Naming conventions allow you to automatically group ads in Comparative Reports and unlock a new report type, Winning Combinations.
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Looking for an efficient way to organize, analyze, and optimize your creative performance across various variables? We’ll walk you through setting up your naming conventions and show you how to make the most of Motion’s Comparative and Winning Combinations Reports for actionable insights!
Why Naming Conventions Matter
Before diving into indexing, let’s talk about why naming conventions are so important. They don’t just keep things tidy; they form the backbone of structured data that fuels your insights. With proper naming conventions, you can:
Automate your reports: No more manually pulling in ad names or properties. Motion will do the heavy lifting by automatically indexing your ad elements.
Track performance trends: Identify which combinations of creative elements, offers, or influencers are driving the best results.
Save time: Once set up, you’ll reduce the need for manual updates, allowing your reports to dynamically adjust as new ads roll in.
Setting Up Naming Conventions
1. Map Out What You Want to Learn
Start by defining the creative elements you want to track. Are you interested in the performance of different influencers? Offer formats? Creative concepts? Think about the types of questions you want answered!
Start by identifying the key variables that will inform your campaigns, such as ad format, creative type, funnel stage, and audience. These should be easy to distinguish and central to your analysis.
Callout: Currently, Naming Conventions apply only to ad names, not ad sets or campaign names. But if you want to categorize ads from past campaigns, don’t worry—Motion can still match those properties by searching within ad names!
Group similar variables in a logical order. For example, place all creative-specific naming conventions together, like talent type, format, and hook, to streamline later searches.
Pro Tip: Make sure to involve your team—this is a cross-functional effort where media, creative, and strategy teams should align on what they hope to learn from these reports.
2. Build Your Naming Glossary
Once your key variables or themes are identified, build a naming glossary that outlines each of these elements. If you need a jumpstart on creating consistent naming conventions, we’ve got you covered. Motion has a Naming Convention Generator that helps you build a streamlined, consistent naming system for your ads!
Download our Creative Learnings Template to help with ad name generation and glossary creation!
Pro Tip: In your template, add a glossary tab where team members can refer to pre-approved terms, codes, and formatting rules for consistency. Update the glossary as your campaigns evolve to ensure alignment.
Your naming glossary will serve as a master list, guiding your team on how to name each ad in a standardized way.
3. Create a Naming Convention Generator
Now that you have your glossary, you’ll want to set up a naming convention generator. This tool ensures consistency when generating names for your ads by automatically pulling elements from your glossary.
Start by choosing a character that separates each property in your naming convention to separate elements within a name. This keeps your naming uniform and avoids conflicts with tracking systems.
Examples of separators can include:
Underscores _
Hyphens -
Pipe |
Greater than >
Pro Tip: Don’t use special characters like "&" in naming conventions, as this can break UTM strings.
Create consistent, identifiers for common variables using colons, such as:
"T:" for Talent (T:MaleTalent, T:FemaleTalent, T:Non-binaryTalent)
"F:" for Funnel stage (F:TopFunnel, F:MidFunnel, F:BottomFunnel)
Now, say your creative focuses on showcasing product use by different talents. You might create a naming convention like:
MaleTalent_TopFunnel where the identifiers would be set up as T:MaleTalent_F:TopFunnel
FemaleTalent_MidFunnel where the identifiers would be set up as T:FemaleTalent_F:MidFunnel
The key here is consistency—this is what allows for structured data that can be analyzed over time.
Pro Tip: Naming Conventions are case-sensitive! If you’re using T: for talent as an identifier, make sure to stay consistent with uppercase T: throughout. Using lowercase t: later on will result in different categories, which could mess up your data organization.
These tips help ensure each name is concise and readable while allowing for efficient tracking in reports.
4. Ensure Scalability
When setting up naming conventions, think about how they can scale as campaigns grow. Your naming system should be adaptable, allowing for new variables (e.g., new campaign types or ad formats) without breaking the structure.
Consider adding wildcard placeholders for future, unanticipated elements. For example, leave room in your conventions for additional UGC creators or untested offers.
Start Indexing Your Naming Conventions
Now, once the heavy lifting is over, this is where Motion’s magic happens which offers a great pay-off and time-savings in the long run! Instead of manually entering naming conventions into reports, you can let Motion do the work for you!
1. Head to your Workspace Settings in Motion and navigate to the Naming Convention tab:
2. Select your property separator, then click Edit to begin defining your properties:
3. Input your properties (ex. Influencer) and assign identifiers (ex. I: for Influencer)
Motion will then start indexing these properties for you, allowing the system to recognize them across all ads as they get uploaded!
Pro tip: You can toggle on the option to match the identified properties in past ads that don’t have identifiers in their ad names
Automate Your Comparative Reports
With your naming conventions set, Motion’s Comparative Reports become fully automated. Now you can easily compare creators, formats, or vendors side by side. And here’s the best part: Motion auto-updates these reports as new values are added. So, if you bring in a new influencer, their ads will automatically show up in your report—no manual updates needed!
Instead of filtering manually by campaign names or individual ads, you can now:
Select properties for your global filters with just a few clicks:
Callout: You’ll always have the option to customize your comparative report by clicking on the pencil icon or the “create custom groups” button as shown above, but just note that this breaks the sync for Motion to auto update if new custom groupings are added.
Generate dynamic reports that update automatically as new ads come in, saving you tons of time on manual tracking and see how ads are performing side-by-side!
Leverage Winning Combinations Reports
Once your naming conventions are in place, you can dive even deeper with Motion’s Winning Combinations report, which are available to Growth Plans only at this time. This tool analyzes the data from your indexed naming conventions to reveal the best-performing combinations of variables!
Imagine being able to quickly see that a specific creator paired with a BOGO offer and a certain creative concept outperforms others. That’s the power of structured data!
Reach Out To Us
At Motion, we’ve guided countless teams through implementing naming conventions. If you need advice, don’t hesitate to reach out to your dedicated customer success manager or chat with us directly!