Catalogue ads build themselves from your product list. You connect a catalogue of everything you sell to Meta, and each person sees the items most likely to interest them: the trainers they looked at on Tuesday, the bag that goes with them, or best-sellers from a range they have never browsed. Meta now calls the format Advantage+ catalogue ads, though most people still say dynamic product ads. Whatever the label, the ads are only as good as the feed and tracking underneath them.
This page covers that machinery: the catalogue, the link between your website and the feed, and the campaigns that run from it. If you want a shop’s whole Facebook and Instagram advertising run, from first sight to repeat order, that is Facebook and Instagram ads for ecommerce. If you want to bring back visitors and past customers with any kind of ad, including for a service business, see Facebook retargeting ads.
Who catalogue ads suit, and who they don’t
They suit UK online shops with more products than anyone could build ads for by hand, and a product list that already exists in the shop platform. Fashion, homeware, beauty, gifts, furniture, sports kit and spare parts tend to fit well, because people browse several items before buying and often come back days later to finish the order.
They are a poor fit when:
- You sell a handful of products. Ads built by hand with proper photography usually do better, and the catalogue becomes overhead.
- There is no price until someone requests a quote, books a consultation or configures the product.
- Stock sells out within hours, as with limited drops, faster than any feed refreshes.
- Nobody can change the website or the shop platform, so tracking and feed problems can’t be fixed at the source.
What the work covers
The catalogue and the product feed
The catalogue sits in Meta’s Commerce Manager and is filled from a product feed: a list of every item with its ID, title, description, price, availability, image and page address. Shopify and WooCommerce both have Meta integrations that keep the catalogue in sync, other platforms can publish a scheduled CSV or XML file, and a feed already built for Google Shopping can often be adapted. I pick the route that keeps prices and stock accurate with the least manual work, then check a sample of items against the live site rather than trusting the sync.
Matching your website to the catalogue
When someone views a product, adds it to the basket or buys, the Meta Pixel sends an event carrying that product’s ID. If those IDs don’t match the IDs in the catalogue, Meta can’t tell which product the person looked at, and the ads fall back to generic best-sellers. Commerce Manager reports this as the catalogue match rate. In an account that already runs catalogue ads, a poor match rate is one of the first things worth fixing, and a common cause is variants: the site reports the parent product while the feed lists each size and colour separately, or the reverse.
I also check that the Conversions API sends the same events from your server as the pixel does from the browser, with shared event IDs so Meta counts each sale once and not twice.
Product sets
A product set is a filtered slice of the catalogue, such as one category, a price band, or only items in stock. Sets decide what each campaign is allowed to show. I usually keep low-margin lines, items that often sell out and anything you would rather not advertise out of the main sets, and give best-sellers and new arrivals sets of their own so their results can be read separately.
Templates and creative
By default the ads use each product’s main image, which is often a cut-out on white. That works in a carousel and looks flat in Stories or Reels. Meta lets you add frames, price and discount labels, lifestyle images and short videos, and choose which image each placement uses. I set these up so the ads look like your brand rather than a shopping list, and write the text templates that sit around each product.
Campaigns for returning shoppers and new ones
Catalogue campaigns do two separate jobs. One shows people the products they viewed or left in the basket. The other shows relevant products to people who have never visited your site but have shown interest in similar items elsewhere. I give them separate budgets and separate expectations, because returning shoppers will always look cheaper per sale. For shops with a steady flow of orders, Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns for sales can use the same catalogue with less manual structure, and when that is the better route I say so.
How I run it
- Audit the feed and the tracking. I compare catalogue items with the live site for price, stock, image and link, and check in Events Manager that view, basket and purchase events carry the right IDs and values.
- Fix the source, not the symptom. A wrong price is corrected in the shop platform or with a feed rule, so the fix survives the next sync. Tracking changes go to whoever controls the site with written instructions, or I make them myself where I have access.
- Build the sets, templates and campaigns in your own ad account, under your own business account.
- Agree what success means before launch. That is usually purchases and revenue, checked against your shop’s own orders, and a break-even return worked out from your margins with the ROAS and break-even calculator.
- Review closely while the campaigns settle, then monthly. I look at how often the same people see the ads, which products take the spend, whether sold-out items are still showing, and whether sales from new customers hold up or the campaign is only collecting people who would have bought anyway.
Problems I see most often in UK catalogues
- Feed prices that differ from the site. A sale runs in the shop but the feed still carries the full price, or the feed shows a price before VAT. Prices shown to UK consumers should include VAT, and a shopper who sees one price in the ad and another on the page tends to leave.
- Savings that can’t be backed up. A crossed-out “was” price in an overlay is a savings claim, and the ASA expects it to reflect a genuine previous price.
- Variants sent as one item, so someone who looked at a navy jumper in a size 12 is shown a red one in a size 8.
- Sold-out stock still advertised because the feed refreshes once a day while the shop sells out by lunchtime.
- Titles written for the warehouse, such as a product code and a colour, rather than the words a shopper would recognise.
- Retargeting so narrow that the same few hundred people see the same jacket many times a week.
- Tracking that ignores the cookie banner. Under UK GDPR and PECR the pixel should run only after a visitor accepts marketing cookies. That shrinks the audience you can retarget, and I plan around the smaller, lawful audience rather than a setup that fires before consent.
None of these shows up as an error in Ads Manager. The ads keep running and the money keeps going, so they are only found by looking.
What you receive
- A written feed and tracking audit listing each problem, what it costs you and how it is fixed.
- A corrected catalogue connected to your Meta business account and owned by you.
- Product sets named and documented, so anyone can see what each one includes and why.
- Catalogue campaigns, templates and text built in your ad account.
- A monthly report showing spend, sales, revenue and return by product set, checked against your shop’s own order numbers.
What it costs and how to start
Ad spend is paid from your own ad account straight to Meta, in pounds, and you can change or pause it whenever you like. My fee depends mostly on how much work the catalogue and tracking need before an ad runs. A Shopify shop with a clean sync is a small job; a custom-built site with thousands of variants and no reliable product IDs is a much larger one. I quote once I have seen your catalogue and Events Manager.
Send me your shop’s address and the platform it runs on, and I’ll tell you whether catalogue ads are worth setting up now and what I would fix first.