How to maximize revenue from your Facebook product catalog

Marketers spend hours each week on their Facebook campaigns. In order to drive results, they have to carefully tailor messaging to the right audience, determine how much to spend, how to segment, and define hundreds of other little details. Any good performance marketer knows that this is hard, sometimes confusing, work.
However, the campaign is only half of the story. This is especially true on Facebook and Instagram. In fact, your Facebook product catalog—the data feed that is required to sell anything on Facebook—can help make or break your campaigns. Not to mention, optimizing your feed can be an invigorating and creative process. You’ll need to leverage all your marketing know-how to make it truly great.

Here are some of the absolutely key aspects of a powerful Facebook catalog.

__What is your Facebook product catalog?__ The catalog (AKA product data feed, Facebook catalog, product inventory) is a compilation of all your product data. That means product titles, IDs, prices, associated images. Everything.

Required data: keep it clean

Some attributes and information are absolutely required in order to advertise on Facebook. However, the exact quality and contents of this data will affect your results. It can be difficult to analyze these attributes at first. If your product catalog is good enough for Facebook, what else is there? There are plenty of options.
These are your required Facebook product catalog attributes:

• product_ID
• GTIN, MPN, and brand
• title
• description
• image_link
• landing_page_link
• price, condition
• availability

Remember: even though feed-based advertising is highly automated, compelling and branded data are what makes a sale. That’s why you need to perfect and optimize every little piece of product information, just as you would in a campaign. Your product data, in many ways, represents the form your final messaging will take.
Notice how all of these data points make up the real offering you bring to your customers. Title, imagery, price: these are all the deciding factors in a purchase. That’s why everything should be compelling and clickable.
Make sure your data is:

__Standardized__
HP	HP
Hewlett Packard	HP
hp	HP

 

__Complete__
__Product title__	__Price__	__Product title__	__Color__
Nike Black Running Shoes	(empty)	Nike Black Running Shoes	Black

 

__Accurate__
__Product title__	__Price__	__Product title__	__Price__
Nike Black Running Shoes	90 USD (outdated price)	Nike Black Running Shoes	75 USD

 

__Coherent__
Nike *Black* Running Shoes! </b>	Nike Black Running Shoes

 

Optional data: it’s not so optional

There are plenty of additional fields that you can add to your product data feed to make it stronger. This data can help Facebook better understand your product and use that information to target users. Some of it can also be leveraged at the campaign level.

Adding optional attributes can:

• help Facebook identify the most relevant users for your ads
• help users better understand your product and how they can use it
• help you advertise more efficiently

__Field__	__What to do__	__Tip__	__Why__
__color__ __pattern__ __material__	Add product properties.	Use common colors like “red” rather than something less searched, like “merlot” or “berry.”	Better ad matching.
__google\_product\_category__ __product\_type__	Define category of the products.	Get granular (3 or more levels).	Better ad matching. More reporting options. Better targeting.
__gender__ __age\_group__	Define audience type.	Be aware that not all Facebook users provide this information, so be careful not to, for example, target *only* males or females.	Better ad matching.
__item\_group\_id__	Advertise variants of one product as one product.		Instead of serving an ad for every shade of one sock style, let users see your product in all its different variation possibilities.
__shipping__ __shipping_weight__	Include your shipping information.		When was the last time you ordered something without checking the shipping cost? Shipping plays a big role in online shopping. Let users know what they can expect up front.
__Custom labels__	These are so amazing they get their own section. Keep reading!

Custom Labels: love them and get creative

Custom Labels are easily one of the most popular feed attributes available. They can be creatively used to drive returns however a marketing team pleases. Focus on seasons, high margin products, clearances items, or anything else. It’s up to you.
Here’s how it works: Custom Labels can be added to your product data feed in order to group products in unique (user-defined) ways. Up to 5 groups of labels can be added.
Here’s one setup idea:

0	Sale
1	Price band
2	Clothing and accessories
3	Season
4	Hero product/most popular

Want to drive clicks to high margin products? Custom Labels. Want to simplify your holiday sales by grouping those products together? Custom Labels. Doing this in your feed is especially easy with a feed management tool like Productsup. It takes just a few clicks to apply these labels to hundreds of products.
Once you have the segmentation available, you can easily support more granular targeting with your campaigns. You’ll also be able to target and bid more easily. Read more on these labels and get inspiration here.

Mobile: don’t skimp

According to one study, 69% of digital media time is spent on mobile. Users are shifting to mobile and Facebook is actually helping to drive this shift. Of course, users don’t just hang out on their phones, they shop. They shop a lot.
In fact, Cyber Monday 2017 brought the first $2 billion mobile shopping day in US history. It’s clear users are spending as much time on mobile as they are on their desktops and laptops. That means marketers need to optimize even more for their mobile campaigns than ever before.
If you offer a mobile app for your shop, you need to consider feed attributes to help users open product pages in your app instead of your website. That means including:

• App URLs: to send shoppers from your ad to an exact product page in your app
  • ios\_url
  • iphone\_url (if different from general iOS)
  • ipad\_url (if different from general iOS)
  • android\_url
  • windows\_phone\_url
• app\_id and app\_name: to help Facebook find your app
• Applink\_treatment: as a fallback in case that user doesn’t have your app installed
• web\_only
• deeplink\_with\_web\_fallback
• Deeplink\_with\_appstore\_fallback

Now, your ads can lead mobile users straight to the best page possible.

Unprofitable products: Get them out of your Facebook product catalog

Not every product is a big seller through Facebook. Not every product has that special something, and that’s okay. In fact, some products simply don’t do well on certain channels. For these, it’s important to make sure they don’t take up any more resources than necessary.
If they’re not going to be useful, products should simply be removed from your export feed. These can be easily identified or removed by using attributes like Custom Label or even price or brand, depending on the situation. With some product data management software, like Productsup, you can create more exact lists based on several factors: for example, exclude all products that receive more than 100 clicks but result in less than 1 order.
Once these products are removed from your feed, they won’t show up in your Facebook ads.

Images and creative: automate wherever possible

Ad imagery is one of the biggest opportunities available to marketers on Facebook and Instagram. Consumer Acquisition found that images are responsible for some 75 to 90% of an ad’s performanc e. Especially on Facebook, images are one of the most important pieces of your ad. But how can you optimize them and make them beautifulat scale?
You may have some campaigns for which plenty of fabulous and complete ad images exist. But that won’t be true for most of your products. If possible, automate the creation of ad images using your feed. For Productsup users, this process is incredibly easy.
Use our Image Designer to automatically turn each and every product into a perfect ad. Create your own unique, branded templates, choosing from 200 icons and 800+ fonts in a drag-and-drop format.

Feed health: stay on top of it

If you’re lucky, your feed management software will offer error monitoring. You should never have to wonder whether your feed is running as usual. Set monitors for scenarios like “new columns appear,” “upload failed,” or “less products imported.” This can help you stay on top the constantly changing products while still being able to move forward.