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Catalog ads

Catalog ads are ads that a social platform such as Meta, TikTok or Pinterest builds automatically from a store's catalogue, picking products for each person.

How it works

The store uploads its products to the platform: a Meta catalogue, a TikTok catalogue or a Pinterest retail catalogue. The platform takes images, descriptions and prices from it and picks products for each person, so nobody has to design an ad for each product. Meta now says its catalogue works across all its sales campaigns, not only in the format it used to call Advantage+ catalogue ads.

To show people the products they viewed and to learn from sales, the platform needs events such as product views and purchases. They come from its own tracking: the Meta Pixel, Conversions API or app SDK at Meta, or the TikTok Pixel at TikTok. Each event carries product IDs that must match the IDs in the catalogue. The Google tag doesn’t send these events.

Your Google feed is a ready starting point. Meta and Pinterest accept CSV, TSV, XML or Google Sheets, and the core fields keep Google’s names: id, title, description, link, image_link, price, availability. Some values need converting: Meta’s availability field accepts only “in stock” and “out of stock”, while Google also has preorder, backorder and limited availability.

Our guide to Meta catalog ads by product sets covers how to split the catalogue into sets and which products to exclude.

Example

Example store, not client data.

The tableware shop sends its 3,000-product Google feed to Meta. Of these, 2,880 products are in stock or out of stock and carry over unchanged. The other 120 are on preorder, so the shop has to choose which of Meta’s two values they get. On the site, the Meta Pixel sends “1146” for the dinner set, and the catalogue lists it as “1146” too, so the IDs match.

Not to be confused with

  • Dynamic remarketing — Google’s counterpart, built from the Merchant Center feed and the Google tag. Catalog ads run on the platform’s own catalogue and pixel.
  • Product set — a filtered part of a Meta catalogue that an ad draws its products from, not the ad itself.

Sources