Naming Conventions For Ad Creative Analysis

Tired of losing track of your best performing ads? Learn how to organise your ad campaigns with a dual approach of systematic naming conventions and smart tagging.

As you navigate ad creative analysis, it’s easy for ad sets and campaigns to blur together, making it difficult to find what you need. With so many campaigns at various stages, relying on generic labels like "Ad Set 1" can get confusing, fast. As such, you’ll want to implement clear naming conventions to keep everything organised and manageable.

Naming conventions provide a consistent way of labelling items, making it easier to understand the structure and purpose of each component. For advertising, effective naming conventions bring clarity, making it easier to organise, manage, analyse, and ultimately scale your ad campaigns.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to organise your ad campaigns with a dual approach of systematic naming conventions and smart tagging.

What are Naming Conventions in Ad Creative Analysis?

Naming conventions are a set of rules and guidelines used to create consistent and organised names for ad campaigns, ad sets, and ads. The goal is to establish a clear and structured ad framework that’s easily understandable by you and your team.

Effective naming conventions should immediately reveal an ad's most important details, providing marketers with key information before even opening the ad or campaign. This approach saves time by eliminating the need to decipher inconsistent naming, unclear abbreviations, or disorganised data.

In the context of creative analysis, naming conventions should reveal ad elements such as the target audience, creative type, platform, objective, and testing stage. By embedding these details directly into the ad names, marketers can efficiently track and compare the success of different campaigns, ad sets, and ads.

Why Naming Conventions Matter

Naming conventions go far beyond simply organising ad accounts. They can also streamline your entire ad creation, management, and analysis process. This, in turn, allows you to optimise and scale ad campaigns more efficiently.

Below are some benefits of implementing effective naming conventions:

Improved Organisation: Consistent and structured naming helps to better organise your ads. This is especially the case for growing teams who work on separate ad accounts and need to cross-reference between campaigns.
Better Analysis: Helps you easily identify specific ad elements, such as funnel stage, targeting, or creative type, at first glance. This is especially useful for distinguishing ads that contain multiple variations.
Faster Optimisation: Quickly locate and analyse specific ads or ad sets, making it easier to pause or scale them as needed.
Conducting Creative Analysis: Discover which ads you're currently testing and assess performance.

How to Format Your Naming Conventions

A naming convention is built around labels, or "identifiers," which essentially name your ads, ad sets, and campaigns. These identifiers remain constant throughout all of your ads.

Identifiers should then be separated by underscores (_), dashes (-), slashes (//), or another symbol. They should also be ordered in a logical way that helps you know exactly what they represent.

MaddieGRWM - Video - 20% off - Shop Now - PDP - Hook 1

Now compare this to a poorly formatted naming convention:

"Campaign1_Final_Final_Update."

The first example follows a structured format. The second, meanwhile, is vague and can be easily misinterpreted.

Below we'll explain how to create naming conventions for each ad level:

PART 1: The Basics

Quick Guide: Essential Elements for Ad Names

Campaign Level: [Funnel Stage]_[Objective]_[Budget Type]_[Bid Type]_[Testing Identifier]
Ad Set Level: [Date]_[Audience]_[Placement]_[Testing Identifier]
Ad Level: [Custom Name]_[Creative Type]_[Offer]_[CTA]_[Landing Page]_[Testing Identifier]

Ad Campaign Identifiers

At the campaign level, naming conventions should convey your campaign's broader goals and strategies. Instead of diving into the specifics about individual ads and their creative elements, you're focusing on the big-picture that describes the direction and purpose of your campaign.

Here are a few identifiers you can include for your campaign naming convention:

Funnel Position: Are your target audience at the TOFU (Top of Funnel), MOFU (Middle of Funnel), or BOFU (Bottom of Funnel)?
Objective: What is the primary purpose of your campaign?, i.e., driving website traffic or increasing conversions.
Budget Type: How is the campaign's budget structured? (e.g. ABO, CBO)
Bid Strategy: How is ad spend managed? (e.g., Lowest Cost, Bid Cap)
Test Identifiers: Are you testing a different campaign eg. (Adv+ vs. Manual)

These identifiers allow you to understand the campaign as a whole.

Example: TOFU - Website Traffic - CBO - $LC - Adv+

Shows it is a top of funnel campaign aimed at generating website traffic, where budget is optimised for lowest cost at a campaign level and it is testing an Advantage+ shopping campaign.

