One of the most overlooked but crucial aspects of running a successful Google Ads campaign is our naming conventions.
I’ve worked with countless clients optimizing their ad performance, and I can tell you that this is the one thing that makes everything easier — or breaks everything.
A naming convention is the process I follow repeatedly when naming my campaigns.
And from my experience, having a consistent and logical naming convention is essential for my organization and productivity when managing them.
A messy campaign structure makes performance tracking, reporting, and optimization significantly harder.
I feel like trying to find something in a cluttered room — wasting my time and effort. And it can be even worse.
Think about this like sharing a room with a messy roommate. If everything is disorganized, I’ll struggle to find what I need, and so will anyone else trying to help me. But if everything has a place, everything is easier to manage.
A strong naming convention ensures that I, my team, and my tools can quickly understand and filter campaigns without unnecessary frustration.
Here’s my recommendation to create a naming convention that makes everything easier, based on tests on my campaigns:
Replace spaces with an underscore ( _ ).
Connect words with a hyphen (-).
This structure allows us to quickly filter and analyze data in Excel, Google Ads, or any reporting tool.
I came up with some examples of how to apply naming conventions to your campaigns:
A campaign targeting North America, focused on non-brand searches in English, using exact match keywords, and targeting all devices would be named: NA_NonBrand_Search_EN_Exact_AllDevices
A campaign targeting Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, focused on content searches in English, using phrase match keywords, and targeting only mobile would be named: EMEA_Content_Search_EN_Phrase_Mobile
A campaign that targets the Asia-Pacific region, focused on brand searches in English, using phrase match keywords, targeting desktops would be named: APAC_Brand_Search_EN_Phrase_Desktop
A campaign targeting North America, focused on competitive searches in English, using phrase match keywords, targeting desktops would be named: NA_Competitive_Search_EN_Phrase_Desktop
And finally, a campaign targeting Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, focused on RLSA searches in English, using broad match keywords, targeting all devices would be named: EMEA_RLSA_Search_EN_Broad_All-Devices
A well-structured naming convention helps in three major ways:
Absolutely!
Naming our campaigns the same across all platforms helps us maintain consistency, simplify analysis, and easily compare performance across different channels when reporting on your overall campaign results.
Please notice that slight platform-specific details might need to be added to the campaign name to account for unique targeting options or features on each platform, but as a whole, having consistent names allows us to easily group data and compare results without confusion.
A good naming convention costs you nothing — but the benefits are enormous.
Get it right, and you’ll make everything in your Google Ads campaigns easier to manage, optimize, and scale.
So don’t wait. Go set up your naming convention and start running smarter campaigns!
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I’ve spent a lot of time wrestling with tracking form submissions in Google Tag Manager (GTM), and I know how frustrating it can be when things just don’t work as expected.
Forms behave in all sorts of unpredictable ways. Some refresh the page, some stay put, and others redirect users to a "Thank You" page.
And because there’s no universal rule for how developers build forms, you and I need different tracking approaches depending on the situation.
And since chances are you’re using form submission to also track how your Google ad campaigns are converting, it becomes super critical for us to get this right.
That’s why in this guide, I’ll break down the most effective ways to track form submissions, step by step, so you don’t have to figure it all out the hard way like I did.
Before we dive into the methods, let’s quickly cover the basics. GTM relies on two key components:
To track form submissions properly, you need:
At this point, the tag exists but doesn’t do anything because there’s no trigger.
Now, let’s set that up based on how your form behaves.
In an ideal world, GTM’s built-in Form Submission trigger would work for every form.
But in my experience, it rarely does. This trigger only works if the form fires a native submit event, which many modern forms (especially AJAX-based ones) don’t.
If your form redirects users to a confirmation page after submission, this is the easiest and most reliable tracking method.
The one mistake I see folks repeat often is they link to this thank you or add it in your sitemap.
The way this method works is it sends an event every time this page is loaded.
So you want to double check to ensure that people don’t land on this page through other sources.
This method is foolproof as long as users can’t access the "Thank You" page without actually submitting the form.
If you have multiple forms on your website, tracking just a generic "form submission" event isn’t enough.
