Overview

The Simon Data platform is flexible in terms of naming conventions and tagging for several features including:

Segments (audiences)
Content
Flows (campaigns)
Journeys (campaigns)

Given this flexibility, it's best practice to follow some general guidelines when naming platform elements. You can create a segment and corresponding campaign without the tags or specific naming conventions, however from an efficiency and workflow perspective, we recommend you create a standardized set of guidelines to use when tagging these elements and/or naming campaigns in Simon.

Your business may already have some taxonomy in place to use as a starting point. For example, many organizations already have standard naming conventions as a part of their data governance strategy for all the data that is housed in their Cloud Data Warehouse (CDW) like Snowflake, for example. This often includes naming protocols for the various elements in their CDW such as schemas, tables and data fields. Using some of the standardization that is already in place as a model could be helpful for organization, usability and familiarity across teams.

Your organization will have your own unique naming conventions based on your business model, the organization of your marketing teams, etc. Taking time to carefully establish a tagging system and campaign naming conventions will help your team navigate the Simon Data platform smoothly and keep your work structured and organized. Additionally, a standardized naming convention allows for easier reusability. This is particularly important when a single brand or team wants to replicate campaigns to other brands or teams.

Organizational Tools

Tags & Campaign Names

There are two ways to create organization and uniformity across teams when in the Simon Data platform: Tags and Naming Conventions. We recommend using a combination of both tags and standard naming conventions to keep the elements you build in Simon well-organized.

Tags: Tags are the primary tool for organization within the Simon Data platform. Many organizations use tags to organize the elements they create in Simon. Use the nested tag feature to drill down more granularly and create an organizational hierarchy. Using tags makes it easier to search for content, segments or campaigns that you or a colleague have built in Simon.

Campaign Naming Conventions: These vary from enterprise to enterprise based on preferences, internal organization, reporting etc. Having standardized and documented protocols for naming conventions makes the workflow more efficient and enables teams across your organization to easily understand the purpose of individual campaigns.

Considerations

The following are some key campaign components that your organization might consider when creating a tagging system and naming campaigns, content and segments in Simon. These factors vary from organization to organization, based on individual needs. However, these are key elements you should discuss and consider when defining common naming conventions.

Created by/Edited by

Many organizations use tags to annotate who created or edited a segment or a campaign. This allows users to to easily search and filter by these tags when working in the platform.

Multiple Brands/Channels/Teams

We highly recommend you use Nested Tags for any instances where multiple brands or teams are using the platform. For example: Tara-Paid Social-TikTok. This example allows you to easily see any Paid Social campaigns created or edited by Tara, that use TikTok as the marketing channel.

For visibility, usability and readability in Simon and whenever multiple teams or brands use Simon, it is best practice to include the brand, channel and/or team name within every campaign and/or segment name.

Dates

Depending on the frequency of their campaigns, many organizations include some type of date reference in their campaign names. Some examples are:

The campaign creation or launch date
A simple Month-Day or MM/DD/YY format
A season or holiday

Having a standardized way to incorporate dates is helpful when campaigns occur in any kind of cyclical manner. For example, many users copy elements from one campaign to another when the configuration for a new campaign is similar.

Customer Lifecycle & Purpose

As campaigns are often designed based on where your customers are in their customer journey, it’s helpful to include this information within the campaign name. Similarly, if your campaign has a specific purpose such as a promotional offer or a coupon code, include this detail.

Casing and Spacing

For readability, it’s important to standardize spacing (i.e. dash or underscore) between words in campaign names.

It’s equally important to decide how to use casing. For example, should the first letter of each word be capitalized or are there only some components of a campaign name that should be capitalized? Casing and Spacing conventions impact how data is ingested downstream of Simon (for example, in reporting tools).

Reporting

Another item to consider when creating a taxonomy for the elements you build in Simon is how the campaign name is employed in analytics and reporting tools. Thinking through how you might want to organize campaign reporting and analytics is important if you want to be able to group or filter your analytics by any of the elements in the campaign name, such as brand or channel or lifecycle stage.

Ordering

Once you’ve determined your campaign naming convention standards, we recommend you use the same order of the elements you choose to include in your campaign names. For example, Brand_Email_Retargeting_Coupon_12-28-22. In this example all teams and brands should be following the order of: Brand_Channel_Lifecycle_Purpose_Date.

Document Your Protocols

Be sure to create accessible documentation that spells out any protocols your organization has put in place related to tagging systems and naming conventions. This ensures standardization across users, brands and/or departments. This also supports new Simon users during onboarding and makes for a clearer, cleaner user experience.