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Meta catalog

A Meta catalog is the container in Meta's Commerce Manager that holds a store's products and their details for ads and shops on Facebook and Instagram.

How it works

Products arrive through data sources such as manual entry, a data feed, a partner platform like Shopify, the Meta Pixel or the catalogue batch API. A feed can be uploaded once or on an hourly, daily or weekly schedule. Meta’s XML feeds accept Google’s g: prefix, so a Merchant Center feed can be the source (moving that feed into Meta).

Every item needs id, title, description, availability, condition, price, link, image_link and brand. Catalog ads pick products by matching the content IDs your pixel sends with the IDs in the catalogue, so the two must be identical. Stores selling abroad add country and language feeds that replace prices, links, titles and other fields per market.

Where you see it

  • Commerce Manager, Products and Data sources tabs: the products, and the feeds that fill the catalogue.
  • Commerce Manager, Catalogue › Events: match rate, the share of content IDs from your site’s events that match catalogue products over the last 28 days. Meta recommends 90% or higher.

Example

Example store, not client data.

The tableware shop sends Meta only the 1,200 products that get impressions in Google Ads. Over 28 days its pixel reports 10,000 content IDs, and 4,000 of them belong to products left out of the feed. Match rate = 6,000 ÷ 10,000 = 60%.

Not to be confused with

  • Merchant Center — Google’s tool for product data. Its feed can fill a Meta catalogue, but Meta checks it against its own required fields.
  • Product set — a group of products inside the catalogue, picked by filters or by hand, that you choose when creating ads.

Right and wrong readings

  • Wrong: “Merchant Center approves our feed, so Meta will accept it as it is.” Right: Meta checks the feed against its own specification and requires brand and condition on every item.
  • Wrong: “The catalogue is uploaded, so ads will show people the products they viewed.” Right: only if the pixel’s content IDs match the catalogue’s IDs exactly.

Sources