SSA #048: Chaos vs Order

Read Time: 2 Minutes

Let me paint you a picture of chaos...

Earlier this week, Lori and me had been up for 4 hours in the night with JJ, our youngest son (16 months old), as he has been teething recently.

So, we slept till 7am (which is late for me; I'm a 5.30am sort of guy).

Unbeknown to us, however, our 3 year old twin boys, Jacob and Caleb, had been up early, entertaining themselves by "cooking cakes".

Now, "cooking cakes" to a 3 year old has a very different connotation to "cooking cakes" as an adult.

As a 3 year old (or our 3 year olds, at least), "cooking cakes" involves:

• Blue Food coloring
• White Flour
• Sugar
• Spices
• Herbs...

...All mixed up in a beautiful concoction on the living room floor.

So, when Lori and me scraped ourselves off the bed at 7am and walked into the living room, what we found can only be described as "a hurricane in Gordon Ramsey's kitchen".

Thankfully, the boys hadn't added water to the mix (water and flour don't play well together, as I've learned from experience).

If they had decided to pour water into their "cake mixture", I may have just gone to live in Outer Mongolia as a goat for a few weeks.

This chaos took 90 minutes to clean up – and the boys still look like little blue smurfs to this day, though it's starting to wear off now.

What Has This Got To Do With Facebook Ads?

Believe it or not, there is a connection with this story to Facebook Ads.

Sidenote: I know I'm a little obsessed with Facebook Ads, as I somehow manage to see tenuous links to Facebook Ads everywhere.

This experience of chaos got me thinking about the chaotic mess I used to have with my Facebook Ads when I first got started.

Just as with cleaning up the boys' "cooking cakes" session, when it came to my Facebook Ads, I had zero clue where to start:

• Lots of Campaigns
• Lots of Ad Sets
• Lots of Ads
• Inconsistent Naming Conventions
• No Tracking
• Completely lost with what I was testing
• No idea what was working and what wasn't
• The list goes on (and on, and on)

Today, I've got things dialled in and simplified far more than I ever thought possible:

• 1 x Campaign (Per Country, Per Series)
• A handful of Ad Sets in this ONE Campaign
• All testing and scaling happening in this ONE Campaign
• No Detailed Targeting (I use Unrestricted Targeting instead)
• Letting Facebook do all the heavy lifting (Targeting and finding winning Ads)

There is now order in my Facebook Ads account. Zero chaos.

I know exactly what is happening, I'm not overwhelmed, and I have a workflow and schedule I follow religiously week in, week out.

Ultimately, I believe this all comes down to less is more.

The more we do, the more complexity we add, to not just our Facebook Ads, but our business as a whole, the worse our results tend to become.

The more we strip things back and double down on what's working, the better our results become.

Less is more.

That's it for this week.

Have a wonderful weekend, and thanks for reading.  

To Your Success
– Matt