Sharing Conventions and Formats Across Projects

You've spent time building a thorough tracking convention. To ensure consistency and save effort, you can share your work across multiple projects instead of recreating it. This guide explains two methods for sharing your conventions and their components to create a central source of truth for your organization.

Choosing the Right Sharing Method

Before you start, it's important to understand the two approaches:

• Share an Entire Convention: This is a quick, all-or-nothing approach. It's best for simple, global rule sets that need to apply to every single project.
• Share Individual Formats (Recommended): This is the most flexible and powerful method. It allows you to create a central library of "building blocks" (like your campaign naming structure) that can be used to build unique conventions in different projects.

Method 1: Share an Entire Convention

Use this method for simple, global conventions that only use standard UTM parameters and should be available everywhere.

1. Navigate to the project containing the convention you want to share.
2. Go to Tools > Conventions and select the Conventions tab.
3. Find the convention in the list and click the Edit (pencil) icon next to it.

4. In the settings, check the box labeled Shared.
5. Click Save.

The convention will now automatically appear in the URL builder's Conventions dropdown for all other projects in your account.

Method 2: Share Individual Formats (Recommended)

Use this flexible method when you want to share core building blocks while allowing individual projects to have unique rules, especially when using custom parameters. This process has two parts.

Part A: Share the Formats from Your Source Project

First, you'll designate the building blocks you want to make available in your central library.

1. In your main project, go to Tools > Conventions and select the Parameter Formats tab.

2. Find a format you want to share (e.g., "Main Campaign Format") and click the Edit icon.

3. Check the Shared box and click Save.
4. Repeat this for all other formats you want to include in your central library.

Part B: Build a New Convention in the Target Project

Next, you'll use those shared components to assemble a new convention in a different project.

1. Navigate to the target project (e.g., "Social Team Project").
2. Go to Tools > Conventions and click Create a New Convention.
3. Give your new convention a name (e.g., "Social Team Convention").

4. When configuring rules for each parameter, you will now see your shared formats available for selection in the dropdown list.
5. Build your new convention by mixing shared formats for company-wide standards and local formats for project-specific needs.
6. Click Save.

Best Practices

• For maximum flexibility, always share individual Formats. This allows you to maintain a central library of approved structures (like your campaign naming) while giving teams the autonomy to build conventions that suit their specific needs, especially with custom parameters.
• Use whole-convention sharing only for the simplest cases. If you have a basic "Social Media" or "Email" convention that is truly universal and never changes, this method is a quick way to deploy it.

By sharing your work, you can easily maintain a consistent and scalable tracking taxonomy across your entire organization.