I have a confession to make. I have never been good in naming anything in my life. Whether it is naming files or naming sites, I have just been terrible at it. That trait followed me to the Internet marketing world and to my PPC campaigns. When you start your first pay per click marketing campaign, you don’t have to worry about what you name your campaign (or so I thought), but it is very easy to get in trouble when you keep expanding your campaigns every day.

Google allows you to have a total of 2500 ad-groups in your campaign. Now you can do it the wrong way, like I did at first, and reuse your paused campaigns to promote totally different products (without renaming the campaign) or you can come up with a good naming convention for your Adwords account. Using Adwords default naming convention is not recommended. By default Adwords name your campaigns “Campaign #N.” You are obviously allowed to change the name of the campaign at the very beginning of campaign creation process. I used to click on the next button fast until I got to the more important part of the process. That meant that my campaign structure was something like the following:

Campaign #1 – Adgroup #1,#2, #3

Campaign #2 – Adgroup #1, #2, #3

What you want to do is to clearly define what each campaign is about. For instance, if you are selling “ebook x”, and you are bidding on the URL (e.g. ebookx.com, ebookx.net, ebook-x.com), you could name the campaign “ebookx – URL.” This name tells me that the campaign is about ebookx and you are bidding on URLs in that campaign. You could also create a campaign for branded terms and put your URLs in an ad-group called “ebookx-branded-URL.” Isn’t that easier to understand?

You can get as complicated as you want with your naming convention, but at the end of the day as long as you have a campaign naming convention that allows you to figure out what the campaign is about without having to open it up, you are all set. I wonder how many folks have made the same mistake that I explained above.