At Socioh, I have worked with 100s of brands to help them optimize their DPA (Dynamic Product Ads) & DABA (Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences) campaigns.

‍Not familiar with dynamic ads? Check out this guide to DABA & DPA campaigns. ‍

Today I’m sharing the internal checklist that I created for my team to ensure that each catalog is set up correctly and optimized to maximize the performance of your dynamic ads. 

1. Check your Commerce Manager

i) Pixel setup and match rate

Are you getting the error: ‘Match rate is low’?

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Ideally, your event match rate should be above 90% in Meta’s Commerce Manager. This is the best way to confirm that Meta is correctly matching events with products in the catalog.

Here is an example of a catalog that has an excellent match rate and is ready for advertising.

Typically, there are 3 reasons why your event match rate may be low:

a. ‘Content ID’ in the pixel events does not match ‘Item Group ID’ in the catalog

The ‘Content ID’ of the product in the Meta pixel event needs to be the same as the ‘Item Group ID’ for that product in the catalog. If these IDs do not match, Meta will have difficulty serving the right products to the right user.

NOTE: The content ID is NOT the same as the variant ID of the product. In Meta events, each variant has a unique its own variant ID, while the Content ID for all variants/variations of the product is the same.

b. Catalog is not connected to the correct pixel

This is a surprisingly common mistake.

Make sure you check that the pixel in the Events tab for your Catalog is connected to the same pixel that you are using on your website. 

c. You have an incomplete product catalog

This can result in poor user experience and lower ROAS as the ads won’t be served to the correct shoppers.

The most common issues here are:

 i) Stale product information 

Ensure that your products show the latest price and other details.

Make sure you periodically check this, especially if you use are using Shopify’s native catalog — the catalog can get disconnected from your store, resulting in stale, incorrect information. 

ii) Sold-out products 

Make sure your sold-out products have the correct inventory information (‘quantity to sell’ = 0) so they aren’t shown in ads.

Note: Don’t remove sold-out products from the catalog unless they are permanently gone from the website. If they are expected back in stock, they should remain in the catalog as sold out.

iii) Incomplete information 

Check for missing information like color, size, brand, inventory, discount, etc.

This is one of the biggest issues that we usually find with the catalog setup. This prevents Meta from prospecting correctly with

DABA ads. 

Besides the basic product fields, the following 3 fields are required to sell on Facebook via Shops:

• Quantity to sell on Facebook
• Google Product Category
• Size

Additionally, we highly recommend that merchants include the following fields for all products and their variations:

• Color
  

• Gender

• Size

• Age group

You will need an app like Socioh for this. Shopify’s default integration offers no way of manually overriding this information or adding additional information. 

2. Add Google Product Category (GPC) 

This is the TOP issue we notice in catalogs. Check that the GPC information is correct for all products in the catalog. 

The more specific you are, the better a job Meta can do with matching potential buyers to your products. This is why it’s important to send as much additional information (GPC, color, brand, size, availability, material, MPN, etc) to Meta in your catalog as possible.

More than 50% of merchants we have worked with did not have the GPC set up correctly.

GPC is critical for your catalog ads to perform as it helps Meta understand:

a) Which product a shopper is ‘in-market’ for‍

Example: A shopper has been browsing ‘men’s shirts’ on various eCom sites. Meta would automatically qualify them as a candidate for your DABA ads if you also sell in that Google Product Category.

b) Which products to show from your catalog

‍GPC helps Meta determine which specific products to show a potential shopper from your catalog.

Example: Based on GPC, Meta would correctly know whether to serve the shopper formal shirts or casual shirts.

c) Which customers to show each product to‍

GPC also helps improve remarketing to your existing customers and warm prospects (DPAs). 

Example: The best time to show your past customers or warm prospects your ‘Shirts’ collection is when Meta knows they are in the marketin-market for a shirt. Having GPC set up correctly can help Meta precisely time and target the products potential customers are most likely to purchase. This is far superior to email/SMS that is blasting the same message to everyone on a fixed schedule.

3. Optimize the performance of your catalog 

The catalog is an incredibly powerful ad unit. However, it does have some major drawbacks.

You’re probably already aware of them, but here’s a quick list of the most pressing problems with dynamic ads on Meta:

• The advertiser has no control over the products’ presentation, branding, or messaging. 
• Images often fit poorly, with heads cropped off or white bars at the sides.
• There’s no way to A/B test what works best or to customize the catalog creative to highlight a promotion.

