When reporting and analyzing marketing performance it’s common to group data by things important to your business like tactics, business units or product categories. These attributes are not possible to extract from the platforms themselves, so marketers resort to encoding these attributes into the names of campaigns, ad groups or ads. To be able to use these attributes in reporting and analysis across platforms, a naming convention is used to ensure consistency. In this article we’ll describe what a naming convention is, why you should have one and how to successfully work with it.

A naming convention describes what variables you want to encode into for example your campaign names along with its possible values, the order in which the variables should be placed and the delimiter used to separate them. Consistency in variable placement and use of delimiter is crucial to be able to extract the encoded information at a later stage.

It might for example look something like variableA | variableB | variableC | … | variableN where the variables might be Region, Brand, Product category, and Product resulting in a name like US | Nike | Basketball Shoes | Air Jordan.

A delimiter is simply a character used to tell the different variables apart and to split the name into parts when decoding it. Common delimiter characters are for example | (pipe) and _ (underscore) but : (semicolon) or - (dash) could also be used.

To be able to follow up on campaign performance on the breakdowns most relevant to your business, you need to structure your data at the point where it’s created. If you manage to keep a consistent naming convention throughout your organization you’ll have

To decide on a convention that will work for you, you need to take into account the level on which you want to report (Campaign, Ad Set/Group or Ad/Creative) as well as what information is important for your business at each particular level. Start small with the broadest variables and add new detailed ones when you discover the need, but be careful to always keep the structure of your old variables intact and always add new variables at the end of your convention.

Be mindful when deciding on a structure for your variable inputs. If your product category is “Basketball Shoes” for example, do you want to represent that as “Basketball Shoes”, “basketball shoes” or “basketball-shoes”? Decide on what makes sense to you and then stick to the same structure with all your inputs.

When it comes to choosing a delimiter, you should pick one that you know won’t be used in other parts of the name. Let’s say that you decided to go for “basketball-shoes” as the way to write out the product category in the example above. In that case you can’t choose - (dash) as a delimiter since it won’t be a unique character to separate your variables. Using | (pipe) or _ (underscore) as a delimiter is a good option in this case.

Preferably, you’ll have one naming convention to be used across all marketing campaigns, but sometimes restrictions (or possibilities) in specific platforms mean you need to tweak the convention slightly. Try to keep the number of variations to a minimum.

There’s no end to the list of variables you’ll want to add to your convention, so you need to figure out what is really important. If you report on a more granular level than campaign, you should consider specific conventions for each level to make sure you capture their individual attributes instead of adding all variables to the most granular level. To avoid long names and spelling mistakes it’s also a good idea to use abbreviations in the name that you can later decode into full words or phrases.

If you want to have certain variables be optional, you should have a structure for how they are to be visible in the name (just skipping one variable has the effect that following variables end up in the wrong place - be cautious). A good option is just to add a blank space or put “N/A” in its place.

Sometimes it’s neat to have a free form variable where the campaign creator can add any information they think is relevant. You should always add such a variable to the end of the convention. This way, it will only affect the total number for variables, and not their position.

Make sure to have clear ownership of the naming convention and the possible variables and inputs in it. Should a need for new variables or input values arise, it should be up to the convention owner to decide and implement them. It’s best to keep the convention in a central place where it’s easy for campaign creators to find (like in a spreadsheet), but lock down edit possibilities to a single or group of owner/s. But be quick to respond to feedback! Long feedback loops might mean teams can’t do their work and that they resort to constructing their own conventions.

For more details and step-by-step implementation plan, read our blog post on “Campaign naming conventions: how to name your ad campaigns like a pro”.

Even the best naming convention setup will not be 100% fail proof. The most common mistakes we see when it comes to following your convention are:

If mistakes are detected, it might be tempting to start cleaning the data downstream to correct faulty values. This way of working however tends to be time consuming and can quickly spiral out of control. Our recommendation is to fix the problem at the root. Try to figure out why the mistake happened in the first place, and what you can do to minimize the risk of it happening again.

With Funnel's naming convention feature, you can add your conventions to a workspace and use it to scan your data for anomalies in variables, values and structure. You’ll be able to stay up to date on how well your names are conforming to your conventions, and immediately see what needs to be fixed. Read more about the feature here (available for all customers on Business or Enterprise plans).

Do you have another idea about how Funnel can help you with your naming conventions? Please let us know, we’re eager to make sure your data is set up for success.