Campaign naming conventions that actually scale

When you're managing a handful of campaigns, naming doesn't matter. When you're managing hundreds of campaigns across multiple brands and platforms, it's the difference between finding the right ad set in 10 seconds vs 10 minutes.

Here's the naming grammar I use at Boring Commerce. Every campaign, ad set, and ad follows the same pattern across Meta, Google, Pinterest, and TikTok.

The format

BC_{Brand}_{Platform}_{Objective}_{Audience}_{Creative}_{Date}

Every field has a purpose:

• BC: agency prefix (Boring Commerce). Consistent across all clients.
• Brand: short brand identifier.
• Platform: META, GOOG, PIN, TIKTOK.
• Objective: CONV (conversion), PROS (prospecting), RET (retargeting), BRAND (awareness).
• Audience: who you're targeting, hyphenated.
• Creative: references the BC-numbered creative.
• Date: launch month.

Why this matters

When a campaign underperforms at 2am and your Slack alert fires, you need to know in one glance: which brand, which platform, what audience, what creative. You shouldn't need to click into three levels of the ad manager to figure out what you're looking at.

It also makes reporting trivial. Filter by brand prefix. Filter by objective. Filter by date range. Sort by creative ID. Everything is parseable by humans and machines.

The audit

Every month, I run a naming audit across all active campaigns. Anything that doesn't match the grammar gets flagged. Non-conforming names are the first sign of sloppy campaign management, and sloppy naming always correlates with sloppy performance.

It takes 30 minutes to set up the naming convention. It saves you hundreds of hours over the life of the account.