The Importance of Naming Conventions for Ad Creative
Any creative has had the self imposed problem before of not naming a file correctly and then struggling to find it at a later date. While naming a file ‘ad12_v2.jpg’ might make sense at the time for what you are working on, when you need to find that file later, it can take some time for you to find it. That is why using a well structured naming convention is essential when you are producing creatives for social advertising, not just to help you, but to make it easier to work amongst your team.
Why are naming conventions important?
Having a well structured naming convention, that is relevant to your company, is important to not only help you manage your campaigns, but also to analyse them to help improve your future creative content.
Management
When you name your ad creatives whilst not following a well organised naming convention, it can be hard to keep track of all your files when you need them later (trust us, we’ve run into this issue before). So by taking the time to create and document a naming structure that works for your company, you can save a lot of time in the future by being able to easily source any of the creatives you have produced.
While it is good practice to name all your creatives in a structured way when working on your own projects, it becomes even more crucial when you are working as part of a team. You want to know that anyone in your team can easily source creatives by searching for certain terms and know that they will find the files they are looking for.
By adding in the correct amount of information, it not only allows you to search for specific ad creatives, but it can also give you a quick overview of what that creative is, just by looking at the information in the name.
If you are using an app or service such as Notion where you can tag all your creatives, using a naming structure will allow you to easily filter and sort through your creatives to manage all your files and analyse what works best.
For example, which of the following two ad file names do you think will be easier to find and understand in the future?
UGCad003v2.1.jpg or contrast-UGC-retargetting-JUN24-Iteration.jpg
Analysis
When it comes to checking how your creatives are performing and using this information to inform future creatives, having a detailed and organised naming convention can save you plenty of time.
By using a structured naming convention, it can allow your team members to easily navigate their way through your ad accounts and management software to search for certain ads, campaigns or ad sets. Without using a naming convention, it can become difficult to keep track of what version of an ad is which, making it hard to work on testing and improving your creative.
By using a well planned naming structure, it can allow you to easily compare ads so that you can work out what is working, and how to use this information on future creatives. It will not only allow you to compare ads in an ad set or campaign, but compare ads based on certain criteria, such as launch date, ad format, audience and more.
What naming structure should you use for your ad creatives?
When it comes to creating your naming structure, the more detailed it is, the easier it will be to find creatives later on and keep track of. However, it is important that you create a naming structure that is customised to your business and needs.
If you are an in-house marketing team, your naming conventions will likely be shorter as you will not have to organise them by client information, but they will still need to be detailed in regards to projects, products or campaigns.
If you are just starting to create a naming convention, it is important to think long term. While a short structure could work for you now, you need to be planning for what will happen if you get more clients, more staff or work on more campaigns. By starting out in detail, it will save you time having to rename files and campaigns in the future or worrying about confusion.
When you decide on your naming structure, make sure to clearly document it, explaining how it works and how to use it. This will allow everyone on your team to not only name their files correctly, but understand how they can search and find your creatives or campaigns.
Your file names will become fairly long using a naming convention, so you want to make sure that they are clearly structured, and this can be done by using a separator between each piece of information. What you choose can be up to you, but they are usually a hyphen, underscore or slash.
You will need to create at least three different naming conventions, one for each stage of a campaign, as they require different information at campaign, ad set and ad level.
There are three naming conventions you will need:
Campaign
Ad Set
Ad
Our structure for naming a campaign
CLIENT_NAME-OBJECTIVE-METHOD-CAMPAIGN_SPECIALITY
Client Name - Name of the client the ad is for or the agency that you are working with
Objective - What is the purpose of the campaign? Is it to increase sales, is it to increase brand awareness etc?
Method - What stage of the funnel is this at? Acquisition, retargeting, re-engagement or retention?
Campaign Speciality - What is the unique aspect of the campaign? Are you working with celebrities or influencers? Is it being whitelisted? Is it the launch of a new product line? etc
When creating these names, it is possible to shorten them down, by assigning certain terms with a letter or number. For example, rather than writing the full term, you could assign acquisition the letter A, and use this instead. However, if using this method, it is important to create documentation that explains this, so that everyone in your team knows what it means.
Our structure for naming an ad set
CLIENT-DATE-METHOD-SET#_AD_TYPE-AD_NAME-AUDIENCE
Client Name - Name of the client the ad is for or the agency that you are working with
Date - What month and year was this ad first launched?
Method - What stage of the funnel is this at? Acquisition, retargeting, re-engagement or retention?
Set# - Include this if you apply a number to your ad sets
Ad Type - What is the style of the ad? Is it a feature point out, us vs them, testimonial, before and after etc
Ad Name - what is the name of the file that the creative has assigned to it i.e. SummerDress_A1_C1
Audience - Who is the target audience for this ad? Gender, age group, new vs existing customers
Our structure for naming an ad
CLIENT-PRODUCER-DATE-AD_NAME-STAGE-ASSET-FORMAT-TYPE-DESTINATION
Client - Name of the client the ad is for or the agency that you are working with
Producer - what team members created the asset for this particular ad. For this you can usually just use initials to keep it shorter.
Date - What month and year was this ad first launched
Ad Name - What is the name of the file that the creative has assigned to it
Stage - Is this particular ad creative a new concept, or an iteration of a previous ad
Asset - What is the overall creative of the ad? Is it UGC, influencer led, lifestyle imagery, product led, brand awareness etc.
Format - What is the format of the ad? is it video, image, carousel, product etc
Type - What is the style of the ad? Is it a feature point out, us vs them, testimonial, before and after etc
Destination - Where is the ad leading to? Is it sending customers to a product page, collection page, landing page etc
By setting these naming conventions up sooner rather than later, and making sure everyone in your team knows how to read and use them, you will be able to make working on your ad campaigns run much smoother. And if you are looking at what types of creatives you can use in your ad campaigns, we break down the most popular ones here.
Contrast is an eCommerce marketing agency that specialises in creating effective ad campaigns, landing pages and emails campaigns to increase your sales. To find out more, get in touch.