A Facebook product catalog is a container that holds information about the products you want to advertise or sell across Facebook and Instagram. In e-commerce, this is commonly a replica of a site's product inventory.

All customers who use Nosto's Facebook integration, can make use of Product Catalogue, which is required for product based Facebook & Instagram ads and features such as Instagram Shopping or Facebook shop. Product catalog is uploaded to Facebook automatically if the integration mode for product catalog management is selected.

The catalogue named Nosto Default Product Catalogue is uploaded and continuously updated every three hours, whereas full uploads updating all details are done weekly. This means that when products are sold out on your site, prices dropped or other details adjusted, changes in products are reflected almost immediately in your ads or other Facebook features you might use, such as Shopping on Instagram.

The catalogue is updated as long as your Nosto account is connected to Facebook. If the default catalogue is not available under your business manager, review in the dashboard the time when catalog was updated the last time and if this indicates an error, reach out to our support.

Removing Rejected Products

Products that violate Facebook’s ad policy are rejected from ads and repeated violations might lead to banning an ad account. Nosto’s integration helps you to mitigate the risk by exposing violating products in the rejected products view in the dashboard and by exposing simple to use inclusion and exclusion rules to narrow down your product inventory.

Google Product Categories for Facebook

By default Nosto uses your product's Google Category when generating pixel events and product catalogues in Facebook. If your product doesn't have a Google Category or this is not included in the implementation, we fall back in the product's category, which according to Nosto's tagging structure, follows the website's navigational hierarchy. The format commonly looks like something below, assuming product range Canoes are under sub-category Boats and under Outdoor main category on the website.

Google Category is a pre-defined and fixed taxonomy structure by Google which originally helps to ensure that your Google search ads are shown with the right search results. The same detail and taxonomy structure can be used to power dynamic ads also on Facebook. To demonstrate the difference, the same taxonomy following the Google Category structure for Canoes would be as below,

or

How to Map the Google Category

To set the Google Category, review and update if needed your Nosto integration and product tagging to set the google_category attribute to the appropriate value in the Google product taxonomy. You may either use a number (e.g. 1604) or description (e.g. Apparel & Accessories > Clothing). For more information about Nosto integration and product tagging, please refer to our tagging guide or reach out to our support.

How to Review the Google Category in Nosto Tagging

Use debug toolbar or review page source to review the tagging and format.

Common Errors and Debugging

When Google Category is not present and Nosto falls back to regular category, Facebook still tries to interpret the product category following the Google standard. By default this is harmless and caused by a mismatch between expected value, which might trigger notification emails or similar updates when logging in to the business manager. You can adjust the notification settings in business manager to tune down unnecessary notifications, which can be triggered multiple times a day as Nosto updates your product catalogue automatically when changes occur in your shop platform (e.g. product availability, price)

Mapping Google Category accordingly for Facebook ads might improve ad delivery as it could help Facebook to interpret taxonomies following Google's standard, but on the contrary it doesn't have a negative impact nor it prevents running dynamic product ads.

Product Catalog Permission Error

The Facebook user that connects Nosto to your ad account needs to be an admin of the catalogue in order for us to automatically update it. When the integration is enabled, access-level is reviewed, but access can be also revoked for example if a Facebook user is removed.

If there is an error message indicating a potential update error view the product catalogue in your Business Settings on Facebook's Business Manager. Click on the Add People button to give the user the Product Catalogue Admin role.

Then confirm that the user has the Catalogue Admin role.

We periodically check the product catalogue's permissions, so it may take a few hours before the Product Catalogue Permissions Error message disappears.