Did you know? You can use Google Drive to create a product feed in less than 10 minutes and use it to run feed-based campaigns like Dynamic Ads or Smartly.io Automated Ads. Check the video below to get started, and read on for more details!

Creating the feed

1. Go to https://drive.google.com
2. New > Google Sheets
3. Enter a name for the sheet
   • In our example below, we've named the sheet "Product Catalogue"
4. Add your columns

Here is an example feed that you can use to for trying out feed publishing.

Suggested columns to use:

• id (id is the only mandatory field)
• name
• price
• image_url
• link_url
• topseller
• description
• category
• availability
• discount

You can freely use any column names that you want.

Fill in your data

Add products in your sheet. Here's what our example looks like:

Publish the feed

Time to publish the feed to make it available to Smartly.io! There are two ways to do this:

• Publish the sheet to the web as a CSV file

• Enable link sharing and and get a file export link

⚠️ Caution: When using either of these methods, the contents of your sheet become potentially accessible by third parties. If you have confidential or sensitive information in your feed, we recommend hosting the feed on your own servers and using authentication measures to restrict access to the file. See Adding a feed for Automated Ads (CSV, XML, JSON) for information on how to connect such a feed source to Smartly.io.

Publish to the web

Go to File > Publish to the web...

Select Link, Sheet 1, and Comma-separated values (.csv) as a format.

Now copy the link Google created for you and paste it into your Smartly.io account.

• If you are unable to untick Require viewers to sign in with their account, you may need to ask your company's Google admin to change this setting. If you do not see this checkbox, the Google sheet will be published without issue (your Google admin settings shouldn't be a constraint).
• Be careful to select Comma-separated values (.csv) instead of Web page when publishing to web. Note that when you repeat the "Publish the Feed" steps, Web page may automatically be selected. If you copy the link with this format selected, it will give you an error in Smartly.io.

Export as CSV with link sharing

It is also possible to export a CSV file from your document without publishing it to the web. This can be done by manually manipulating the document URL. Here's what the URL in your browser's address bar usually looks like:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/{KEY}/edit#gid={ID}

The URL needs to be changed to:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/{KEY}/export?format=csv&gid={ID}

In addition to changing the URL, you need to enable link sharing for the document.

1. Click Share in the upper right corner
2. Enable link sharing and set it to Anyone with the link can view
3. Click Done
4. Copy the link to your Google Sheets document
   • Example: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bqhyVgPwNS-dWxHzqnpOY_7bGSCCSeqjuHvzt1vYOIS/edit#gid=1149095614
5. Paste the link into a text editor and change the part after the last forward slash to export?format=csv&gid={ID}
   • Example: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bqhyVgPwNS-dWxHzqnpOY_7bGSCCSeqjuHvzt1vYOIS/export?format=csv&gid=1149095614

The final link can now be used to connect the information in the sheet to Smartly.io.

Test our product catalogue

You can test our feed in your own account.

1. Go to your Smartly.io account Settings > Feeds for Automated Ads and click Add a new product feed
2. Add a name to your feed, and paste in this URL:

   https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSmjcPZkjWk3qIeDLnUnOkIP92J4gdw3XnsDcggmv8eOtcbWXwIR5SEPhb1If2tvwMFmRwmsRoojLh5/pub?gid=0&single=true&output=csv

3. Click Advanced mode (left-bottom corner) to continue
4. Select CSV/TSV, add id as your product ID and fill all the other fields as shown in the picture.

Refresh your feed page after few seconds and you should see 9 products.

How to use your Google Drive feed

You can use feeds created with Google Drive to run your Facebook marketing. Let us show you 3 examples:

Use case 1: Facebook dynamic ads campaigns with Google Drive feeds

If you have a pixel installed and the pixel is sending the correct events (ViewContent, AddtoCart, Purchase) and the pixel is also showing content_ids, you can run a dynamic ads campaign using Google Drive. Obviously if you have thousands of products, you can't add them manually this way, but if you have top 10 product where 80% of the traffic is generated, it's worth considering creating a manual feed as described in this article and running retargeting campaigns only on these items.

Use case 2: Automated Ads / Prospecting your topsellers items

This few lines here will change the way you do Facebook marketing. In Smartly.io we have a feature called Automated Ads. What Automated Ads does is create ads based on your feed. Now, imagine you have a feed where you have 9 products and you can choose which one to display on a carousel ads based on how well they are selling or if they are still available in your shop.

Let's create an Automated Ads campaign displaying 5 top sellers in a carousel ad.

In the Feed tab, add a new condition, for example topseller = 1. Now Smartly.io will only include the products marked as top sellers from your feed. Narrow down the number of selected products to 5 and create a carousel ad. You can use from 1 to 20 products with Automated Ads.

Now pick any Dynamic Image template previously created, select your audiences, and create the campaign.

The beauty of this? Every time you will add new products to your Google feed and mark them as "topseller", Smartly.io will update your campaign and create new carousel ads, without you doing anything.

Use case 3: Slide Show campaigns

• create a feed that contains only products you want to display in your slideshow
• create an Automated Ads campaign using this feed
• in the Ad Template Tab, select Video, Slide show based on still images, Use dynamic image template

If you need to insert some randomness in your feed

You could create a second sheet and paste the following in the A1 Cell:

=ArrayFormula(SORT(Sheet1!A2:J51 , RANDBETWEEN( 0+0*SIGN(ROW(Sheet1!A2:J51)), 1.8E+293) , RANDBETWEEN( 0,1) ))

This will take all the content from the Sheet1 and paste it in a random order in Sheet2. Make sure you adapt the range and the sheet name if you changed it.