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Keep Marketo Engage Organized with Folders and Naming Conventions

Natalie_Kremer
Level 5 - Champion Alumni
Level 5 - Champion Alumni

Last Updated Date: June 5, 2023

 

Having good organization is a key piece of a successful Marketo Engage instance as it sets the groundwork for easy navigation, intuitive Programs and accurate reporting. Whether you are just setting up your new Marketo Engage instance or cleaning up a messy instance, a folder structure and naming conventions will keep you organized and set up for success.  

 

FOLDER STRUCTURE 

The first step to organizing your instance is to set-up a folder structure house your Program in an easy to find and orderly manner.  
 

Here are some considerations when devising your folder structure strategy:  

  • Keep your folder structure as flat as possible for ease of use 
  • Align your folder structure with your organization’s team structure 
  • TIP: This could be a Region or Team based approach or something unique to your organization.  
  • Nest the same folder structure within each of your high-level folders: High Level Folder > Campaign Category > Campaign Type > Initiative 
  • Include a time-based element to help with searchability and archiving.  

Now that we’ve talked through some of these considerations, here are some examples of these tips in practice.  

 

Team or Region Example:  

This example would be for organizations who have a Team or Region-based approach to their marketing efforts. 

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Top Level Folder Example:  

This example could be used when the organization does not have a Team or Region-based approach and may need to set -up folders according to Business Unit, Initiatives or others.  

 

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Time Based Folder Structure Example: 

If your organization campaigns in unique time periods, you could include this in your folder structure. In a previous role I worked in higher education and our campaign cycle was based on a semester schedule, so we set-up our folder structure to support this:  

 

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Other Folders 

Depending on your Marketo Engage instance’s maturity, there are two additional folders that could be helpful and will live outside of the above campaign hierarchy.  
 

  • Operational - This folder is a centralized location for any of your on-going operational programs such as lead scoring, person source, etc.  
  • Training - This folder allows your MOPs team a space to test and learn new things in a clearly differentiated space for learning.

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Archiving 

As a part of your folder structure, you’ll also want to think through how often you will archive past campaigns and their folders. As a best practice, your MOPs team should plan to archive folders at least once a year. By having an annual folder for each Campaign Type, it becomes easy to deactivate any running Smart Campaigns and archive the entire folder.  
 

In each of your Campaign Type folders, you can include a Z.Archive folder to move any archived folders and to keep your current campaign folder in order.  

 

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NAMING CONVENTIONS 

Next, we’ll talk about Naming Conventions and how they can work with your Folder Structure. There are a few key components of a strong Program naming convention in Marketo Engage that will be easily searchable and identifiable:  
 

  • Program Type Abbreviation - Email, Content, Nurture, Webinar, etc. 
  • Category - Type of Program - Standalone Email, Newsletter, etc. 
  • Dates - When is the campaign launching 
  • Short Description - Brief description about the Program 

In practice, your naming convention could look something like this:  

Formula: [PROGRAM TYPE] - [DATE] [CATEGORY]: [SHORT DESCRIPTION] 

Example: WB - 05.23 Monthly Webinar: New Product Features 

  

Based on your organization, there are other items you may want to consider in your naming conventions, so Programs are easily searchable and assist efficient reporting: 

  • Channel abbreviation 
  • Program ID 
  • Region or Geographic area 
  • Workspace abbreviation 

You could also add specific abbreviations to your asset naming conventions to quickly identify certain types of emails or exclude certain emails from your reporting. Some examples include: 

  • AR - Auto-responder 
  • EM- Standard email 
  • OP - Operational email 

Depending on your naming convention, you could use a Google Sheet or Microsoft Excel with formulas to input your campaign values and have your Program name auto generated. 

  

NEXT STEPS 

Now that we’ve covered best practices for optimizing your Marketo Engage instance organization, let’s review your next steps for getting started.  

