Encountering problems with your dynamic ads campaign? We've compiled this guide to help you get things back on track. If the information below doesn't provide an answer, reach out to our support chat and we'll help you out!

Campaign creation fails to permission error

• Check that you have connected the Business Manager to Smartly.io, and accepted the necessary terms of service.
• See Roles and permissions for Facebook users for more information.

Dynamic audiences are not populating

• Did you launch the campaign recently?
  • Facebook has reported that they cannot provide reliable audience size estimates for recently launched ad sets, or ad sets that have not gathered significant traffic yet.
  • We recommend judging the audience size by the actual delivery metrics: Impressions and Reach. In many cases, the delivery has been OK even though audience size estimates are very low.
• Are your DPA audience rules sensible?
  • For example, including AddToCart events and excluding ViewContent events would naturally result in a zero audience
• Also, check that
  • you are not excluding an unfortunate (Website) Custom Audience
  • you are not targeting a non-matching country in native targeting
• Is your Pixel properly set up?
  • Use Meta Pixel Helper on your product page / after adding to cart / after making a purchase: can the Pixel match products?
  • Note that your Pixel should NOT be sending the product_catalog_id parameter!
• Are there enough events on your website in the first place?
  • Go to Settings → Pixels page to see how many of each event Facebook has received during the last 24 hours
  • In this list, by clicking "show parameters" you can also check that the required parameters are also received as many times: content_type and content_ids
  • If you cannot see the "show parameters" link, your events are not sending the required parameters

Do Pixel events match to the catalog?

Facebook needs to identify the product IDs sent by the Pixel. To verify this:

• Open the catalog you are using in the campaign, by clicking Go to catalog in campaign view
• Open Catalog Settings
  • Are the correct Pixels/apps selected to be tracked by this catalog?
• Next, open Event Stats
  • For each event (ViewContent, AddToCart, Purchase) the number of matched events should be high, to verify that your catalog can match the product IDs sent by your Pixel.
  • If this number is low, you may have to fix the product IDs in either your catalog or in your Pixel.

My dynamic ads are being paused on their own

When Facebook notices an extremely sharp increase in product matching failures, a background validation process will pause the dynamic ads. This can happen when:

• You are missing the majority of the products in the catalog
• Your feed might be improperly formatted: download the feed and investigate whether all columns are in place
• You might have some illegal characters in the ad template texts: check if there are any unusual characters
• Your Pixel has recently been edited erroneously
• The product IDs sent by the Pixel might be wrong
• Check your product page with Meta Pixel Helper: can the Pixel match products?
• Check if there is a lot of rejected products in your product set 

My dynamic ads are not delivering on Instagram

One common issue causing dynamic ads to not deliver on Instagram is that the image URLs mapped in the feed under "Image Link" are smaller than 600x600.

Facebook does the image validation, and thus your eligibility on Instagram, at the default image level, even if you are using Image Templates. 

If you are using Google Chrome, you can check the size of your images, by opening an image URL, right-clicking it and selecting Inspect. 

Either make the appropriate changes in your feed so that it contains higher-resolution images, or map your image to an 1200X1200 Image Template and use Image Template As Default Image In Product Catalog to solve the issue. This will ensure the images are nice and crisp in the ads.

My dynamic ads are not showing in the correct local alphabet

For example, Arabic or Thai letters are not shown correctly if the feed is not in UTF-8 format.

• If the feed is generated dynamically by your IT team, ask them to change the encoding to UTF-8 (Unicode)
• If you are managing the feed yourself, specify in the editor while saving the file to save it in UTF-8 (Unicode) encoding

My ads show incorrect image both on Smartly and Facebook side after it was updated for the feed

Please, note, that if you update the image on your server side by replacing the image file itself, but without changing the link in the feed, Smartly will not recognize that change and may continue to serve the original image, that was cached during previous processing. The same will apply to what Facebook provides in actual ads.

Further information

Facebook also has an excellent blog post on DPA best practices and troubleshooting.