Once the Facebook integration is successfully finished a user sees a dashboard such as below. The top area of account tab includes the status information of the integration:
User who connected the account
Account status
When product catalog was updated to Facebook. Last updated indicates when Nosto updated one or more product details to Facebook, for instance when price details changed, while last full update is weekly full upload, which updates all product data.
Top level pixel stats
Asset information of business manager, ad account, product catalog and pixel to help in debugging
Status information if integration error is detected.
Account Settings
The bottom area of the same view includes three control toggles for the integration.
Currency for ads if Nosto integration includes multi-currency support. This'll send product currency variant to Facebook as a part of the integration
Optional data control toggle for Facebook ads, which when enabled sends receipt data to Facebook offline API. By default the option is disabled. More information available here.
Disconnect-button, which disconnects the integration and consequently terminates all updates to catalog and pixel through Nosto.
Product Catalog
The product catalog tab features include and exclude options for product catalog integration, if catalog upload is selected as the integration mode. The catalog view repeats some key debugging integration information as the overall account view.
Filters
The options in the include & exclude settings allow to control if Nosto manipulates the product catalog uploaded to Facebook. This supports for example removing products that might violate Facebook's ad policy or including only products that you want to advertise in your ads and upload to Facebook due to branding or merchandising reasons. As and example of the latter, in the screencapture below, the configuration would only include products that are priced more than $4.90. As the opposite, you can use exclude products filter to remove products that you specifically do not want to upload to Facebook.
Rejected Products
Rejected products tab looks like in the screen capture at the below, if Facebook has not rejected any of your products.
In case Facebook has rejected one or more of your products, they appear as a list with a reason given by Facebook and when the status was updated. Note that the reason is directly read from Facebook and Nosto has no control over the repealing the decision. In case you want to remove rejected products automatically from your ads, you might want to exclude them either using the exclude filters or by creating an adset in Business Manager that doesn't use the full catalog.
Square Images And Instagram Compatibility
Nosto tries to use product images that are in a square aspect ratio in order to improve compatibility with Instagram ads. You can control the behaviour using the selection below.
Prioritize squared images uses squared images by default and fall back to the original image if a product image can't be made square (more details below)
Limit to squared images uses only square images. Proceed with caution as this option can also limit the product catalog size as it includes and uploads only products, which have a square or squared image
Only use the original image bypasses the square format and only uploads the original image to Facebook.
Methodology for Image Reprocessing
Images are made square by padding the image with the background colour on either side of the product. We can only square an image if the product doesn't go to the edge of the image on both sides.
For example, the following photo does not have a square aspect ratio but we can pad both sides of it with white to make it square.
Original Image
Squared Image
The product in this image, however, touches all sides of the photo, so it's not possible to square the image without distorting it.
Original Image
Erroneously Squared Image
By default, we attempt to use the squared version of the image. If it's not possible to square the image, we fall back to using the image in its original aspect ratio. We serve images for the product catalog from our own CDN, so no additional processing is required from your site.