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I'm curious - what other ad platform could I have turned to drive local commerce? Always interested to hear how other folks would approach the same problem. I

I'm curious - what other ad platform could I have turned to drive local commerce? Always interested to hear how other folks would approach the same problem. I still have some records left over, thinking about doing another sale, would be game to test another means of customer acquisition and report back with results.

jefflinwood 14y ago
Really quickly, the first thing that I would turn to would be Craigslist - is there a reason you chose Facebook ads over Craigslist?
- veyron 14y ago
  His business is in facebook ads ...
jmduke 14y ago
jeff chimed in before me. if I were in your shoes, I would have probably leaned on Craigslist and the area subreddit (the latter is very hit or miss, but I could see something niche like records doing really well.) I'm not a vinyl guy, but I'm sure there are a TON of niche forums out there worth looking at as well. I really wish you could apply multi-armed bandit approaches to physical problems like these more easily; obviously its hard to do A/B testing when you only have one actual supply.
- brendanib 14y ago
  Yeah, I actually only recently started to understand the impact that area subreddits can have - great channel for certain audiences. My intuition is that most of my target audience for vinyl isn't yet on Reddit, but maybe that's changed and I just haven't realized it yet. There are certainly a lot of forums out there too, but most of them aren't local to one area, so most of the sales are online (I did a lot of business through these forums in the past). In retrospect, it would have been rad to run this as a fully fledged A/B test. I honestly just didn't know that the ads would have quite the impact that they did.
jack-r-abbit 14y ago
While a worth while experiment, you are still going to have a hard time getting a comparable result set. You have records left over... presumably all the ones that the first batch of shoppers didn't want. You are also targeting a local set of people... hundreds of which already attended your sale and have picked up the records they wanted. If your next sale is solely advertised on, say, Craigslist, I would not be surprised if your take was much less than $10k. But I would not necessarily blame that on Craigslist when those other factors are just as likely to affect a second Facebook advertised sale as well.

jefflinwood 14y ago

Really quickly, the first thing that I would turn to would be Craigslist - is there a reason you chose Facebook ads over Craigslist?

veyron 14y ago
His business is in facebook ads ...

jmduke 14y ago

jeff chimed in before me. if I were in your shoes, I would have probably leaned on Craigslist and the area subreddit (the latter is very hit or miss, but I could see something niche like records doing really well.) I'm not a vinyl guy, but I'm sure there are a TON of niche forums out there worth looking at as well. I really wish you could apply multi-armed bandit approaches to physical problems like these more easily; obviously its hard to do A/B testing when you only have one actual supply.

brendanib 14y ago
Yeah, I actually only recently started to understand the impact that area subreddits can have - great channel for certain audiences. My intuition is that most of my target audience for vinyl isn't yet on Reddit, but maybe that's changed and I just haven't realized it yet. There are certainly a lot of forums out there too, but most of them aren't local to one area, so most of the sales are online (I did a lot of business through these forums in the past). In retrospect, it would have been rad to run this as a fully fledged A/B test. I honestly just didn't know that the ads would have quite the impact that they did.

jack-r-abbit 14y ago

While a worth while experiment, you are still going to have a hard time getting a comparable result set. You have records left over... presumably all the ones that the first batch of shoppers didn't want. You are also targeting a local set of people... hundreds of which already attended your sale and have picked up the records they wanted. If your next sale is solely advertised on, say, Craigslist, I would not be surprised if your take was much less than $10k. But I would not necessarily blame that on Craigslist when those other factors are just as likely to affect a second Facebook advertised sale as well.