How To Name Your Marketing Campaigns: Must-Haves & UTM Tagging

Start off on the right foot by having a naming system for your marketing campaigns.

This way, you can keep your advertising campaigns organized, especially if you have hundreds of campaigns across different ad channels.

When your naming convention is consistent and clear, you can quickly know what each campaign is about in one simple glance.

In addition, you can also use this naming system for your UTM tagging.

Here are some nomenclature tips and must-haves when naming your campaigns, ad sets and creatives.

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5 Must-Haves When Naming Campaigns

The campaign name is where you give an overview of what the campaign is about.

Product/Service

The first thing you obviously need to include will be the product or service you’re promoting in this marketing campaign.

This could be shoes or copywriting service etc.

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Promotion/Discount/Sale

If there’s a promotion, discount or sale, you can consider separating it as another campaign from your usual campaign.

This way, you can compare the performance of your tactical and evergreen campaigns.

• Tactical: time-sensitive campaigns (eg. Christmas promotion, warehouse sale)
• Evergreen: campaigns not affected by time and will never expire (eg. 1-year warranty that’s included in every purchase)

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Country

Do include the countries you’re targeting in the campaign name.

You could use abbreviations like US, FR and DE.

The point is to make it easy at a glance which countries a campaign is targeting.

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Date

Include the date that the campaign is launched. This could be the year, month and even day if you want to be very specific and detailed.

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Campaign Type

Whether you want to include the campaign type is totally up to you.

Most ad channels like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn will allow you to filter by campaign type (or objective in Facebook’s case).

• Google: Search, Display, Video, Shopping
• Facebook: Page Likes, Post Engagement, Traffic
• LinkedIn: Text Ad, Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail

Therefore, it’s not necessary to include the campaign type in the campaign name since you can manually filter by campaign type. It’s more for your own reference.

But if you’re running various campaign types from the same ad channel (eg. FB Traffic & FB Post Engagement), I highly recommend that you include the campaign type in the name. This way, it’s easier to see the traffic and compare the performance of the various campaign types in your web analytics tool.

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Campaign Name Examples

Now, let’s string them together. You could name your campaign like

• GSN_ValentineDay2019_MilkChocolates_US
• FB-Traffic_FR_PartyDresses_Xmas2019
• DE_BlackFriday_Web-Hosting_LI-InMail_2019

Rearrange them according to whichever is important to you. But bear in mind that you should have consistent naming across all your campaigns.

4 Must-Haves When Naming Ad Groups & Ad Sets

This is where you can go into more details like the targeting.

Country

This is optional. Whether you want to repeat the countries you’re targeting again or exclude it entirely is up to you.

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Age

Do include your target audience age so you can see at a glance the age group that the ad group or ad set is targeting.

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Gender

Gender is equally important so you know if you have specific ads for each gender or a generic ad for both genders.

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Targeting

Try to include as many targeting details as possible.

For instance, your Google Search campaign will consist of tightly-themed ad groups with closely related keywords. You could have ad groups like

• Brand
• Competitor
• Product

On the other hand, your Google Display campaign might have ad groups like

• Interests x Topics
• Keywords x Interests
• Placements

Your Facebook campaign could have ad sets like

• Job Titles & Interests
• Custom Audience
• Shopping: all shopping-related interests

Note that Facebook also has placement targeting. You can consider adding this to the ad set name.

• Facebook News Feed
• Instagram Stories
• Audience Network
• Messenger Inbox

For LinkedIn, there’s no ad group or ad set. Hence, you can add the targeting details into the campaign name itself.

• Years of experience
• Company Industry
• Job seniority

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Ad Group & Ad Set Name Examples

Again, here are some examples. Can you guess the ad channel that each of them belongs to?

• 18-65MF x In-Market
• US_25-34MF_Shopping_FBFeed
• DE_BlackFriday_Web-Hosting_LI-InMail_2019_35-54M_BizOwners

The first example belongs to a Google Display campaign, the second example belongs to a Facebook campaign and the last example is a LinkedIn campaign name that includes targeting details.

2 Must-Haves When Naming Ads

The ad name is where you include details about the creatives.

Ad Format

By including the ad format in your ad name, you can quickly compare the performance of one ad format versus another.

• Text
• Image
• Gmail
• Video
• Carousel
• Lead

Variation/Version

Let’s say you’re running 2 image ads: one with someone holding your product and another with just your product itself.

I highly recommend that you name it in a way to differentiate the 2 ads of the same ad format. Or if you’re unsure how to name it, you can simply name it as Ad1, Ad2 or use dates like 13Dec19Ad (PS. I still feel that your ad names should capture the essence of the ad, rather than using numbers or dates that don’t really say what the ad is about).

• ProductWithGirl
• ProductWithoutGirl

Ad Name Examples

Here are some ad name examples:

• Image-RedShoes
• Video-ProductDemo
• Carousel3-HappyCustomer

For Facebook carousel ad, I added numbers in the ad name. This is especially important if your carousel cards need to be arranged in a certain order. The numbers can then tell you which is the first, second, third card etc.

Use The Same Names For UTM Parameters

Notice how I usually use hyphens (-) and underscores (_) when naming?

That’s because I crafted those names with UTM tagging in mind.

To track campaigns, I have the habit of adding UTM or campaign parameters to URLs.

For instance, you could add source, medium and campaign name so you know that this Xmas2019 campaign is from facebook/cpc. In other words, instead of sending people to https://www.nicolecw.com/, you send people to

• https://www.nicolecw.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Xmas2019

You can use the campaign URL builder by Google to get those UTM-tagged URLs.

If you put a space between Xmas and 2019, it won’t be utm_campaign=Xmas2019. It’ll be utm_campaign=Xmas%202019 instead. Due to this issue, I don’t really like using spaces in the campaign/ad group/ad set/ad names.

Therefore, do bear this UTM tagging in mind when naming your marketing campaigns. If you name them properly from the start, you can also reuse those names for the UTM parameters.

Note that I only use UTM tagging for non-Google ad channels such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. You can check out this guide on how I added UTM parameters for Facebook and Instagram campaigns~

Now It’s Your Turn

How do you usually name your marketing campaigns? Do you have any naming tips or strategies?

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