Catalog ads (dynamic product ads)
What are catalog ads (dynamic product ads)?
Catalog ads, long known as dynamic product ads, build themselves from a shop’s product catalogue and show each person what they reached for — a model they viewed, a basket they abandoned. Instead of one creative per item you keep a single feed with prices and stock, and Meta decides which product to put in front of whom.
Example
A sports shop carries 900 items. Ads get made by hand for ten of them; the other 890 are never advertised at all. With a catalogue the feed is uploaded once and the returning-visitor campaign works across the whole range.
A month later: €300 spent, 40 orders, an average order of €65 — €2,600 in revenue, or €8.67 per euro spent (2,600 ÷ 300). The number is high because these ads reach people who have already been on the site, which is exactly why catalogue campaigns are reported separately from the ones chasing new customers.
Why it matters for a business
A catalogue turns advertising from a campaign into a process. A discontinued product drops out of the ads when stock changes in the feed. A new price reaches the creative without a designer. A shop with thousands of items struggles to advertise its whole range any other way.
Two conditions apply, and both are technical. The feed has to be right — id, title, description, price, availability, condition, brand, image link and product link. And the events from the site have to send the same ids, or the system cannot tell who looked at what and the returning-visitor campaign never starts. A catalogue will not rescue a weak product page either: after the click it is the conversion rate that decides.
What to ask
- Where does the feed come from, and how often does it refresh?
- Do the ids in the catalogue match the ones the site sends on view and on purchase?
- What happens to out-of-stock products, and to products with several variants?
- Are returning-visitor campaigns reported separately from new-customer campaigns?
- Who owns the catalogue inside the business portfolio?
We set the catalogue and the feed up as part of social media management, along with the site events they depend on.