Naming campaigns and ad groups — the convention that pays for itself.
A consistent naming convention is the single highest-leverage choice in account setup. The five fields every name should encode, why renaming is harder than it looks, and the template AMALYZE uses in real accounts.
Naming conventions feel like the most boring topic in Amazon advertising and turn out to be the most consequential. Every report you ever look at — bulk-files, dashboards, attribution traces, BI exports — is filtered, grouped and pivoted by campaign name. Get the naming wrong on day one and you will pay for it every single week of the account's life.
Five fields a campaign name should encode
The convention we use, in order:
- Format — SP / SB / SD
- Targeting type — Auto / KW / Prod / Cat / Audience
- Product family or ASIN root — short code, e.g. Knife01
- Goal or stage — Launch / Profitable / BrandDef / Conquest / Reach
- Marketplace or country code — DE / UK / US / FR
Joined by a separator that does not appear inside any of the fields — a pipe character works well, an en-dash works, an underscore is fine. Example: SP|KW|Knife01|Profitable|DE. The convention should also work as a substring filter — you should be able to grep for every Knife01 campaign with a single search.
Ad group names should encode the dimension that varies inside a campaign
If a manual campaign holds multiple match types, the ad group name should encode the match type: Knife01-Exact, Knife01-Phrase. If a product-targeting campaign holds different competitor sets, the ad group name should encode the set: CompetitorA-Premium, CompetitorB-Budget. The rule of thumb: campaign name encodes what the campaign is for, ad group name encodes what varies inside it.
Why renaming later is harder than it looks
Renaming a campaign in Seller Central is technically free, but everything downstream breaks: bulk-file uploads keyed on the old name, BI dashboards joined on the old name, third-party tools that cached the old name, attribution reports already exported. You will end up either maintaining a name-mapping table forever or doing a hard cutover that costs you a week. It is genuinely cheaper to spend an hour on the convention before the first campaign goes live.
Things to avoid
Free-text descriptions ("Christmas campaign final final v2"). Inconsistent separators across campaigns. Encoding bids or budgets in the name — they change too often. Encoding dates in the name — also changes too often. Using emoji — they break in some BI exports.
What about portfolios?
Portfolios are the next layer of grouping, covered in the next episode. The campaign name still has to stand on its own, because portfolios are not part of every report.
Watch Episode 06: Naming campaigns and ad groups (German)
The German walkthrough — a campaign-naming convention that survives account growth.
Tame the campaign list before it grows.
AMALYZE's dashboards rely on the structure encoded in your campaign names — get them right at the start and every report afterwards organises itself.