How To Use Naming Conventions For Ad Creative Insights

Ever since the iOS14+ update, a lot of visibility to insights from Facebook & Instagram’s parent company Meta have begun to disappear. Because of this, it is now more important than ever to develop new strategies so that we as digital marketers can still gather as much data from our ads as we possibly can.

Using a solid naming convention for your ads is one extremely important way to do this. 

Everyone knows that having a good naming convention is important for keeping your team organized and making sure everyone can find the campaigns, ad sets, and ads that you are looking for. However, there’s a lot more to a good naming convention than just making your Ads Manager look pretty.

Honestly, there is SO MUCH information that you can get when analyzing your ads when you are using the right naming convention. While using a good naming convention is definitely important at all 3 levels, this blog post is going to focus on using a naming convention for creative analysis at the ad level specifically.

So what is creative analysis? This is a way for you to keep track of your results on the different types of ads you run. If you use the right naming convention, you will know everything about the ad at a quick glance just by reading the name.

In order to do this, you need to develop standard names for each facet of the ad that you run variations for. Here is a list of common ones:

1. Creative - keeping track of the creative used on the ad is most important, as it evokes the strongest reaction from your audience. Some people will use a very standardized method like “Creative 1” and then track each creative in a separate spreadsheet, while others prefer using a keyword that describes the creative, i.e. “banana video”
2. Copy - keeping track of Copy is also very important, as this will give your audience more information about your ad and further entice them to take action. Again, you could be very standard using a naming convention like “Copy 1” or you could use some sort of keyword relevant to the included text.
3. Destination/Product - keeping track of the destination of your ads is also important. If the ad is getting great reactions and getting a lot of people to take action, but the destination of the ad is a product that is not converting well, it can result in bad performance for the ad. The same copy and creative could work very well for a different product or landing page, so tracking each ad’s destination is super important. Note: if you are running carousel ads or dynamic ads, tracking destination through the ad name would not be 100% accurate if the same ad leads to multiple destinations, so adjust your ad and naming convention accordingly, i.e. you should note that the ad has multiple destinations in the naming convention

These are the 3 most common things that advertisers are changing from ad to ad, which is why we listed them first. If you frequently change the following aspects of the ad, these would be important to include in your naming convention as well:

4. Ad type - This will help you keep track of whether the ad is a single image, video, carousel, an existing post, catalog, etc.
5. Call to Action - This will tell you the CTA used on the ad. If you always use “Shop Now”, for example, this would not be necessary to include in your naming convention.
6. Brand/Category - This will help you be more specific about destination if you have a lot of different types of products on your store.
7. Additional product details - This will give you more information if you sell a lot of the same type of products, i.e. you have multiple variants for the different colored t-shirts

Once you have a solid strategy for how to use naming for your creative analysis, you will want to separate each of the categories using a nice clean separator. Some common ones are “-”, “_”, and “//”. Then you can implement your naming strategy.

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