Facebook Catalogs for Your Shopify or WooCommerce Store 

What Are Facebook Catalog Ads?

Facebook catalog ads are a great way to deliver relevant product offers to your customers and automate some of your remarketing efforts.

Essentially, Facebook draws in products from your catalogue dynamically when you’re running catalog ads, and shows them to the most relevant consumers.

This is much more efficient and practical than manually setting up a hundred different ads and audiences for all your customers.

Who Should Run Facebook Catalog Ads?

Facebook catalog ads are not useful for boutique businesses where you could feasibly set up ad campaigns for all of your products. Setting up individual campaigns will actually give you better results since the Facebook algorithm can optimise each product for sales individually.

Where it shines is for businesses which have a large and broad range of products. When you have several hundred products, you can’t possibly set up and manage campaigns for each individual one.

That’s where Facebook catalog ads come in. They’re the next best thing, allowing you to use the Facebook algorithm to show consumers the products most relevant to them.

Step 1: Starting a New Catalog

1.1. Log into Facebook Business Manager, click on the menu and select Catalog Manager. 

1.2. Click “Create Catalog” to access this screen and then select your business type (in this case e-commerce). 

1.3. Click next and fill in the details on this screen. Manually setting up your product feed is the most reliable option. Make sure you select your business’ page as the owner and name your catalog something that makes sense to you.

1.4. Click “Create” and you’re done. You’ve created your catalog.

Step 2: Adding Products to Your Catalog

2.1. Navigate to “Data Sources” and select “Use Bulk Upload”

2.2. Under “Choose Upload Option” select “Use Bulk Upload” and click next. Then click “Scheduled feed” and click next again.

The next step depends on your hosting platform. For Shopify follow step 2.3. and skip step 2.4.

For WooCommerce skip step 2.3. and follow step 2.4.

2.3.1 For Shopify: sign in to your Shopify site and navigate to the app store.

2.3.2 Download and install the “Flexify Facebook Product Feed” app to your site.

2.3.3 Follow Flexify’s instructions to set up your first product feed.

2.3.4. Copy the feed URL it generates at the end and paste it into the “Enter URL” field on Facebook. Click next.

2.4.1. For WooCommerce: Sign in to your WordPress website and navigate to the Plugins store.

2.4.2. Download and install the “Product Feed PRO for WooCommerce” plugin to your site.

2.4.3. Follow the plugin’s instructions to set up your first product feed.

2.4.4. Copy the feed URL it generates at the end and paste it into the “Enter URL” field on Facebook. Click next.

2.5. Select an upload schedule, depending on how often you update your prices.

2.6. Give your data source a name that makes sense to you, and be sure to select the correct currency.

Step 3: Connecting Tracking to your Catalog

3.1 Navigate back to Catalog Manager and click on “Events” then click “Connect to Tracking”.

3.2. If you have a Facebook Pixel set up it will direct you to this screen. If the “Status” light is green you’re good to go, just click on the toggle button to connect your site’s tracking with the Catalog. If it’s not you first have to resolve the issue with your tracking.

3.3. If you see this screen instead that means you haven’t set up a Facebook pixel, or you’re not signed in to the right account. Click “Get Started” and follow the process to set up a new Facebook pixel, or check you’re signed in to the right account.

3.4. Click Save. You’re done and your tracking is set up for your pixel.

Conclusion

Congratulations, if you followed all those steps successfully you now have a Facebook catalogue that automatically populates itself with products and you’ve set up tracking to monitor your catalog ads’ performance.

Be sure to check in next week when we go over part two: how to run Facebook catalog ads.

This article was brought to you by Syte. We’re e-commerce marketing experts obsessed with driving up your bottom line. If you need any help setting up catalog ads for your business, feel free to reach out with the form below.