Naming Taxonomy best practices?

Published by: Paul Cook , Dominion Enterprises
Published on: June 5, 2012

I'm looking to clean up / re-do some campaigns/line items & groups and was hoping to get some advice on how to name everything in a new system.

Anyone have some best practices for naming conventions that is intuitive and leaves my options open for future changes?

Thanks,
Paul

Comments

#1 Rainey Smith - June 11, 2012

Hi Paul,

I'm pretty picky on my nomenclature...having worked for several sites who had "sponsorships" which involved multiple ad units all under one line of the IO...it can get pretty tough really quickly to keep things straight!

I have a custom IO that I offer clients...it has a letter for each line item (A,B,C...etc) and that is the beginning of my naming.

I do this:

Letter on IO Advertiser Name Ad Size Where it's Running Descriptor

examples:

A Pepsi 728x90 ROS June
B Pepsi 300x250 Sports Section May-July

I also carry this over to my creative...I use the same format but the Descriptor is about the ad rather than anything else.

A Pepsi 728x90 ROS June Polar Bears
A Pepsi 728x90 ROS June Family

That way, no matter how I pull a report...I know who it is, what size it is, where it's running and what ad it is.

The great thing is too...it's super-easy to clump them together by the letter. I have clients who have their own IO's...I add the letter in by hand on my printed copy! :-)

Hope that helps...

Rainey
www.oncalladops.com

Paid Member
#2 Sean Dillon - June 11, 2012

Hi Paul.
The naming convention we use on all line items is:
Advertiser Name - Campaign Name - AdType/AdFormat [optional]
eg; Audi - A6 Launch 2011 - HomePageTakeover - Master/Leaderboard

For each creative we have a naming convention that is:
Advertiser Name - Campaign Name - Creative Name [3rdPartyAdserverName 3rdPartyAdID]
eg; Audi - A6 Launch 2011 - HomePageTakeover - Master/Leaderboard [DFA B01234568.1]

Downsides - on DFP original sometimes the names can exceed the visible space allocated to display it.
Upsides - Clear and concise descriptions makes identifying each element within a deal easier. Easier to find the correct creative if we're rebooking an ad.

This naming convention started when we were on DART Enterprise and the UI was able to easily accommodate long descriptions, in DFP is can be a bit painful as descriptions can get a bit big, but we stick with it as helps us in the long run especially when analysing large amounts of data.

NB: we always record the 3rd party AdID of an creative we traffic. Not only does it help us clearly identify which tags are running in which lines but for the client it is also makes reconciliation easier/simpler as they can map this against their own reports from their 3rd party adservers.