What’s In a Name? For Multi-Channel Marketing Campaigns, Everything
Even the most powerful martech stack won’t work if marketers don’t use consistent campaign naming when setting up multi-channel campaigns. Otherwise, it’s nearly impossible to bring data together from all the originating platforms and tell an accurate story about performance, says,Matt Hertig is the CEO of Alight Analytics.
Being consistent is one of the most important habits for data-driven marketers, especially those working on multi-channel campaigns.
When marketers execute these campaigns, they spend time on creative, calls to action, timing and budget — all essential tasks. Too often, they forget to create guidelines for how these campaigns should be named.
You need those guidelines. Not only are you using multiple networks and tactics, but there are also usually multiple people setting up those campaigns, too. Sometimes they’ll be sitting down the hall, but they could just as easily be working across town or on the other side of the country.
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All the people on your extended team must follow the same playbook when setting up and naming campaigns on every platform and ad network in your campaign. Otherwise, it’ll be extremely difficult to bring all the data together as a single source of truth that lets you accurately measure the success of the campaign across tactics.
Even the most powerful piece of martech will struggle to harmonize datasets that use different naming conventions. Even if you’ve got the time to unify everything by hand, you might not remember that “spring 2019 campaign” and “blue sneakers special offer” are referencing the same campaign.
As a result, your data is still effectively siloed, with information from each source isolated from the others. Siloed data takes away your ability to assess performance at the campaign and channel level, and it hinders your ability to show how individual media platforms are contributing to overall ROI.
Create Rules for Consistent Campaign Naming
Fortunately, this is a solvable problem. It starts by creating a set of campaign naming conventions —rules that everyone on your team follows when setting up a campaign on every platform or channel you use. Here are a few best practices.
A good campaign name should contain the most important details about the campaign.
Your campaign names should consist of a string of descriptive, relevant variables, such as medium, region, product, season and year.
At a glance, you know this is a search campaign promoting shoes to a New York audience, running in the summer of 2019.
If you’re using a consistent naming convention across platforms, it’s easy to combine datasets from each one while retaining the ability to filter results by each variable, in case you only want to see results for “shoes” or “newyork.”
This example uses medium, region, product, season and year as variables. But you should spend time considering what variables make the most sense for your reporting and analysis. Maybe something like line of business or SKU would work better. An advertising agency, for instance, probably needs to include its client name in each campaign name.
To keep your campaign names at a manageable character length, pick attributes that are the most important to record in the campaign. Many attributes can be inferred and are not needed in the name. Set limits!
All your campaign names should use the same structure.
However you order the variables in your campaign name, they should be in the same order for all your campaigns, on all ad networks or mediums. Again, this will make it easier to unify all of a campaign’s datasets across platforms.
Don’t use spaces between the variables in a campaign name. Use another character — a delimiter such as a pipe, semicolon or underscore — to show where one variable ends and the next begins. The delimiter you choose should be one that you are pretty confident won’t appear naturally in your campaign name.
Handling values that include multiple words is often a question that comes up. It’s best to just implement an easy-to-understand rule that is universal, like “no spaces.” Spaces can be replaced with underscores for multiple word values in your campaign names — use “campaign_1” not “campaign 1.”
What if you have a campaign that doesn’t fit the mold you’ve designed? Maybe our search campaign from above isn’t limited to a single season and runs all year. For those cases, you should have a universal value that gets added in place of a specific value — “various,” “multiple,” “other,” “many” or “none.” These are all possible descriptive values that could be used to represent a generic or universal campaign.
It’s also a good idea to use only lowercase letters when creating variables, so you avoid problems with case-sensitivity. Plus, an all-lowercase rule is easier to remember and follow.
Avoid abbreviations. You might think you can decode those abbreviations later, but it inevitably turns into a mess. It’s just not worth the trouble for what you get back.
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Ensure Consistency in Campaign Naming
Simply having a process is a huge step toward creating consistency in multi-channel campaigns. But you also need to make sure that your process is communicated to the relevant people, internally and externally, and that everyone is following the same rules.
You need a rulebook for campaign naming and setup.
This is a document that spells out all the rules for your organization’s naming conventions, from the variables that each name must contain to how capitalization and delimiters are used. List your preferred formats for names or dates. Include a few examples of well-built campaign names.
It’s also important to make sure that, once you have a campaign name, you apply it in the right spot during setup. Some ad networks or platforms might have a designated field for the campaign name, but others won’t. Your rulebook can list which field should be used when “campaign name” isn’t an option.
Your rulebook doesn’t need to belong — usually, a page or two will suffice — but it needs to be shared with every person who’ll be setting up your campaigns on different platforms.
You need a centralized tool for creating, sharing and storing campaign names.
For most teams, this means creating a spreadsheet with a separate column for each variable that must be included in the full name. You can even set up a formula in the spreadsheet to output the full campaign name, complete with delimiters, so you can easily cut and paste it into whatever platform you’re using.
Spreadsheets can be a useful way to share and store campaign names, especially if you’re employing a shared resource like a Google Sheet. But they also require a certain amount of discipline to use, and they can still be prone to errors and miscommunication.
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You could also use a centralized campaign naming and tracking solution. There are a growing number of tools like this on the market. They can create a unique ID or key associated with all the variables you want to track for a specific campaign. Instead of having to add a long, complex campaign name with multiple delimiters, you can plug in the shorter key instead. Because these keys are easier to create and share, your team is more likely to actually use them during campaign setup.
Nobody wants to add another chore to their to-do list. But the time you spend standardizing campaign naming will ultimately result in more accurate and complete data.
