How To Keep Your Facebook Ad Campaigns Organized

Have you ever looked at the ads listed in your Facebook ad manager and had no clue which ads were which until you clicked each ad one by one?

The problem stems from the fact that, unless you use the Power Editor, Facebook generally gives very generic names to your ads based on the type of ad that you create.

Today, we’re going to learn a few simple tips for naming your ads and keeping your campaigns organized.

The most important element of keeping your ads organized is to implement a consistent naming system. This way,  you know which ads you are looking at on your campaign summary page without needing to click each ad to see the creatives.

Here’s the naming system that I use…

There are three important elements of each ad that should be included in the ad name:

1. Type of ad
2. Audience targeting
3. Creative description

I suggest including all these elements in your ad names, like this…

<Ad Type>_<Targeting>_<Creative>

 

1) Ad Type

For ad type, use a code similar to this:

• TA = Traditional Ad
• PPA = Page Post Ad
• PLA = Page Like Ad
• PPLA = Page Post Like Ad
• CIA = Check-In Ads
• APP = App Used Ad
• SR= Sponsored Results

 

2) Audience Targeting

For demographic targeting, I try to be as descriptive as possible. Here are a few examples…

• Targeting women age 25 to 45 who like Starbucks and live in New York =  F25-45*Starbucks*NewYork
• Targeting men and women 18 years and older who like my competitors = MF18+*Competitors

Note: Don’t use commas in your names because if your export your data and import into Excel, you might run into some problems with commas in your CSV file.

 

3) Creative Description

The last section of the ad name should simply be a very short description of your ad creative that will help you distinguish it from other ads in the campaign.

It’s important to note for all these naming conventions, that if all the ads in your campaign are the same for a given element, then you don’t need to mention that variable in the ad names. It is sufficient to simply mention it in the campaign name.

There are other variables that you might want to include in your ad names as well such as bid type (CPC vs CPM).

Bonus Tip: If you manage ads for multiple brands or companies in your account, you may want to add a company variable to each ad so your ad names will look more like this <Client>_<Ad Type>_<Targeting>_<Creative>.

 

Here are a few full examples:

1) If I’m using a page post ad to target women over 50 years old in California with an ad that has a puppy image, I might name the ad like this, PPA_F50+*CA_Puppy

2) A Page Like ad targeting all US fans of the Yankees who are exactly 25 years old with a baseball creative could look like this, PLA_MF25*USA_baseball

 

Bonus Tip: When to name your ads

If you create lots of ads to test in your campaigns (as you should), then I don’t recommend wasting time to name each ad immediately after you create them. Instead, I suggest that you wait until the ads have been running for a day or two. By that point, there should be some clear winners and losers. Pause the losers and apply names to the winners (you’ll never want to look at the losers again anyway, so there’s no point in wasting time to create names for them).

 

A word about organizing your campaigns…

In most cases it is important that each campaign has its own unique objective and function. Here are a few quick points to keep in mind when creating new campaigns:

1. Don’t test multiple variables across different ads in the same campaign. For example, don’t vary your creatives, audience and bid type across different ads in the same campaign. This will make it very hard to test and understand what’s working.
2. Each campaign should only have one type of ad. For example, try not to mix Page Post ads and Page Like ads in the same campaign.
3. Give mobile ads their own campaigns. Mobile ads behave very differently than web-based ads, so give them the respect they deserve with their own campaigns

 

What about you?

How do you keep your Facebook campaigns organized? How do you determine which ads to batch in campaigns together? Leave a comment below and share your tips.

And don’t forget, if you want more advanced Facebook ad strategies, be sure to enter your email below to get my blog updates.