HubSpot nomenclature: 5 steps for perfect internal naming

A prerequisite for being able to perform fast and accurate analytics in HubSpot (or any other tool for that matter) is to use coherent naming for activities. To come up with a suitable naming convention isn’t always easy and often takes more than a few iterations to get right, but it’s definitely worth the effort. In this blog post I’ll cover 5 steps to building an internal naming nomenclature, give examples and provide a template to help you in the right direction.

1. Assess what content identifiers there are

The first thing you have to do when creating a consistent nomenclature is identifying all the parameters that can separate two pieces of content from each other. The most common and simple example of all is date/time. The same activity might be repeated and naturally have the same default name, in which case the only way to identify which is what is through adding date/time as part of the naming convention. Depending on what business you are in identifiers can be e.g.:

• Market (countries, geographies)
• Business area (within a market)
• Activity (e.g. a seminar series, a module/function)
• Event (within an activity)
• Date/time (of activity or event)
• Type/description (of content, e.g. landing page)
• Language (of content, for markets with more than one language)

A good way to identify what identifiers are relevant is to look at your content plan going forward, as well as any existing content that might already be populated.

2. Create a draft nomenclature

Based on the identifiers relevant to your business, create a draft nomenclature. Start your naming convention with the most ‘high level’ identifier first and then gradually move to more and more content specific identifiers. Example based on above identifiers could be e.g.:

• Market | Business Area | Activity | Event | Date/Time | Type | Language

Then decide what in the nomenclature is mandatory and what is optional, again based on above identifiers it could be e.g. (optional in brackets):

• Market | Business Area | Activity | Event | (Date/Time) | (Type) | Language

This could potentially lead to moving language earlier in the naming convention if grouping the mandatory together at the beginning and have the optional at the end makes it easier to remember what is optional and what is mandatory. There is no definitive answer here, what is important is that the ones who will be working in HubSpot feel 110% comfortable they will be able to follow the naming convention.

3. Remember the special cases

Now that you are starting to feel like ‘wow, this was easy’ it’s time to tackle the special cases, because there always are some. One issue that often comes up are ’transactional’ assets, for example landing pages, forms and CTAs used in internal workflows. Will your nomenclature work on such or do they have to be identified and treated separately? Let’s assume for a moment that we have a simple process where leads are captured through a ’I want to book a meeting’ contact form, what would the naming be for that form? Continuing on the above example: 

• Market | Business Area | Activity | Event | (Date/Time) | (Type) | Language

…it could be something like this if the form is specific to an activity:

• North America | Financial Services | Seminar Series 5 | I want to book a meeting | EN

What if the form was more generic, so not tied to an activity like a seminar series, instead only specific to the business area?

• North America | Financial Services | I want to book a meeting | EN

This case then highlights that ‘activity’ cannot necessarily be a mandatory feature of the naming convention for these types of forms. Two ways to treat it:

• Make an exception rule, or preferably
• Make activity optional, and make sure people understand when to use it and when not to use it by having lots of relevant examples. 

This brings us to the fourth step.

4. Test and provide a nomenclature document with real life examples based on your content

The draft nomenclature shall be applicable to all assets, meaning landing pages, thank you pages, emails, forms, CTAs, workflows, etc. Make sure you test your nomenclature on your real assets, this can be from already populated content in HubSpot (if you’re about to make a cleaning effort) or draft content from your content plan. 

To help you with this we’ve put together a template that should get you going in the right direction:

Now that you have a structured nomenclature you’ll be able to quickly link content together when doing analytics work, linking content in the campaign tool of HubSpot or setting up new flows of landing pages, thank you pages, emails and workflows etc. 

5. Get agreement from EVERYONE involved

The last, yet not least important step, is to get agreement from everyone involved in the process that we shall follow the nomenclature we have agreed upon. Make sure there is a directly responsible individual, or call it ‘super user’ if you will, that people in the organisation can turn to in case they are about to populate new assets and feel uncertain about a specific case of naming. It is a little bit cumbersome in the beginning, but when you happen to reach hundreds of assets in your HubSpot portals, everyone involved will be grateful that the job was done.

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