Ad-Set Identifiers

Next, let's look at ad set-level identifiers. These identifiers should be more specific than the campaign-level ones, revealing the more finer details:

Launch: When did the ad set launch?
Audience: What audience is this ad set targeting? (e.g., "Lookalike," "Interest-based," "Custom Audience")
Placement: Where is the ad set reaching audiences? (e.g., Feed, Stories)
Test Identifiers: Use these to distinguish between different ad sets and tests

Example: 130424-1%LLA-Feed-BFCM

These identifiers show that the ad set was launched on 13th April 2024, is targeting a lookalike audience of 1% using a feed placement for a BFCM set of ads.

Ad-Level Identifiers

Finally, let's dive into ad-level identifiers. These reveal the more granular details within the ads themselves:

Creative Name: What is the name of the ad? (e.g., "Maddie UGC," "Product Shot")
Ad Type: What is your ad's format? (e.g., video or image)
Offer: The type of offer your creative is offering (e.g., "Free Trial," "Discount")
Call to Action (CTA): What action is the ad asking users to take? (e.g., "Shop Now," "Learn More," "Sign Up")
Destination: Where will the ad take users if they click through? (e.g., "Website," "App Store")
Test Identifiers: The isolated creative element you are seeking to test (eg. Hook1, Testimonial, Video<10s)

Example: MaddieGRWM - Video - 20% off - Shop Now - PDP - Hook 1

Based on these identifiers, we can see that it is a “get ready with me” style video add, with a 20% off discount directing people to ‘shop now’ and leads to a product detail page. This ad would also be testing Hook 1, where other ads in this test you could label “Hook 2, Hook 3, Hook 4” etc.

Ad Testing Naming Conventions

When you're running creative tests, you’ll want to include an identifier that clearly indicates what aspect you're testing. This helps keep your data organised and makes it easier to draw insights from your tests. Since these tests are temporary and specific to certain ads, the identifiers for ad testing purposes should be structured differently from your regular naming conventions.

For example:

If you're testing different ad offers, your naming convention might look like this:

SpringPromo - Video - 10%Off - ShopNow - Homepage - OfferTest1
SpringPromo - Video - FreeShipping - ShopNow - Homepage - OfferTest2

If you're testing different CTAs, it could be structured like this:

NewArrival - Image - 20%Off - LearnMore - ProductPage - CTATest1
NewArrival - Image - 20%Off - SignUp - ProductPage - CTATest2

In these examples, "OfferTest1," "OfferTest2," "CTATest1," and "CTATest2" are the testing identifiers that help distinguish each variation being tested. By using these identifiers, you can easily track the performance of each test and make data-driven decisions based on the results.

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PART 2: Deeper Analysis

Get Deeper Analysis Using MagicBrief Custom Tagging

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While clear naming conventions form the foundation of ad organisation, they can sometimes become unwieldy when trying to capture every aspect of your creative strategy. That's where MagicBrief's custom tagging system comes in, offering a flexible layer of analysis without compromising your naming structure.

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Why Add Custom Tags?

Think of naming conventions as your ad account's filing system - they provide essential structure and organisation. But what happens when you want to analyse your creative performance from multiple angles? Or when you need to track specific elements across different campaigns? That's where custom tagging becomes invaluable.

For example, instead of trying to fit everything into a name like: BlackFriday2023_Video_UGC_50Off_Desktop_Test4_ProductA_CreatorSarah

You can create a simplified ad name and then use MagicBrief’s custom tags to track additional elements such as:

Creator names
Video length
Lofi vs. studio style
Audience personas

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They can also help organise your team by enabling you to tag:

Names of team members who created the ads
Status of the ad - eg. Testing, Winner, Previous Winner

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How Custom Tagging Works

Custom tagging allows you to layer additional information onto your ads without cluttering your naming convention. Think of it as adding sticky notes to a filing system - they provide extra context without changing the underlying structure.

Building Up Creative Compound Interest

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of custom tagging is how it helps build your brand's creative compound interest, as every test, every campaign, and every insight gets captured in a searchable format and allows creative learnings to compound over time.

This means:

New team members can quickly learn what works
Successful approaches can be easily replicated
Failed experiments won't be accidentally repeated
Seasonal campaigns can reference historical performance
Creative decisions become more data-driven

Getting Started

Begin by auditing your current naming convention and identifying gaps in your analysis capabilities. Where do you need more insight? What patterns are hard to track? These areas are perfect for custom tagging.

Remember, the goal isn't to replace your naming convention but to enhance it. Custom tagging gives you the flexibility to evolve your analysis without disrupting your existing system.

Ready to see how custom tagging can transform your creative analysis?

Click HERE to request a demo with our MagicBrief team today!