Socioh’s Branded Catalog is designed to solve all of these problems and give you back control over your catalog ads.

With Socioh, you get a set of growth levers that every modern performance marketer wants — not only is it super easy to A/B test messaging without losing learnings, but you also get complete control over your branding — AND detailed analytics to give you the complete picture. 

In this section, I’ll delve into some problems that brands often face and give you specific examples of how we helped them turn their catalog ads into growth drivers.

i) Products on a white background just… suck

No matter how good your product shots are, it’s really hard to stand out in a crowded newsfeed with products on a plain white background. You will be better off enhancing your product feed in almost all cases. Here are some examples:

Specialized uses background-removed images to add mood and character to their feed

Brümate's background-removed catalog helps their product feed stand out

Hyugalife uses a background-removed catalog with product USPs to advertise their bestselling category

With Socioh, you can automatically replace the plain backgrounds of your product images with on-brand colors, patterns, or images. See more examples of background-removed catalog ads.

ii) No first-time buyer is buying your products

‍Your shoppers are buying an image, an emotion, something that adds value to their lives, and they need to trust that you aren’t misrepresenting your products. 

But how do you convey an emotion or establish trust through a product catalog? Here are some examples of how brands working with us made it happen:

a) Have lifestyle images? Highlight those assets. It creates trust, and allows shoppers to visualize how your product fits into their lives. No one does this better than Kiel James Patrick.

Kiel James Patrick uses lifestyle images to connect with their shoppers

b) Specifically for apparel, showing multiple angles makes a huge difference in CTR and ROAS.

Carve Designs used a 2-image template to showcase different angles

c) Likewise for accessories, showing the product and how it looks when worn goes a long way — and the impact is doubled when combined with BNPL options or reviews!

Juler's row's 2-image catalog combined product images with lifestyle images

2 Hounds Design added reviews and lifestyle images to their catalog ads

With Socioh, it’s super easy to replace product shots with lifestyle images in your catalog ads. See more examples of lifestyle catalog ads.

d) Don’t have lifestyle images? You can always use design and data automation to convey your brand identity. Look at how design details elevate the shoes from Specialized or the rings from Enso.

Specialized added an off-center gradient and product metadata to help shoppers find key information

Enso Rings included the brand logo and color variations for each product

See more examples of how to optimize the design of your catalog ads.

iii) Your potential buyers have objections — and you need to address them even before they visit your website

If you are addressing potential objections on your product pages, then why not do that on your catalog ads as well? This works not only for retargeting, but for prospecting too. 

a) This kids’ clothing brand understands how hard it is to convince moms to try a new brand for the first time. They effectively used their catalog to address all potential trust and quality objections in their catalog and were able to improve their catalog ads CTR by 70%: 

Bums & Roses added social proof and USPs to convince moms to buy from them

This lifestyle brand improved both their CTR and ROAS significantly simply by highlighting their USPs on the catalog:

Carve Designs added rotating USPs to their catalog

iv) No size fits all especially when it comes to design — you need to A/B test your messaging

When a brand signs up with us, the first question they ask is — what is the best design for my store?

The correct answer is —whatever convinces your buyers. And that looks different for different products and brands. 

With Socioh’s Smart Switch, you no longer need to guess. You can test different messages without losing learnings. You can run designs sequentially or in a loop and measure the performance changes with messaging changes. 

In the screenshot below, you’ll notice that we used 2 designs for this catalog. The second design was an incremental update to the first and it showed a 44.8% percent improvement in ROAS over the first design and 98.7% over the baseline.

v) Reducing friction is key to conversion

Did you know that auto-applying discounts can increase your conversion rate? We didn’t either — but a customer proved to us that they consistently saw a 10% increase in conversion rate if their coupons were auto-applied. 

And that is an easy win, especially if you are running a coupon anyway. So we made it super easy for you to do this with your catalog ads in Socioh.

All you have to do is enter your code using your catalog settings on Socioh to auto-apply your discounts in ALL your existing ads:

Auto-apply your discounts to your catalog ads

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Plus, you can remove it when the offer is over – all of this without resetting learnings. 🙂

And this is not all! Socioh has tons of optimizations — supplementary language feeds, mapping secondary images, adding product metadata — that makes selling with your catalog ads a breeze — here are 5 lesser-known ones.

Want to give us a try? Just log in with your Facebook account to get started. Or book a call with me here.

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