It’s fitting to have a first blog post about FB Ads that discusses naming conventions-

Because it is a formula that you will want to use every time you go into an ad account, from your first to every, single one after.

If you don’t have a naming convention for the ads, not only is it likely to become a sinkhole for your time when you can’t find something you’re looking for in an account- it’s also going to make tracking harder, especially if you’re using UTMs. (We’ll cover those in a future post)

And if you don’t use them; when you finally come around to using a naming convention… (and you will!) it’s going to be a headache to change the naming inside all of your accounts.

So what is a naming convention?

It’s just a formula for how you can approach how you name everything in an ad account.

Develop or find one and don’t deviate from it until you find a better one, otherwise you’ll tie yourself in knots!

I like to use the following for the campaign level:

DATE, FUNNEL STEP, EVERGREEN/SALE NAME/TEST NAME, CONVERSIONS/OPTIMISATION OBJECTIVE, CBO/ABO, COUNTRIES

Which looks like this in an account:

010122_TOF_New_Year_Sale_Conversions_CBO_US

Underscores aren’t to everybody’s taste but they can help you read data better in some situations.

And this for the ad set level:

DATE, FUNNEL STEP, AUDIENCE NAME, PLACEMENT

Which looks like this in an account:

020222_TOF_Broad_Auto

And this for an ad level:

DATE_FUNNEL STEP_COPY NAME/NUMBER_CREATIVE FORMAT NAME/NUMBER

The more information that you give, the better. You want as much info in the name as possible so you can avoid clicking into the campaigns/ad sets/ads to find something inside as much as possible-  which saves you time.

So much of media buying is about efficiency, it makes no sense for your naming to be inefficient.

Naming something Ad 21, without context is nearly always as good as useless and one of the fastest ways to show inexperience.

Ultimately, experience will be your guide, be that yours or someone else’s. Time in accounts will help you develop an insight into what you want and need to see when it comes to your naming.