The Best Naming Convention For Ad Creatives

Speaker 1: Here's a little marketing joke for you. Okay, okay. So why do digital ads hate going to therapy?

Speaker 1: Because they're tired of being labeled.

Speaker 1: Get it? Yikes. Tough crowd. Anyway, let's dive into what we believe is the best naming convention approach for Facebook ads that'll make cross-functional collaboration easier and creative analysis a lot less stressful for you and your team.

Speaker 1: Because that mess of unstandardized accounts, unintelligible abbreviations, and frustrated hours spent trying to find that one stupid ad, that's not the way to scale your business.

Speaker 1: No. Consider this your crash course to stop naming your ads, Ad 1.

Speaker 1: If you'd like to follow along, feel free to grab the link to our Google Sheet template that's linked in the description of the YouTube video.

Speaker 1: It's got a naming convention generator, a step-by-step instruction manual, glossaries for campaign sets, ad sets, and ad names. It can really help you a lot with this process.

Speaker 1: All right, let's get started.

Speaker 1: Chapter one, formats and compositions of naming conventions. First up, it's important to know that there are basically three tiers or levels of naming that happen. Campaign level naming, ad set naming, and ad naming.

Speaker 1: And each one of these levels has a little bit of a different format to follow. When you're building your naming convention, you'll want to include two distinct types of identifiers. Your standard identifiers, which are things like the date, the ad type, budget type, offer, and then your testing identifiers, which we'll get to later.

Speaker 1: Those are more customizable things like the description, X1, hook one. These are identifiers that are broken apart by separators like this.

Speaker 1: Chapter two, campaign level naming. Okay, let's start with the campaign level. Here, your naming convention will describe the higher level goals and strategies of your campaign through the following structure.

Speaker 1: Funnel position or which part of the buying cycle you're targeting like TOFU, MOFU, BOFU.

Speaker 1: Your objective or what the desired outcome of your ad will be, things like awareness, conversion, traffic.

Speaker 1: You've got your budget type or how your campaign is allocating spend like ad set budget optimization or campaign budget optimization.

Speaker 1: And then lastly, your bid strategy or how your campaign is spending money.

Speaker 1: Are you still following along? Did you get distracted or bored?

Speaker 1: I know this isn't the sexiest topic around, but let's dive into the naming convention generator and then walk through a quick example for a campaign level name.

Speaker 1: So, the format will be funnel position dash objective dash budget type dash bid strategy dash custom identifier one. I'll click the dropdowns accordingly like this. And if I need to add or edit those columns, I can just hop over to the campaign glossary on this tab, type it in there, and voila.

Speaker 1: Now it's in the generator. Now we see the output generated reads TOFU dash awareness dash CBO money LC X1, X2, X3.

Speaker 1: All right, chapter three, ad set level naming. At the ad set level, your naming conventions will describe the higher level details of your audience. So, it'll include the date or when we launched the ad set, the audience type or how the audience was built. That could be something like past purchasers or interest, insert whatever, maybe football. Really, it can be whatever.

Speaker 1: And then you've got your audience seed or where the audience is coming from. Again, you're going to enter this one in manually. And then the placement type or where the ad set is reaching the audiences. So, if we actually just quickly hop back over to our naming generator, we'll take a look at our ad set namer, and we're basically just doing what we did before. Let's adjust our inputs as needed. We can even jump into the ad set glossary. We can add or edit those options like I mentioned earlier, doing that manually.

Speaker 1: Oh, and you'll see the date and the audience type and the seed, you have to enter those in manually because there's just too many variables. We couldn't reconcile them into a dropdown menu.

Speaker 1: But yeah, anyway, now we have a beautiful little output that's ready to be dropped into our ad platforms.

Speaker 1: Nice job.

Speaker 1: Chapter four, ad level naming. Finally, we've reached the ad level identifiers. We're so close to the end of this. I can feel it. Okay, here we are describing the fundamentals of our ad and creative. So, the structure will have to look something like this.

Speaker 1: The creative name or what the theme is for our creative. That could be something like Valentine's Day ad or Black Friday ad.

Speaker 1: Next, we have the ad type or what format the creative is using. So things like image, carousel, feed, video, story, etc.

Speaker 1: Then we'll select the offer. This could be something like BOGO, sale, new, discount.

Speaker 1: After that is the CTA. The call to action can be whatever applies to the ad. So something like shop now, sign up, call, apply, download.

Speaker 1: And then lastly, we'll add the destination identifier. This tells us where the ad is redirecting to. That could be a unique landing page, the homepage, demo page, product page, whatever.

Speaker 1: Chapter five, testing identifiers and why should you care about all these naming conventions? So, basically, we've covered the standard identifiers that are really going to help organize campaigns, ad sets, and ads in a nice, neat, and consistent fashion. But if you're testing different hypotheses, which hopefully you are because if you're not, big yikes energy, like what are you even doing? Then the testing identifiers are going to help you organize these, even if you're running it on a limited number of ads for a limited period of time.

Speaker 1: That's why we typically append these identifiers to the end like you see here. So, besides being super type A, why the heck would anyone go through the trouble of learning this and then implementing it? Well, as someone who's worked on a large performance marketing team in the past, running a ton of ad variants, it can get really messy really fast when it comes to reporting.

Speaker 1: So, when you take the time to format your ad names like this, you're including all of the most relevant information in the name, and it is way easier to find, analyze, and hypothesize on creative. Naming conventions like this avoid jumbled views where you're trying to decipher between bottom of funnel ads mixed with top of funnel ads, clustered with static images, video ads.

Speaker 1: This is going to make reporting, filtering, and presenting on creative analytics a breeze, especially if you're using a tool like Motion.

Speaker 1: All right, a special thanks to Tanner Duncan, Susan Wenograd, Brad Ploch, and Elliot Brand, whose expertise helped guide the direction of this video.

Speaker 1: Go give them a follow. We put their Twitter profiles linked in the description. They gave us so much of the information that we taught here.

Speaker 1: Hope you enjoyed.