The best campaign naming conventions for marketo, pardot, salesforce, blueshift, and more

Whenever I do an audit or work on projects, the first thing I always notice is whether there are naming conventions. If you have naming conventions for your campaigns, folders, and automations, it shows that someone put some care and thought into the rollout. But if there are no naming conventions, you can bet you're in for a wild ride.

When creating campaigns across platforms like Salesforce, Marketo, Blueshift, or Pardot, it’s important to follow a structure that allows you to easily pull data and identify campaigns.

Below is my tried-and-true approach to naming conventions for campaigns:

Format: TYPE YYYYMMDD AUDIENCE NAME
Example: WBR 20250701 DG Crafting your marketing technology stack

Just by using this simple naming convention, you can immediately tell that it’s a webinar that took place on July 1st, targeted demand generation personas, and covered the topic of crafting your marketing technology stack.

The reason I like this is because with a quick search in your systems—like “WBR” or “202507”—you can pull up all your webinar campaigns or any campaigns from July 2025.

You can also expand on this by including the funnel stage (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU) or even adding a campaign ID from your CRM to help you pinpoint marketing assets tied to a specific initiative.

Here are some abbreviations I personally like to use:

• ABM – Account-Based Marketing
• SOC – Social Media
• WBR – Webinar
• BLG – Blog
• WP – White Paper
• CS – Content Syndication
• PD – Paid Display
• WEB – Website (organic)
• SEM – Search Engine Marketing
• RET – Retargeting
• EML – Email
• NS – Newsletter

You can (and should) adjust your abbreviations to fit your business and use case. I like to keep them between 2–3 characters to keep the full campaign name readable.

With naming conventions, the most important part is consistency. If you’re wrong, stay wrong—one of my favorite pieces of advice from the Navy.

What you don’t want to do:

• Include commas in your campaign names. If you copy and paste them into certain platforms, the commas will break the name into separate fields.
  
  • Bad example: WBR, 20250701, DG, Crafting your marketing technology stack
    Some platforms will display that like this:
    
    • WBR  
    • 20250701  
    • DG  
    • Crafting your marketing technology stack  
• Make the name too long. I often see companies create naming conventions that only make sense to their ops team. Names should be easy to read and identify—even for someone outside of marketing operations.
• Use vague or duplicate names. A common issue, especially with nurture and engagement campaigns, is labeling everything “Q3 Nurture.” That makes it impossible to distinguish between campaigns later.

Naming conventions may seem like a small issue but it can save you a lot of headaches and hassle down the line.

"To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is consulting."

— Steven Wright-style dry humor