Naming Convention best practices#
This guide explains best practices for creating and maintaining naming conventions for your marketing data. Implementing a standardized taxonomy is a fundamental requirement for effective data governance and producing high-quality reporting.
Introduction#
A standardized taxonomy ensures a uniform structure that acts as a common language for all your campaigns, which is crucial for consistent cross-channel reporting and aggregation. Strategically designed naming conventions are a long-term solution. By maintaining a consistent structure, you ensure that your reporting is trustworthy for tracking over time. Careful planning helps you to avoid duplication and prevent errors, which makes the resulting data easier to work with.
Structure best practices#
A naming convention is a series of fields joined together and separated by a specific character known as a delimiter. Defining fields in this way is crucial because it supports standardization across all teams and markets. These standardized fields communicate specific information that most marketing platforms fail to capture in their standard data.
The important best practices to consider when creating the structure of a naming convention are:
- Delimiter selection
The underscore
_is considered the best practice delimiter for separating fields. Although pipes|can be used, dashes-are less reliable because they are often utilized for other purposes, such as acting as a space replacement or within specific date formats (YYYY-MM-DD). You must use delimiters consistently. Using consistent delimiters allows Adverity to reliably separate the values back into columns and enrich the existing datasets.- Character restrictions
When constructing the naming convention, only use alphanumeric characters (
0-9,a-z,A-Z). It is essential to avoid using punctuation, symbols, or special characters such as&or@. The only exception to this rule is the hyphen-, which can be used to separate pieces of information in free-form text fields.- Case consistency
Developing the convention requires that you pick a case and use it consistently. Consistency in capitalization is essential for the Adverity Smart Naming Convention transformation to work efficiently. For more information, see using the Smart Naming Convention transformation.
- Specific formats and standardized values
Fields that require information to be communicated in a particular way must adhere strictly to predefined formats. All dates utilized in the naming convention are required to be in the format
YYYY-MM-DD. This is an ISO standard format that ensures data tools, including Adverity, process the information correctly as a date. Similarly, always use standard ISO codes for country, language, and currency.
Designing the campaign name naming convention#
A uniform campaign structure is essential from the beginning to establish a common language for all campaigns. Campaigns are top-level layers that hold key data values necessary for global reporting. While there is no definitive naming methodology, any chosen structure should follow a consistent format.
A useful and adaptable campaign structure might include the following elements:
Brand_CampaignDesc_S.Date_E.Date_Product_Country_BudgetID_Custom
Useful elements to include:
Brand: Used for the company name or sub-division.
CampaignDesc: Used for the name of the marketing “initiative” or a description of the campaign.
S.Date and E.Date: These elements represent the campaign start and end dates, which must use the YYYY-MM-DD ISO standard format.
Product: This element identifies the product being advertised and can be standardized if reporting needs to show products.
Country: This field typically uses a standard code for the country in which the media is running.
BudgetID: This element includes the unique code assigned to the campaign initiative in a budgeting tool. Including this ID helps you to cross-check discrepancies between cost data from marketing platforms and the original planned cost data.
Custom: Add any additional useful information about your campaign. You can add as many custom fields as needed, provided they stay within the ad server’s character limit.
The structure should be designed to be future-proof, allowing the taxonomy to be updated with new entries like new partners, markets, or brands.
Other best practices#
Effective implementation of naming conventions requires careful planning of the taxonomy, adherence to governance rules, and awareness of how data processing tools like Adverity manage the data. Consider the following best practices:
- Avoid duplication
When developing the taxonomy, which can span levels such as Account, Campaign, and Ad Group, it is best practice to avoid duplication. For each individual data source, a single element from the taxonomy should only appear in one level of granularity. For instance, the ‘Brand Name’ should only be used in the Account Name or Campaign Name, not both. This choice to deliberately avoid repeating elements prevents errors in the long term and makes the resulting data easier to work with.
- Using codes and Adverity processing
While using coded fields (such as three- or four-letter codes) is best practice for reducing length and ensuring adherence to ISO codes, it introduces additional technical requirements within the data ecosystem. Adverity can map the codes back to human-readable names using mapping tables. For more information, see mapping tables.
- Ownership and governance
For robust data governance and to ensure a single source of truth, the naming convention and taxonomies should have defined owners. Overall ownership must reside with a central authority or a lead owner who is responsible for the maintenance of the naming conventions and taxonomies. This lead owner ensures that the convention is adhered to across all teams and departments responsible for implementation. The teams or individuals responsible for applying the conventions are the users, who are responsible for their usage. Any updates or changes required to the taxonomy or convention structure should be requested to the central owner.