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Ad naming convention generator

A naming convention is the difference between an ad account you can report on and one you can only scroll. Pick the fields you want to answer questions about, put them in order, and take the pattern with you.

Free, nothing to install, and no email required.

Fields in the name

Check what you want to report on, then order it. The first field is what your account sorts by.

  • Sorts the account chronologically, so what shipped in a given month is a filter rather than an excavation.

  • Compares prospecting creative against retargeting creative without inferring either from a campaign name.

  • Keeps a promo out of your evergreen averages, which is the most common way a sale flatters creative that did not earn it.

  • The field that answers which idea is working, separately from how it was cut or who appears in it.

  • Two ads can share a concept and open completely differently. This is where that difference becomes reportable.

  • Video against static against carousel, so a format read needs no spreadsheet.

  • Placement performance tends to follow the crop, and without this field that pattern stays invisible.

  • Marks an iteration of one concept, which is the only way to show that an edit helped.

  • Worth carrying while you still test audiences by hand, and worth dropping once the platform decides targeting for you.

  • Tells you which creator to book again. Earns its place the moment you work with more than one.

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Your pattern

{launch-month}_{funnel}_{concept}_{format}_{ratio}_{version}

Three ads named with it

The first two are two cuts of one concept. Only the version moves, which is the whole point of keeping the other fields fixed.

  1. 2026-09_tof_founder-story_ugc-video_9x16_v1
  2. 2026-09_tof_founder-story_ugc-video_9x16_v2
  3. 2026-10_bof_before-after_static_1x1_v1

Rules that keep a convention alive

Lock the vocabulary, not just the order
Two people writing ugc-video and UGC_Video breaks a filter as completely as a missing field does. Agree the allowed values for each field and keep them somewhere the whole team can read.
Never put a judgement in a name
Names are permanent and performance is not. A name carrying winner or best is wrong within a month, and it will outlive the report that made it true.
One separator joins fields, another lives inside them
If fields join on an underscore, values use hyphens. Mixed separators break every split in every sheet downstream, and it is the failure that takes longest to notice.
Only add a field you will filter by
Every other field is typing, and typing is where a convention dies. Six fields that get used beat eleven that get skipped on a deadline.
Start at a date and let old names age out
Renaming history costs more than it returns and usually breaks the reporting you were trying to fix. Draw the line today and hold it going forward.

A convention organizes your own work. Barry organizes everyone else’s.

Naming makes your account legible to you. It does nothing for the question a creative team asks more often, which is what the rest of the market is running right now.

That is what Barry is for. The market’s ads sit on one board you pan across and zoom into, so you can study a whole category and then a single hook without paging through screenshots. Save what matters to a board of your own and send it as a link.

Create your boardTake the tour