Learn how to
stay competitive
while marketing your brand and message…
when you don’t have the time, energy, or expertise!
Keeping Digital Files Organized with Naming Convention Impacts Your Marketing Campaign
Having a strong background in data strategy, automating the data process, managing the data, and utilizing it for actionable results, the Engage 2 Engage team knows the importance of keeping data and documentation organized when it comes to digital marketing campaigns.
When it comes to organizing your digital files and keeping them readily accessible, one of the easiest ways to maintain a neat virtual office and communicate across teams, is to ensure that all your file names are consistent across multiple platforms. These are rules that apply to the naming of files for blogs and email nurtures, documents for social media, and website URLs; they’re designed to make things easier to find and organize.
Basically, the marketing campaign naming convention impacts the way marketing data management is handled. You will be able to connect dots and recognize patterns for better improvement once you are able to visualize your planned activities and actual data results in a customized report.
For example, data taxonomy, metadata, and tagging are key ingredients necessary to keep information organized in other platforms like your CRM application, funnel process, web traffic monitoring, and more.
Here we focus on naming conventions, which are the high-level names you give your campaigns to keep things organized.
How to Name Files
When you need to produce a file for a special project, you and your team likely do not have time to scour your computer for it. Fortunately, you can save yourself the time and trouble by keeping consistent with your file names. Above all else, you also want a filename that you can identify instantly and know exactly what the file contains.
Here is an example of a file name that abides by typical naming convention:
20210725–ProjectTitle-V01
First and foremost, this example abides by a few overall guidelines that should be upheld across all files. This title:
- Avoids using spaces, underscores, or special characters (such as ?, /, \, +, ~, or periods) in the title;
- Differentiates words by capitalization, not spaces or underscores;
- And maintains a short yet informative title.
Next, we’ll examine the parts of the file name and their importance.
- 20210725 is a date code, formatted as YYYYMMDD. In this instance, the date this file was created is July 25, 2021, or 2021/07/25. To properly put this into a file title, you must remove the slashes.
- ProjectTitle is, as this example suggests, the name of the project this applies to. If you’re working on a specific client case, you would name it as something like “JamesBDocument”, or whatever the agreed upon project name is.
- Finally, V01 is the version number. The number should be formatted as having two digits, regardless of if the number would normally be written as such. The third version, for example, would be written as “V03”, not “V3”. This is important for sorting and organizing files and for version controlling. Tools such as Google Docs have made collaboration and a way to view version history convenient.
Remember, too, that these conventions rely on proper organization. You should always put files in the folder or location that your team has agreed upon.
How to Name Website URLs
The rules for creating names for website URLs overlap with file naming to some extent. Your pages should be organized properly before you start this process, as this will often automatically create well-named pages for you. However, if you’re starting for scratch, you should always abide by the concept of sections.
A section is the main page for a part of your website. The website’s “About Us” page would be its own section and should have a URL similar to www.website.com/about.
Anything that comes after the “About Us” page would, therefore, fall under the same section. To add a page that lists the names of each team member, you would create a page with a URL similar to www.website.com/about/meet-us. Note that this URL does not use underscores, as users may confuse them with spaces.
The following example demonstrates proper naming conventions for a page dedicated to a specific product in the fictional website’s “shoes” section:
www.website.com/shoes/mens/cool-striped-shoe
Broken down, this URL includes:
- The main website, which is website.com in this case;
- The “parent” section, —or (in other terms) the main section that we want to go to—here, you’re directing the customers to the shoes selection;
- To elaborate further for the sake of demonstration, this example also includes a sub-section, —a “child” of the “parent” section—in this case, the men’s collection (note that the URL doesn’t include an apostrophe);
- And, at the very end, we have the final landing page or location. In this example, we’re looking at a product called “Cool Striped Shoe.” Sometimes, this might have an additional extension, such as “.html”; this is part of the website, and you don’t have to worry about it.
Naming Your Funnel Steps
You should also provide names for each step of your funnel, so that you can easily track how often a lead results in a purchase. Similarly, keeping track of how far into the process most users get can help you see where there might be a point of failure in your funnel.
First of all, you need to have a category for your potential customers. In this case, let’s say that we’ve sent out an email call-to-action for selling some of our keychains.
The first step will be your lead magnet; this is where your customers will arrive upon clicking the link. You should specify the type of lead you generated in this URL; in this case, it’s a discount offer. A good URL would be www.example.com/sale-keychains.
Your next step is an offer page. Having acquired the customer, you’re now going to show them the available options for this particular lead. A good URL would be www.example.com/offer-keychains.
Finally, you’ll want to create the order page for these items. Ideally, these should all be connected, so that you can see the traffic flow on your website. An ideal URL for this stage would be www.example.com/order-keychains.
Once the customer has purchased an item, it’s good practice to also have them sign up for email updates. When they enroll, you should continue to send them offers and incentives. A good URL for this step would be www.example.com/emailsteps-keychains.
The basic idea for organizing your funnel steps is based upon the overall program and campaign name. You need to have this figured out in order to start creating effective funnel page names. Once you have done this, however, it’s easy to build off of it.
Naming Urchin Tracking Models (UTMs)
Creating UTM tags is slightly more complicated than URLs or files. To put it simply, a UTM (or Urchin Traffic Monitor) are small pieces of code that allow you to assess how well a certain campaign is working at yielding meaningful traffic to your website.
Naming UTMs is important for marketing and research. If you fail to properly organize your UTMs, you’ll end up with a variety of disparate points of data, none of which will truly make sense. Keeping your campaigns organized is key to your success, as it enables quick and easy data analysis.
However, disregarding the requisite code format, everything is similar to the above naming conventions. You’ll want to separate data by using dashes and capitalization instead of underscores or spaces, and you want to have a consistent date format. One of the most common standards is YYYY-MM-DD.
The example below only applies to the final name for the campaign, and not the overall UTM code that will be put into the link. In this example, we’re selling hats!
all-hats-sale–lead-us–2021_04_13–rewards
Broken down, this name includes:
- The gender or group being targeted, “all”. In this example, we targeted all demographics, but this could be something like “male”, “female”, or “adult”.
- The campaign name. In this case, “hat-sale”.
- The “lead” area or region, if applicable or relevant. You should use standard country codes, detailed here, for this section. In this example, we’re specifically targeting leads in the United States, hence “lead-us”.
- The date the campaign began or was created. This is for sorting purposes, and you and your team should decide what the date will be. In this example, the campaign began on April 13, 2021, so the title includes 2021_04_13.
- Finally, the funnel name includes the campaign type. This imaginary campaign was a rewards email sent to previous customers, so it falls under the “rewards” category.
Extra Guidance
All of these standards are meant to improve productivity and make files more easily accessible. Remember, none of these will work without cooperation! Everyone needs to work together to keep folders organized and conventions set.
Each section above has a text article linked for your convenience, so that you can read more about the guidelines.
If you need more help, however, here are some video examples:
- For file naming conventions,
- For URL naming conventions,
- And for UTM conventions.
Engage 2 Engage is Here to Help
When you are consistent with naming, not only do you make your job easier for yourself, you make it easier for everyone else as well! After all, it is quite hard to measure results meaningfully if you have to spend countless time searching through file after file.
Here at Engage 2 Engage we are serious about creating processes that are efficient and effective. We help small businesses and entrepreneurs get the most out of their digital marketing campaign. We’ll help you develop and implement a result driven campaign. Learn more about our programs today!
