Good naming conventions help advertisers in a variety of different ways. It not only ensures that your files are easily discoverable, but also helps you identify which creative elements have the biggest impact on performance. Maintaining a systematic naming convention can significantly speed up how your team operates, for example when building campaigns or handing off assets from one team to another.

However, as team's size and the number of assets increases, maintaining a systematic naming convention quickly starts to require a lot of manual work and discipline from the team. With deadlines approaching, it can be easy to save the file naming for a later time and focus on just getting the assets delivered and campaign live.

This is why we built Automated Naming Conventions - an easier way to stay organized, without the added admin work or risk of manual errors.

The growing role of creative variety and tracking

It has been a longer term trend that Meta, TikTok, and Google develop their ad platforms towards the direction where media buyers find success by deploying diverse creative assets to broad audiences, allowing the platforms' algorithms to determine the best fit. This shift underlines the growing importance of creative variety in reaching the right audiences.

The move towards broader audiences not only increases the need for a systematic organization of creative assets but also underlines the importance for advertisers to maintain a large and diverse library of creatives for testing and running. Clear naming conventions enable teams to swiftly identify which creatives resonate with their audience, streamline the testing process, and enhance the scalability of campaigns.

The creative elements we recommend you to track

To ensure your creatives are easy to find and use accurately in your campaigns, it’s crucial to start by naming each asset with basic yet essential details: aspect ratio, duration, language, and style (e.g., UGC, AI-generated, traditional). This makes the files readily identifiable for everyone and ensures they're used appropriately.

In addition to the basic creative elements, we recommend every advertiser to name and track track at a minimum:

1. Creative angle: The main message or unique selling point that the creative is highlighting. Different messages resonate with different parts of your target audience, and the creative angle is the reason why someone would choose your product or service over alternatives.
2. Hook: The initial 2-3 seconds of your video can significantly influence viewer interest. This includes overlay text, audio, and the initial visual impact.
3. Visual Appearance: The style of your video, be it UGC, AI, 3D, or another type, determines the aesthetic and feel of your ad.

As your campaigns become more complex with additional concepts and variations, the detail in your naming conventions should also increase accordingly.

Welcome Automated Naming Conventions

With Automated Naming Conventions, Focal transforms randomly named creative files into easily trackable assets.

In our example, we’ve tagged the creative with custom metadata such as ID, name, version, style, angle, and hook, as well as metadata like aspect ratio, length, and file type, ensuring a granular level of detail for analysis and optimization. For example, an asset initially uploaded to Focal as 'File123.mp4' will, upon approval, be automatically renamed to SA-2950_Convenience_Simple-tip_Week46_9x16_40s.mp4.

In addition to correctly naming the ad, Focal also moves the file to the appropriate folder, in this case, the 'Approved' folder, helping you keep your files easily findable and ready for deployment.

Get started today

Implementing Automated Naming Conventions is simple. After you’ve added the ad creative elements you want to track to your Creative Board, you simply click on the ⚡️-icon and set the rules:

1. In which folder the assets are added to,
2. Which elements you want to use in your naming conventions, and
3. When the automation is triggered,

and the automation does the rest.

The feature is now live for all users on Focal. If you need assistance setting up automations, please reach out to us.

Join the beta

Focal offers a free plan to small teams and paid plans starting at $99/month. Drop your information below, and we'll set you up with a test account.