You need to capture more details that help differentiate between each form submission, such as:
If you want to use this data in GA4 reports, you’ll need to register it as a Custom Dimension:
By implementing this setup, you ensure that every form submission is attributed to the right form, providing clearer insights into form performance, lead quality, and conversion attribution.
Form submission is just one step in the buyer’s journey.
To truly track and optimize for conversions, map the entire journey. Start from initial engagement to the final revenue event, and track each step.
By tracking and feeding all these data points back into ad networks, you help the algorithm prioritize high-intent users.
Here’s an example of how the buyer journey might look like:
Sales-led Company:
Product-led Company:
We covered how to set it up in detail in this free Google Ads course, which also walks you through full-funnel tracking and measurement strategies.
The right tracking method depends on how your form behaves:
Test everything thoroughly in Preview Mode to ensure you’re capturing data correctly.
I’ve been through enough form tracking struggles to know that what works on one site may completely fail on another.
Hopefully, this guide saves you a lot of time and frustration!
If you’re looking to see what the paid media marketing pros are up to, you should come and hang with them in the community.
The community is where you can ask the questions you wouldn’t post on LinkedIn and get insights that you wouldn’t find on Google.
You get access to:
Come, sign up and see what the pros are talking about in the community. It takes less than a minute to sign up.
I see a lot of companies completely overcomplicate ABM on LinkedIn.
Some think they need an expensive ABM platform just to get started. Others assume that simply uploading an account list and running ads will magically drive pipeline.
Neither approach works.
I’ve tested LinkedIn Ads for ABM across different industries, budgets, and company sizes, and I’ve seen what actually moves the needle. The key isn’t just running ads. It's getting the fundamentals right and making sure ads, targeting, and sales outreach all work together.
In this post, I’m breaking down 10 practical, no-BS strategies I use to make ABM campaigns on LinkedIn drive real results. If you’re tired of wasted budget and low engagement, this is for you.
The account list is the backbone of any ABM campaign.
If your account list is wrong, everything else will fail. Your targeting, your engagement, your pipeline.
A lot of companies just pull a list from a data provider using filters like industry, employee size, and technology stack and assume it’s good to go. But here’s the issue:
A well-built account list makes every impression valuable. If your impression itself isn’t worth anything, your list is wrong.
Once you have a strong account list, the next step is uploading it to LinkedIn Ads.
This is where a lot of folks make a critical mistake. They upload a contact list instead of a company list.
If you only upload a contact list, you’ll have to constantly update it. That’s an operational nightmare.
If you upload a company list and use job title filters, LinkedIn does the updating for you. Plus, you get better match rates.
Since ABM campaigns target smaller audiences, ad frequency can get out of control fast if you’re not careful.
If people see the same ad 40 times in a month, they won’t just ignore you, they’ll actively resent your brand.
I always check my frequency metrics and aim for around three impressions per week per person.
If my frequency goes beyond that, I rotate in new creatives.
A good ABM strategy requires constant creative refreshes.
If you don’t monitor frequency, you’re going to annoy your target accounts instead of influencing them.
One of the biggest budget-wasters in LinkedIn ABM campaigns is uneven ad distribution.
Let’s say you’re targeting 500 companies. If Amazon is on that list, Amazon employees alone might eat up 50% of your budget. Why? Because Amazon has more employees in your target roles than smaller companies.
LinkedIn has a Company Engagement Feature that lets you cap impressions per company.
This simple tweak ensures that no single company dominates your budget, and every account on your list gets a fair share of impressions.
I’ve been testing one-to-one ABM ads for a while now, and the results have been insane.
A standard LinkedIn image ad usually gets a 0.5% to 1% click-through rate.
But when I run personalized one-to-one ABM ads, I’m seeing 5% - 10% CTRs.
These ads stand out because they look like they were designed specifically for the company.
But before you go all-in, there are two major caveats:
If you’re hesitant to use logos, you can still personalize these ads by:
One-to-one ABM ads aren’t for every industry, but in the right space, they massively outperform standard image ads.
A big mistake I see in ABM campaigns is running LinkedIn ads in isolation and expecting them to create pipeline on their own.
