This article guides you on how to use a catalog that has been created in Facebook Business Manager.

In short, you need to "claim" the catalog's product feed in Smartly.io. After the feed has been claimed, Facebook will no longer fetch the feed directly from you but through Smartly.io instead. This will allow Smartly.io to edit the feed and to add additional information to it. You need to claim the feed in order to use Image Templates with the catalog and to do feed field mapping or transformations.

ℹ️ Note: Once the feed has been claimed, we recommend that you only update it through Smartly.io. Updating the catalog content via other feed uploads can lead to unpredictable behavior, including Smartly.io Image Templates not working in your ads.

1. Claim the feed

Go to Catalogs.

Choose the Business Manager account that was used to create the catalog you want to claim.

From the product catalog list, find the catalog that you'd like to start using with Smartly.io and open the catalog. Next, you should be able to see the product feed in the Product Feeds tab. To claim the feed, click Claim.

2. Check feed address and mapping

If the product feed has been set to automatically update in Facebook Business Manager, Smartly.io will be able to find the feed address automatically for you. If you did not have automatic feed updates scheduled in Business Manager, you need to have the feed available online and add the link to the feed in the feed settings. You need to have the same products in the feed that you were previously using. Otherwise, you may lose the audience from the catalog.

Double check that the feed mapping is correct. You can refer to the Catalog Setup article for more information.

⚠️ If you change the feed mapping to be different than the mapping in your original feed, this can cause some of the information in the catalog to change, potentially breaking existing product sets in the catalog.

⚠️ Please note that if your feed already contains additional image fields, Smartly will overwrite them with image template URLs. To use image templates correctly in this situation, you can map image URL columns from your feed to 'extra fields' in Smartly for use in your image templates. 

Once you save the changes, you should be able to see the Status and Next Upload fields updated in the feed list, which means you're good to go once the feed has been refreshed.

3. Check event sources

Double-check that the event sources (Pixels and apps) that you're using with the catalog are correct. Click Catalog Settings and you'll see a list of all Pixels and apps that you can use with this catalog.

4. Check product sets and image templates

Check that you have the product sets that you want to be using.

Remember to import or create Image Templates to make your ads look nice!

⚠️ Caution: if you're using the catalog in live campaigns, adding image templates can potentially change the creatives in those campaigns. For more information, see Adding Image Templates to Catalogs.

FAQ

Is it possible to reverse the process, i.e. make Smartly.io to stop updates to the feed/catalog?

Yes, this is possible. Contact our support chat for assistance.

What happens during claiming a feed if I have previously set the product feed to automatically update in Facebook Business Manager?

Smartly.io is going to remove the schedule from Facebook Business Manager. Update interval for a feed should be set in Smartly.io instead. To set the update interval, click the Edit link in the Actions column. If a schedule is set up again in Facebook Business Manager, a warning (see image below) will be displayed in Smartly.io because this can lead to undesirable results.

What happens during claiming a feed if I have previously set up Rules for the Columns of a feed in Facebook Business Manager?

The rules are not going to be changed or removed. However, a warning will be displayed in Smartly.io including information about which field has what kind of rule set. Having rules configured in Facebook Business Manager might lead to undesirable results, thus we encourage you to use Smartly.io s Advanced templating feature with Liquid markup instead.

I'm receiving an Access Denied error when claiming the feed. What am I doing wrong?

The feed is password protected so you'll need to get those details and input them into the URL field in the following format:

sftp://username:password@ftp.feed_address.com/feed_name.txt.gz

ℹ️ Note: When added as part of the feed URL, there are cases where Smartly.io is unable to encode some special characters used in the username and password. If you spot any fetching issues, try using only alphanumeric values for the username and password instead or try to URL encode any non-URL-safe characters in the file path. For example, instead of a space, use '%20'. See more about advanced settings here.

After claiming the feed, my feed URL in Ads Manager has changed to https://smartlyio-production-eu-west-1.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com

This is normal. This feed URL points to the version of the feed that has been processed in Smartly.io, so that the feed includes Liquid templates and Image Templates.