Cross international borders with your dynamic product ads

November 22, 2021

Do you run Dynamic Product Ads on Facebook and Instagram in multiple countries?

If so, there's a feature in Business Manager you need to know about!

It’s called Localized Catalogs, and it allows international webshops to display localized product information in tagged postings and dynamic product ads to users on Facebook and Instagram based on their country or language.

This means that a user from Denmark will see the title and description in Danish and the price in DKK, while a user from Germany will see the title and description in German and the price in Euro.

And if a user isn’t from a country in which the company operates, they will see the title and description in English as well as the currency in USD—if that is what you choose as the standard.

In addition to contributing to a better shopping experience and less friction on the customer journey for users when they explore the webshop's products via Instagram Shopping, Facebook Marketplace, or organic postings with product tags, the feature also creates value for you as an advertiser.

"Why?" you might be thinking. "Currently, we have a product catalog in Business Manager for each market, and it works fine."

And you are, in part, correct, but with a Localized Catalog you can both execute and optimize your campaigns more efficiently.

Better budget allocation

When you set up Dynamic Product Ads in a campaign with the goal 'Sales from catalog' in Ads Manager, the product catalog must be selected at the Campaign level.

Therefore, you need to set up a campaign for each market and assign each market a specific budget.

With a Localized Catalog, you can just create one campaign with one ad set for each market. This way, Facebook can continuously distribute the campaign's budget across the individual markets—depending on where there are the most opportunities to convert users.

Same ads for multiple markets

If you prefer not to tailor the content of your ads to individual markets and don’t want to set spending limits at the Ad Set level, you can go one step further and settle for setting up one Ad Set that represents all markets.

This can be especially beneficial if there is not enough data to complete the learning period for each Ad Set.

This also means you will need to target the same dynamic ad to multiple markets. But that’s no challenge with a Localized Catalog, as the product information will be customized to the user. However, you still have to translate the ad text yourself—for now.

A huge time saver

There’s a lot of time to save with Localized Catalogs. And the more countries you advertise in, the bigger it is.

For example, if you set up a Collective Ad with lifestyle images, you can safely duplicate it to the Ad Set for your other markets, as the product catalog is the same.

This means you can easily set up Localized Catalogs for all customers where possible—and as social media moves towards becoming social trading platforms, technologies like this will undoubtedly play an ever larger role.

How to set up a localized catalog

To set up a Localized Catalog in Business Manager, you need three types of product feeds:

  • a Standard Feed

  • a Country Feed for each country

  • a Language Feed for each language

The webshop's developers can typically create these, but otherwise you can use third-party programs such as DataFeedWatch, Channable or avecdo.

Standard feed

Your Standard Feed must contain all the information about the webshop's products that Facebook requires.

This will correspond to the product feed that you currently use to run Dynamic Product Ads on Facebook and Instagram.

It should contain at least the following fields (but preferably more information about the products):

  • ID

  • Title

  • Description

  • Availability

  • Condition

  • Price

  • Link

  • Image\textunderscore link

  • Brand.

Country feeds

For each country to which the product information needs to be customized, create a Country Feed with the following fields:

  • <override>: Must contain the country code—e.g. DK.

  • <id>: Must contain the product ID as it appears in your Standard Feed—e.g. 12345678.

  • <price>: Must contain the price of the product in the country's currency—e.g. 299 DKK.

  • <sale price>: Must contain the product's retail price in the country's currency—e.g. 199 DKK.

  • <link>: Must include the link to the product on the local edition of the shop—e.g. webshop.com/da/dk/produkt.html

If you use the fields <sale_price_start_date> and <sale_price_end<_date> in your Standard Feed, these should also appear in your Country Feed.

Also, it’s important that the product IDs match those in your Standard Feed—otherwise Facebook cannot overwrite the data with it from your Language Feed.

Language feeds

For each language to which the product information is to be adapted, create a Language Feed with the following fields:

  •  <override>: Must contain the language code—da\DK
  •  <id>: Must contain the product ID as it appears in your Standard Feed—e.g. 12345678
  •  <title>: Must contain the product title in the local language
  •  <description>: Must contain the product description in the local language

Similar to the above, it’s important that the product IDs match those in your Standard Feed—otherwise Facebook cannot overwrite the data with it from your Country Feed.