Campaign naming conventions: The key to cleaner and reliable reporting [template included]

Imagine analyzing data from a “Special Discount” campaign six months later. Unless you’re blessed with an exceptional memory, you’ll find it impossible to remember details such as its purpose, audience, or the period it ran.

This is why having a well-structured naming convention and marketing data governance will make analyzing and reporting your campaign much easier. In this article, I’ll discuss how you can make your campaign names less random and more strategic, including:

• Campaign naming structure and hierarchy
• 2 ways to name your campaigns
• How to improve marketing reporting with campaign naming conventions
• Campaign naming convention best practices
• Let’s talk about UTMs
• Free campaign naming conventions template

Campaign naming structure and hierarchy

Since most ad platforms use a hierarchical structure for campaign organization, your campaign names should follow the same rule. This ensures that each level of your campaign has its own descriptive name and makes it easy to analyze data later on. Here’s the typical hierarchy:

1. Account level: This is the highest level, often encompassing multiple campaigns and potentially various settings related to currency and geographic regions.
2. Campaign level: This level defines the overall marketing objective and budget. Key data points such as the campaign theme, start date, and relevant product or service information are typically included here.
3. Ad group/Ad set level: This level allows for more granular targeting and management of ads. Settings such as bidding strategies, specific audience targeting parameters (location, demographics, interests), and placements can be defined here.
4. Ad level: This is the most granular level, focusing on individual ad creatives, calls to action, and ad formats.

The specific location for certain settings (like targeting parameters) can vary across platforms, so having a consistent, multi-level naming system is important. For example, if your accounts are structured by country, you might extract the country information from the account name. Besides, if you manage multiple countries within a single account, including the country designation in either the campaign or ad group/ad set name is better.

The following table illustrates a typical hierarchical structure for campaign naming, along with potential settings and example names:

Additional fields, such as product, brand, project, or service, can also be incorporated into the naming convention, usually at the campaign level.

Some platforms might have their own best-practice recommendations for naming conventions. If you encounter inconsistencies in how campaign names are applied, remember that platform-specific differences exist. 

*To keep user information private, it’s best to avoid using actual audience and budget names in campaign names. Instead, use a coded system. This is because campaign names are often included in UTM parameters, which can be seen in a user’s browser after they click an ad. By using a coded system, we can maintain clear internal records without exposing sensitive information.

Note that in my naming conventions, I use a combination of capital and small letters (CamelCase) instead of hyphens or spaces. This approach helps avoid potential issues when transforming the campaign names for data separation. Using CamelCase ensures that the data can be easily parsed without the risk of misinterpretation arising from using spaces or special characters, which might cause errors in various data processing tools and platforms. It also maintains clarity and readability, allowing for an immediate understanding of each component within the campaign name.

How to name a campaign

Next, I’ll break down the two main campaign naming methods and their implications for data management. The core difference lies in how the information is structured within the campaign name and how that structure affects data extraction and analysis.

TL;DR The key-value pair method is better when dealing with many fields, frequent changes, and potential missing data. On the other hand, although the delimiter-based method is simpler, it’s quite rigid and prone to errors if the order or values are inconsistent. In general, many marketers still choose the key-value pair in the long run since it’s more suitable for large-scale campaigns.

Method 1: Delimiter-based naming (e.g., using underscores or pipes)

This method uses a single delimiter, like an underscore “_”, to separate different pieces of information within the campaign name. The order of these pieces is fixed and crucial.

• Example: US_FA_TOFU_NewBrandImage_Aug2024

Here:

• US represents the country.
• FA represents the data source (e.g., Facebook Ads).
• TOFU represents the funnel stage (Top Of Funnel).
• NewBrandImage represents the campaign theme.
• Aug2024 represents the campaign start month and year.

Advantages: Simple and easy to understand.