That’s not how it works.
You need to use LinkedIn ad engagement as a sales trigger to prioritize outreach.
Instead of sales reaching out cold, why not time it based on actual engagement? If an account is consistently clicking on ads or engaging with content, that’s a strong signal that they might be open to a conversation.
LinkedIn lets you create dynamic audience lists based on engagement, which means I can track things like:
I can then send this data to sales as a prioritized list of accounts.
A sales rep reaching out to an account that has clicked on an ad three times in the past two weeks is going to have way more success than reaching out completely cold.
Some companies use tools like Fibbler to track progression of clicks over a period of month, all the way towards becoming an opportunity.
But even if you’re just using LinkedIn’s native company engagement feature, you can still set up alerts for sales when an account’s activity spikes.
This is one of the easiest ways to align marketing and sales, yet most companies don’t do it. If you’re just running LinkedIn ads without tying them into your outbound strategy, you’re leaving money on the table.
A CEO at a 50-person company is very different from a VP at a 10,000-person company.
You can’t treat them the same.
The way LinkedIn distributes ad spend also makes this even more important. If you mix small and large companies in the same campaign, the large companies will dominate your spend.
Why? Because they have more employees that fit your targeting criteria.
I split campaigns into two groups:
At big companies, targeting managers is usually a waste of money.
If I’m running an ad campaign for a marketing software company, the CMO at Amazon isn’t going to care about my ad.
But at a 200-person company, the CEO or VP of Marketing might be the final decision-maker.
This segmentation also allows me to write better ad copy. If I know I’m speaking to executives at smaller companies, my messaging will be more direct and high-level.
If I’m speaking to senior managers at larger companies, I might focus more on how my product solves day-to-day problems.
If you’re running a single campaign for all employee sizes, chances are your budget is being wasted on the wrong people at big companies while ignoring the right people at smaller ones.
Most people run generic remarketing campaigns, but for ABM, you need to build remarketing lists specific to your target accounts.
This means you’re not just retargeting anyone who clicked on an ad. You’re only retargeting people from your ABM account list who showed engagement.
Here’s how I structure my ABM remarketing lists:
This ensures I’m spending remarketing dollars on accounts that actually matter rather than random people who engaged once and never came back.
In remarketing, I shift the content to focus on social proof and direct response ads. This could be:
In some cases, I also test demo CTAs and incentives, especially for enterprise deals where a small push (like a free assessment or report) can make a big difference.
If you’re only running top-of-funnel awareness ads and never segmenting high-intent ABM accounts into remarketing, you’re missing a huge opportunity to convert engaged prospects.
Side Note: Check out all the cool ads that Tim Davidson put together over here.
A lot of people think that because they’re targeting an account list, they don’t need to add exclusions.
That’s a mistake.
Even if your account list is perfect, LinkedIn’s targeting isn’t.
Here’s the problem: LinkedIn doesn’t always match job titles and company names correctly. If someone has multiple roles in their profile, LinkedIn might target them under the wrong company.
For example, let’s say someone runs a side business while working full-time at Amazon. LinkedIn might show them your ad under both companies, meaning you’re wasting budget on someone who isn’t actually part of your ABM target.
To fix this, I always:
Just because you’re running ABM doesn’t mean you can trust LinkedIn to get everything right.
If you’re not actively reviewing exclusions, you’re burning ad dollars.
I need to make this very clear. Running LinkedIn Ads alone is not ABM.
ABM is about orchestrating multiple touch points across marketing and sales. If you’re just running ads and waiting, you’re missing the point.
Here’s how I integrate LinkedIn Ads into a full ABM strategy:
One of the best ways to start is by working closely with an enterprise sales rep.
Pick 100 accounts and run a coordinated campaign, where marketing runs ads and sales follows up based on engagement.
If you’re just running LinkedIn Ads and calling it ABM, you’re not doing ABM. You’re just running ads to a list.
Hope you found this article helpful!
If you’re looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, check out these free LinkedIn Ads courses, that will teach you how to launch, optimize, and scale LinkedIn Ads campaigns effectively.
And if you have any questions about LinkedIn Ads, feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn.
