Catalog ads

Catalog ads show each shopper products from your store, picked by Meta: the products they viewed or added to cart on your store, or products Meta expects them to want. Meta fills a product catalog from your store's product feed, and your Meta pixel tells it which products each shopper looked at.

Setting up the catalog costs nothing. A catalog campaign is created paused and only goes live after you confirm the most it can spend, like any other campaign.

What you need

Open Marketing → Instagram ads → Product catalog. Until everything is ready, Set up catalog ads lists the steps in order, says what is missing and offers the fix:

When every step is done, the tab says Ready for catalog ads.

Connect a catalog

Under Connect a catalog, choose:

• A catalog I already have: one of the catalogs in your business portfolio, with its product count; or
• Create a new catalog: give it a name (up to 100 characters), or leave it empty to name it after your store. Creating a store's first catalog may need Meta's terms accepted in Commerce Manager; Meta's message then says so.

Then choose Connect catalog (or Create and connect). Your store:

1. uses your store's Meta-format feed from Marketing → Data feeds, or makes one called "Meta catalog (Instagram ads)" when there is none (refreshed every 6 hours);
2. adds the feed to the catalog, and Meta fetches it every day;
3. asks Meta to fetch it once right away;
4. links your pixel to the catalog.

If something stops it half-way, choose Connect catalog again: it finishes what is left without making anything twice. Use another catalog switches catalogs, and Disconnect catalog forgets the catalog in your store. Neither deletes anything at Meta: the catalog, its feed and its product sets stay in your business portfolio, and catalog campaigns keep running until you pause them on the Campaigns tab.

The product feed and Meta's fetch

Product feed shows:

• the feed, its Feed link (read-only; Copy link copies it) and that Meta fetches it every day;
• when your store last made the feed file, and how many products it has;
• Meta's last fetch: Fetching, Fetched, Fetched with warnings, Some items refused or Failed, with the items Meta read, the ones it didn't accept, and its errors and warnings;
• up to 5 of the problems Meta reported, in Meta's own words. Fix them in your products; Meta picks the changes up at its next fetch.

Fetch now asks Meta to fetch the feed again. Meta can be asked once every 10 minutes; sooner, the page says how many minutes to wait (Meta's daily fetch runs anyway).

The page also warns you when:

Product IDs match by themselves

Each product in the feed has your product's ID, or the product's ID and the option's for one option of a product with variations. Your storefront's pixel (product views, adds to cart, checkouts and purchases) and the server-side purchase events send exactly these IDs, so Meta matches what shoppers do on your store to the catalog's products without any setup.

Product sets

A catalog ad shows products from one product set. Product sets lists the catalog's sets with how many products Meta counts in each. A set with 0 products won't deliver: check its filter or your catalog.

New product set:

• Name (optional, up to 100 characters): left empty, it's All products, the category's path, or Price range.
• Category (optional): search your categories as you type. The set takes the products of that category and the ones below it.
• Lowest price and Highest price (optional), in your store's currency, both included. Products on sale are matched by their regular price.
• Choose nothing for every product of the catalog.

Each filter makes one set: choosing the same filter again keeps the set made before.

Sets made in Meta Commerce Manager are listed as Made in Commerce Manager and can be used too.

Create a catalog campaign

Choose Promote on Instagram, then:

1. Goal: catalog ads are always Sales ads (they need the pixel). Choosing your catalog sets the goal to Sales.

2. What to promote: choose Your catalog, then the Product set. Without a connected catalog or any set, the step says so and Open Product catalog takes you there; the campaign you started is kept in this browser.

3. Ad text: required. Product tags add each product's own details where the cursor is, in the ad text or the headline:

   Tag	What Meta fills in
   {{product.name}}	The product's name.
   {{product.price}}	Its regular price, like ₹1,299.00.
   {{product.current_price}}	The sale price while one is set, else the price.
   {{product.brand}}	Its brand.
   {{product.description}}	Its description.

   After the tag's name, add raw for no currency symbol, strip_zeros to drop .00 or round for whole amounts, as in {{product.price strip_zeros}}; add | titleize for Title Case, as in {{product.name | titleize}}. Any other tag, or a tag that isn't closed, is pointed out before you can go on. The Headline is optional; left empty, each product's name is used.

   The Preview shows the ad as a product carousel, with the tags filled in from your store's first product (or an example), labelled Example: Meta shows each shopper their own products.

4. Who sees it: choose Retarget (people who viewed or added to cart a product of the set in the last N days, leaving out those who bought then) or Broad (anyone in the audience, leaving out people who bought in the last N days). Days to look back is 1 to 30, 14 by default. While retargeting, Let Meta find the audience is off, since Meta's automatic audience would reach people who never viewed your products. Countries, places, ages and gender work as for any campaign.

5. Where it shows, Budget and dates and Review are the same as for any campaign. Review also warns when the set has no products, when your pixel isn't linked to the catalog yet, or when Meta hasn't filled the catalog yet.

Create makes it paused; Go live asks you to confirm the most it can spend. The campaign's page shows Catalog ad, its product set and who it shows products to, and its results include Product views and Adds to cart.