Disadvantages:

• Strict order: The order is absolutely critical. If you change the order, your data analysis will be wrong. For instance, if you accidentally wrote FA_US_TOFU_NewBrandImage_Aug2024, your analysis script would incorrectly assign “FA” to the country field, “US” to the data source, and so on. Everything would be misaligned.
• Missing data: If you omit one piece of information, the subsequent fields will be misinterpreted. Let’s say you forget the funnel stage:
  • US_FA_NewBrandImage_Aug2024 Now, “NewBrandImage” would be incorrectly interpreted as the funnel stage, and “Aug2024” as the campaign theme. The data is completely skewed. You must use a placeholder (like “NA”) if a field lacks a value: US_FA_NA_NewBrandImage_Aug2024.
• Adding fields: Adding a new field can only be done when adding to the end of the string.

Method 2: Key-value pair naming (using markers)

This method uses markers, for example, country*, ds*(data sources), funnel*, etc., to clearly designate each piece of information. The order is flexible, and values are placed after their corresponding markers.

Example: country*US_ds*FA_funnel*TOFU_theme*NewBrandImage_start*Aug2024

Here, the markers clearly show which value belongs to which field. The order doesn’t matter because the markers act as labels.

Advantages:

• Flexible order: You can rearrange the order without affecting the data interpretation.
• Missing data: You can omit values without affecting the interpretation of other fields, or use placeholders (“NA”). Missing data is simply a missing value, not a shifted value.
• Easy field addition: Adding a new field is straightforward. You just add a new marker-value pair to the end of the campaign name or insert it at any position, maintaining clarity. Existing campaign names do not need to be changed.

Disadvantages:

• More complex: Your data extraction scripts need to be designed to handle the key-value pair format.

How to improve marketing reporting with campaign names

With tools like “Split text to columns” in spreadsheets, SQL in data warehouses, or Supermetrics’ Marketing Intelligence Platform custom fields, you can split each component of the campaign names to get more granular data. For instance, separating fields such as “product category” or “country” lets you see which products or countries drive the most conversions.

With Supermetrics, you can transform data before bringing it to your reporting destinations. Read Top 7 data transformations you can do with Supermetrics, including managing naming conventions, converting currencies, etc.

For a quick overview of how to extract new fields from campaign names within Supermetrics Hub, check out this short video:

Once the data is transformed and each campaign name component is separated into its own field, users can efficiently aggregate and filter data based on any section of the campaign name.

For example, we can analyze all campaigns based on their theme in a specific country.

We can also drill down into specific themes and campaign categories under them.

Additionally, we can compare campaign performance across different countries with various themes.

Without a naming convention, this level of analysis would require significant manual effort; some data might be irretrievable. A consistent convention simplifies analysis, revealing differences in campaign performance and facilitating collaboration across teams.

Naming convention best practices

Consider these five points when designing your naming convention.

1. Compatibility: Ensure your chosen naming system works with all relevant marketing platforms and analytics tools. Avoid special characters that might cause issues. 
2. Scalability: Design a system that can easily grow and change. It should be able to handle more campaigns and new information without needing a major overhaul.
3. Maintainability: The naming convention should be easy for everyone on the team to understand and use. Clear documentation and training will help keep things running smoothly.
4. Searchability: Names should be easy to find in your data and reports. Avoid long or confusing names.
5. Consistency: It’s important to follow the naming rules. If you don’t, it will be hard to understand the data and make good decisions.

Finally, let’s talk about UTMs

To understand your marketing performance, it’s crucial to link your ad platform data—impressions, clicks— with web data—conversions, and website activities. While various tracking systems exist, most platforms use similar tagging methods. We’ll focus on UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters commonly used with Google Analytics.

The best practice is to apply your pre-defined naming convention to your UTM tags. This provides a consistent and easily understandable framework for tracking data across different platforms. Note that some platforms will automatically generate UTM tags that you can insert into your marketing campaign. The utm_campaign parameter, in particular, should mirror your campaign name or ad group name, depending on your analytics granularity. If you set individual UTM tags at the ad group level, use your ad group name; if at the campaign level, use the campaign name.

Here is an example of Google’s UTM Generator:

Get  our free campaign naming convention template

Instead of starting from scratch, you can use our Google Sheets template to create a simple Google to simplify your naming process. It’ll help ensure consistency and accuracy by providing a pre-defined structure for campaign naming and UTM tag creation.

Get the Campaign name and UTM generator.

You can adapt this template to fit your specific needs. Here’s a video tutorial to guide you through customization and implementation:

Enjoy and happy campaign naming!