How to name your Zap

The owner of the last Airbnb I stayed at printed out labels for every single light switch and cabinet. It was ugly. But it saved me from flipping seven switches just to turn the hallway light on.

Giving your Zaps a clear name in Zapier works the same way. A confusing name causes you to click into each Zap just to understand what it does. A clear name makes your Zaps easy to scan.

Today I’ll show you the exact template I use to name each Zap which will save you and your team time.

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I’ve seen many people try to give Zaps a good name but things inevitably get messy. It gets messy because they don’t have a template.

It’s really that simple.

👉Here’s my template: [Trigger App]>[Action App 1]>[Action App 2]When [trigger activity], Action, Action.

Here’s what it looks like in practice when you have a Typeform submission that needs to update a contact in Hubspot:

[Typeform]>[Hubspot]When new yearly update form submission, find contact, update contact.

Zaps can get pretty complicated, though, and so I have a few best practices for naming them to keep it simple:

• Formatter, Filter, or Path apps do not need to be included in the name
• Only name an app once even if there are multiple steps using the same app
• When in doubt, create a name that someone else would understand if you were out of office.

This has really helped me and my team at Write of Passage. I hope it’s helpful for you, too. So, to recap:

• A clear Zap name saves you and your team time.
• The template: [Trigger App]>[Action App 1]>[Action App 2]When [trigger activity], Action, Action.
• When in doubt, create a human readable name.

That's all for this week!


Happy Building,
Bryce