Crafting a Taxonomy Structure: A Marketer’s Guide to Naming Conventions

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, maintaining consistency and clarity in data organization is key. Establishing a taxonomy for naming conventions lays the foundation for efficient campaign management, enabling marketers to navigate complexities with ease.

If you’re unsure how to start this process or simply looking for a few ways to polish your approach, read on for tips and best practices sourced directly from our team of data standards experts!

Hierarchies and Essential Fields

When crafting a naming structure, it’s crucial to prioritize fields that capture the fundamental aspects of your campaigns.

Focus on a few core hierarchies and selecting key fields for each:

1. Campaigns: The overarching container for your marketing initiatives.

Brand_Product_Quarter_Year
This hierarchy encapsulates vital information about the campaign, including the brand, product, quarter, and year. By incorporating these elements, you provide context and facilitate easy identification.

2. Placement/Ad Set: Refers to the specific locations or sets of ads within a campaign.

Type_Audience_KPI_Target_Date
This hierarchy delves into the specifics of ad placements, encompassing the type of placement, target audience, key performance indicator (KPI), and target date. These fields offer granular insights into the ad set’s purpose and objectives.

3. Creative/Ad Creative: Involves the actual content or creative assets used in advertisements.

Format_Size_Length
This hierarchy focuses on the format, size, and length of the ad creative. These parameters are crucial for optimizing ad performance and ensuring compatibility across various platforms.

Best Practices

To maximize the effectiveness of these types of structures, adhere to these best practices:

Designate Field/Value Positions

• Establish a clear hierarchy by assigning field/value positions from left to right, moving from broader to more specific elements.
• Use delimiters between elements. Underscore delimiters (_) are best.
• For example: Broadest_Broad_Narrow_Narrower_Narrowest

Maintain Consistency

• Always maintain a consistent order of elements within the naming convention.
• Consistency fosters familiarity and simplifies management across campaigns and platforms.
• For example: Field 1_Field 2_Field 3_Field 4_Field 5

Standardize Allowed Values

• Define and enforce standardized values for each element within the naming convention, eliminating variations that could lead to confusion or errors.
• Standardization enhances clarity and accuracy in data organization.

Limit Use of Special Characters

• Minimize the use of special characters that could impact URL strings or compatibility with digital platforms.
• Stick to alphanumeric characters and commonly accepted delimiters to mitigate potential issues.
• Underscore delimiters (_) are our suggested delimiter because they aren’t commonly used as punctuation or in URL encoding.

Consider Short Codes

• Some platforms have character limits so short codes are a handy way to work within these limits, i.e. Instagram becomes “IG”.

Don’t Shove Everything In

• Consider which fields should be included in your naming convention and which should just remain additional metadata.
• As long as you can associate, store and retrieve your other metadata and connect it to the name (Claravine can help!) you don’t have to fit it all into your naming convention

Ultimately, standardize values when possible and remember: consistency is key. Following the same structure, delimiters, spelling, and capitalization across BUs, channels, campaigns and assets limits user error as much as possible.

Once your fields and potential values are finalized, Claravine offers tools and features to streamline the process of taxonomy structuring and standardization. From generating taxonomy names or codes to managing related URLs, UTMs, or mappings, The Data Standards Cloud simplifies campaign management and enhances data consistency!