What is a Product Catalog?
A product catalog is the structured list of your SKUs and their attributes (title, price, availability, category, images, ratings). It’s the source of truth for catalog ads.
Understanding Product Catalogs
A product catalog is more than a list; it is the structured backbone that connects your products to delivery systems and creative. Clean, complete attributes help platforms understand what you sell and who should see it, reducing ambiguity and wasted spend. When the catalog mirrors how you merchandise—categories, brands, price tiers—it becomes a reliable control surface for testing and scaling. Standardized naming and taxonomies make reporting clearer and troubleshooting faster. Strong catalogs also reduce disapprovals and mismatches that derail performance.
For creative, the product catalog powers dynamic templates that render price, ratings, promos, and media directly on the ad. That turns every impression into a tailored product story with less manual work. Catalog hygiene improves both pre‑click relevance and post‑click continuity by matching ads to the right landing pages. As you expand to new channels, the same catalog fuels performance across social, search, and CTV. Small data fixes compound across every impression.
Why Product Catalogs matter
Product catalogs matter because they determine how precisely platforms can match your items to shoppers and placements. A clean catalog expands eligible inventory while protecting efficiency, so you can scale without guesswork. It also turns creative into a system by feeding on‑ad clarity directly from the data.
- Relevance: Better attributes → better matching.
- Scale: One catalog feeds many platforms.
- Creative: Templates pull price, reviews, and promos directly.
How Product Catalogs work
Product catalogs work by exporting structured product data (CSV, XML, API) that platforms ingest on a schedule. The platform validates required fields, flags errors, and indexes items for eligibility and ranking. Campaigns then reference subsets of the catalog through product sets to control which SKUs can serve. Dynamic templates render titles, prices, and reviews from the catalog so ads stay accurate without manual updates. Freshness matters—price and availability must stay synced to avoid disapprovals and bounce. Consistent taxonomies enable cross‑channel reuse and clearer reporting.
