As a digital marketer, you know the importance of applying relevant and consistent naming conventions to campaigns and ads on various channels. Get them wrong, and you end up with inaccurate reports and waste a lot of time on finding what’s wrong.
However, AI and machine learning can be powerful tools in the fight against naming convention errors, explain Georgia Costa, Client Services Director at Flashtalking, and Joseph Caston, Senior Solutions Consultant at Adverity, in the latest Adverity Bitesize Webinar.
A Road to a Clear Marketing ROI
The secret behind naming convention success is great organization, says Joseph, “as one might arrange clothes in a wardrobe, or classify its collection of rare books.” But more than that, “good naming conventions are like having a strong foundation upon which you can build a tall building,” he comments. The bottom line, from a marketing perspective, is that a carefully-developed and implemented naming convention enables you to get to a clear ROI on your marketing efforts.
Consistent naming enables you to connect up your leads and customer interactions, so you can attribute results to campaigns that earn them. Without naming conventions, this is a difficult and lengthy process.
What’s in a Name?
Campaign or asset names get created by three main groups of people, explains Georgia. It could be an individual marketer, and this naming might only make sense to the person who created them, incorporating a subjective mixture of names and numbers. Or, a media agency might be the one to propose and implement a naming convention for marketing assets and campaigns. Ultimately, the naming convention might be managed by a large advertiser, requiring its partner agencies to follow them to ensure consistency across its global operations.
Joseph points out that creating asset names can be a very repetitive and time-pressured task. There’s practically no way to avoid errors creeping into naming conventions, and they often need to be understood by multiple teams around the world, which is an important consideration for managers on all levels steering these campaigns.
Naming Models are Key for Further Analysis
Once you’ve got your naming conventions organized and your marketing data in one place, you can then apply advanced AI-based model calculations such as advanced attribution, marketing mix modeling, or trend forecasting. “This is where the information the naming convention provides to these models is crucial to its success,” says Joseph.
However, naming convention accuracy is also critical as machine and algorithmic models are very unforgiving when it comes to errors. And once AI has started to crunch the information, it’s too late to go back to the source and correct the error, which could be as simple as missing out an element in a name string, such as a date or an asset class.
Clean Up Before You Start the Analysis
AI models can amplify minor naming errors across datasets, and introduce massive reporting errors. This can turn into a huge problem if it’s used for making investment recommendations or reporting on ROI.
To help alleviate this issue, Adverity cleans and harmonizes data before it’s pushed through to a model. “One of the common tasks it does is unpack a naming convention into its separate values,” Joseph explains.
Smart Naming for Simplified Reporting
Adverity has a Smart Naming Convention feature, an add-on to the marketing data analytics platform and its data integration, visualization and analytics capabilities. The tool applies AI technology to understand a naming convention using a sample dataset, and to identify and highlight any discrepancies.
It automatically determines how each name dimension should be split, splits the name elements into columns, and suggests the rules those named dimensions should follow based on what the model has learned from the data.
Proactive Assistance
During data transformation, it proactively monitors names for compliance and flags up errors by sending out automated emails. “The part I find most interesting is the model’s ability to automatically resolve misaligned fields. By recognizing that neighboring values are not what they should be, it is able to place all the values back into the correct position and avoid the horrible domino effect we spoke about earlier,” Joseph concludes.
With potential naming convention issues alleviated at early stages by using all of the advanced technology built into Adverity, marketers can rely on the campaign performance data with much more confidence, and focus on improving ROI rather than worrying about the integrity of their reports.
