topic Re: Best Naming Convention Practices in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

Best Naming Convention Practices

qturner1 — Sun, 20 Jan 2019 14:55:26 GMT

Hi HubSpot Community,

I've worked in several marketing automation platforms and I notice that all of the naming convention structures are different. I've narrowed down best practices according to our organization for the following items:

File Manager

Emails

But I'm having trouble with the best way to do naming conventions for:

Campaigns (we all know this is important since we can't change once created)

Lists

Forms

Workflows

What has worked for your teams? I've looked into every article and haven't found anything helpful.

Re: Best Naming Convention Practices

MFrankJohnson — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 11:21:00 GMT

Hi Elle, agreed. Information on this is sparse (to say the least).

This post about the use of HubSpot campaigns to 'manage' HubSpot workflows isn't about naming conventions per se, but it may be helpful. We typically begin our naming with <company_name> while in development, then re-name to whatever standard the client prefers. [Of course, this doesn't apply to HubSpot campaigns (for reasons you originally noted).] If the client has no standards, we give them some!

Other than that, it's more difficult to organize HubSpot lists since removal of the left folder pane (see this post). - see image

Now the names have to include and additional identifier just to help locate them in large portals. And, of course, this applies to workflows, forms, and CTAs as well.

HTH

Re: Best Naming Convention Practices

qturner1 — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 14:07:13 GMT

Hi Frank,

Thanks for your response.

Re: Best Naming Convention Practices

MFrankJohnson — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 22:10:55 GMT

Thanks

Re: Best Naming Convention Practices

qturner1 — Thu, 14 Feb 2019 17:38:38 GMT

Hello @MFrankJohnson although you answered to this post, it still did not solve my question. So I won't be marking this as resolved. Thanks!

Re: Best Naming Convention Practices

Ben_M — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 23:54:15 GMT

Hi @qturner1 - I'm working with a company who is using Hubspot having come from working with many different automation solutions in the past. Personally speaking, folders while nice to have, can become very disorganized over time especially as employees come in and out of marketing. With the past few automation instances I've worked with I've tried to rely less on folders and more on naming conventions.

What I have tried to do in recent implementations is keep naming conventions the same across all assets within the platform. So for instance, emails and landing pages will look similar. And Hubspot does a lot to help out. If you use the search bar at the top right of the navigation it actually searches all assets like emails, landing pages and workflows. It doesn't seem to search forms yet, but maybe this is a bug that is being worked out.

Without seeing what your business structure looks like, at a high level I would try to track the following in your naming convention:

- Date the asset is first used/or the campaign launches. For naming standardization I would recommend YYYYMM, YYMM, YYQ# (19Q1) because this will keep your campaigns in order.

- Give the asset an identifier so you know what type of asset it is: EM for Email, LP for Landing Page, etc.

- If you have products or groupings within your product consider an identifier for that

- Consider an identifier for the stage of the CX journey that a contact is to help you fill in voids in a journey mapping.

- Allow for a freeform description to make things easily human readible, identifiable, or even show campaign relation.

By having these types of fields it can be as useful, if not more useful than folders so long as you know how to search for things. Also, because the searches have become so smart, it's easier to use for this then to dive through level after level of folders.

Re: Best Naming Convention Practices

john3211 — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 05:17:20 GMT

Re: Best Naming Convention Practices

Rafa_CM — Sat, 01 Jun 2019 13:19:46 GMT

Hi @qturner1.

Although keeping all the assets organized is very difficult, there are some practices that we implement for our portal and our clients' portals. Most of our assets have the following naming convention:

Type of asset | Campaign | Buyer's Journey stage | Title

For example, a workflow email could be:

WF | Inbound Marketing | Consideration | What is Inbound Marketing.

You can use "WF" for workflows, "FU" for followup emails, "LP" for landing pages, "TP" for Thank you pages, and so on...

As some have pointed out, maybe adding the date would also be a good idea. For example:

WF | 2019Q1 | Inbound Marketing | Consideration | What is Inbound Marketing?

As for the file manager we have a folder structure that we took from this blog post:

https://www.zenpilot.com/blog/an-awesomely-organized-hubspot-file-manager

Basically our folder structure is the one mentioned in the post:

*Free Stock Photos
cta
email
identity
images
offers
resources
scripts
social
video

And we try to follow the following file naming best practices:

All text in lowercase
Use hyphens instead of spaces
Don't use accents (we're in México :)) or any special character.

It's really hard work but it really pays out to have everything organized. Good luck!

Rafa CM.
Inbound Métrica - Director
inboundmetrica.com

Re: Best Naming Convention Practices

jjb868 — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 21:07:15 GMT

@qturner1 He asks everyone to do that anytime he gives a response

Re: Best Naming Convention Practices

TracyG — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 20:23:09 GMT

I found this very helpful: https://www.synx.com.au/en/knowledgebase/naming-conventions-for-hubspot

Re: Best Naming Convention Practices

EChronik — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 20:55:31 GMT

Cool!

Re: Best Naming Convention Practices

karstenkoehler — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 08:08:30 GMT

Hi everyone,

I just submitted a request relating to naming conventions: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Enforce-naming-convention-for-new-assets/idi-p/745831...

If you would find this useful, feel free to upvote!