 

  1. Create your Folder Structure.  
    • Right click on an existing Workspace or Folder and select New Campaign Folder.  
    • Continue to create and nest additional folders to create your folder structure.  
  1. Think through your folder archive strategy and make sure your Folder Structure contains the necessary components for future archiving.  
    • Make sure folder names include a year or time period consistent with your archiving strategy.  
  1. Create your Naming Convention including necessary components for your organization.  
    • Create documentation and templates to support your new naming convention. 
    • Train your MOPs team to make sure everyone is using the naming convention.  

 

How are you using Folders and Naming Conventions? Share your ideas, best practices and unique use cases in the comments! 

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11 Comments
Meghana_Rao1
Marketo Employee

Love this, especially breaking out the archive folder! One other tip that I've found to be helpful when naming programs is to include the program ID in your naming convention to increase your efficiency (see this blog post to learn more: /blogs/marketowhisperer/2015/07/06/why-you-should-start-including-program-id-in-your-naming-conventi... ). Thanks for sharing, Natalie Kremer‌! 

Beth_Massura
Level 8 - Champion

Love it! Especially about archiving folders from past time periods that you no longer need cluttering up the instance.

One of the challenges is making sure everyone is using the same abbreviations and order in the naming conventions. (e.g. CM-19F not Fall2019-CMkt). Using a spreadsheet formula like you shared is a great way to keep it consistent. We saved a naming convention/abbreviation guide on the staff intranet, but it would be awesome if this info could be displayed within Marketo itself... But you can save programs/assets in the center of excellence that follow the naming conventions and hopefully they will be good examples for people to follow as they clone.

Karan_Hari3
Level 9

Awesome write-up! Thanks for sharing this  !

Best Always,

Karan Hari

Balkar_Singh
Level 9 - Champion

In addition to internal organization, it’s worth to document the linking externally as well - especially via flow charts and spreadsheets. This helps to defreeze the technical nature of Marketo-Builds, and translate them into language which extends to more non-technical audience.


Also, having a Glossary to share common understanding shall help to align everyone working, or using a CoE. As Beth Massura mentions, the more we can document within Marketo, the better. Tagging can also help to filter out the categories of Programs within reports (program-performance)

Brittany_Striew
Level 2

Great topic! We just stood up a net-new Marketo instance in April of this year and have successfully implemented our brand new naming convention. Four digit year - two digit month - channel - campaign name (ex: 2019-10-EM-Halloween for an email). Trying to figure out a good two-to-three letter abbreviation that has clear differentiation between channels has been a bit of a challenge at times but so far, so good! 

Some other abbreviation examples we've implemented include LWB for Live Webinar, OA for Online Advertising, WF for Web Form, and NUR for Nurture programs.

Francois_Plos
Level 1

Hi,
We started some month ago using Marketo and for now we used a simple naming convention.
For assets we used EM: Email,  FO: Forms, LP: Landing page, MA: Marketing Activity. Then we build the name with the an internal unit code. After that name of the campaign and date. At the end it looks like : EM_000_Hallowen_10/19.
To stick to our multinational organization we just created folders per country, then every countries is responsible for the subfolder classification.
Hopefully this will keep us organized for some months!

Aslihan_Ayan_Ha
Level 7

One thing to keep in mind if you are syncing your Marketo Programs to SFDC Campaigns, the SFDC Campaign Naming limitation.  

JD_Nelson
Level 10 - Community Advisor

Awesome tips. I've recently been getting into more separators between all the abbreviated items; so for CM 19F doing CM | 19F -- it ends up adding 2 extra characters, but if you have multiple tracking items, it helps visibly delineate. I was using dashes and spaces and underscores before, but once I started using vertical pipes, it made me that much more happy.

 

For instance:

OP | 20F | Prosp | {content name}

 

Katja_Keesom
Level 10 - Community Advisor

Great tips and so important! When you just start with a virgin instance it is hard to imagine how quickly things can get cluttered, but it goes so fast. A few more options to consider:

  • Adding a language code to your programs in a multinational solution
  • Putting your naming generator tool on an internal web page with dropdown options
  • Include url structures in your naming generator, including a structured utm parameter section
Waseem-Khan
Level 1

Awesome topic to cover! A good naming convention and folder structure can prevent many organization issues in Marketo down the road. Thanks for sharing!