Managing your ad campaigns efficiently is crucial, whether you use a PPC tool or not. The key?
Implement a consistent naming convention to avoid the chaos of a disorganized account.
This simple strategy saves time, reduces stress, and enhances your analysis capabilities, making your reports and Amazon ad interface much easier to navigate.
Here are some best practices to guide you:
1. Campaign Type
Use these abbreviations to clearly identify the type of campaign you are running:
SP = Sponsored Products
SB = Sponsored Brands
SBV = Sponsored Brands Videos
SD = Sponsored Display
2. Country (Marketplace)
If you advertise on multiple Amazon marketplaces, include the country abbreviation to your campaign names to easily differentiate between Amazon marketplaces:
UK for the United Kingdom
IT for Italy
FR for France
… and so on.
3. Product Type or Name
Incorporate specific product types or names into your campaign names.
For example, let’s say you’re selling and advertising kitchen lamps, keychains, car tires and hand-made carpets.
When you create an advertising campaign for lamps, add “Lamps” to the campaign name. And you’ll quickly tell them apart from advertising campaign for carpets.
4. Campaign match type or targeting
Specify campaign match type in the campaign name so you will be able to immediately tell what campaign type you’re looking at.
Here’s a list of abbreviations you can use:
PH = phrase campaign
BR = broad campaign
PAT = Product Attribute Targeting
EX = Exact
KW = Keyword
CAT = Category
This is just a suggestion and you can use your own abbreviations! As long as you establish a system that works for you.
Whatever naming system you’ll end up going with, just make sure to stick with it.
5. Brand or Account Name
Assign short, meaningful abbreviations for each of your brands or accounts to simplify overview and management.
For instance:
Orange Bananas brand = OB
Red Snatchers = RS
Blazing Blazers = BB
This approach helps you instantly recognize which campaigns are associated with which brands, making navigation through accounts much smoother.
6. Auto or Manual? (Only for Sponsored Products)
If you’re running Sponsored Products Auto and Manual campaigns, then I strongly recommend you to include that information in the campaign name:
[auto]: for Sponsored Products Auto campaigns
[manual]: for Sponsored Products Manual campaigns
7. Ad Groups Identifier
Label ad groups with "AG" to prevent confusion between campaign and ad group names:
AG = ad group
That’s how you’ll immediately be able to set apart an ad group from a campaign.
Practical example 1: “SP_IT_Lamps_BR_OB [manual]”
Let’s break down this campaign name according to best practices listed above:
SP = SP marks a Sponsored Products campaign, so you immediately know what’s the campaign type
IT = IT stands for Italy, so this is the marketplace for this campaign
Lamps = you can immediately tell the product type
BR = BR means that this is a broad campaign and
OB = in this example, “OB” stands for “Orange Bananas” which is the account name
[manual] = because this is a Sponsored Products campaign, it’s a good idea to define if it’s an Auto or Manual campaign. This one is clearly a Sponsored Products Manual campaigns
Practical example 2: “OB_IT_SP_Lamps”
Especially longer names often get truncated. So another thing you can do is to move the most important part of the name to the font. In this case, I have +50 advertising accounts.
I decided to start the campaign name with the account name so I can immediately tell which account a campaign belongs to.
OB = in this example, “OB” stands for “Orange Bananas” which is the account name
IT = IT stands for Italy, so this is the marketplace for this campaign
SP = SP marks a Sponsored Products campaign, so you immediately know what’s the campaign type
Remember, this is just a suggestion! You can set up your naming convention however you want.
But whatever you do, set up a logically organized system and then stick to it.