Supplementary feeds on Meta, and how to set one up

Most stores have one product feed and it comes out of the shop platform. Shopify writes it, an app writes it, or a developer wrote it once and left. Whatever the source, it is the same file that feeds the store, the sales channels and sometimes Google.

That makes it a bad place to put ad decisions. Change an image there to add a sale badge and you have changed it for every channel reading that feed. Change a title to test a shorter one and your storefront may change with it.

A supplementary feed solves that. It sits on top of the primary feed and wins where the two disagree.

What a supplementary feed can and cannot do

It can override fields. It cannot add products.

If a product id is not in the primary feed, putting it in a supplementary feed does nothing. Meta joins on id, and a row with no match is skipped. This is the single most common reason a supplementary feed appears to do nothing at all.

The fields worth overriding in practice:

• image_link and additional_image_link, for badged or restyled creative.
• title and description, for ad wording that is not your storefront wording.
• sale_price and sale_price_effective_date, for a promotion window.
• custom_label_0 through custom_label_4, for grouping products into product sets.
• availability, when your platform reports it late.

How to set one up

1. Export the product ids you want to change. They have to be the ids exactly as they appear in the primary feed, including any prefix like shopify_US_.
2. Make a CSV with id in the first column and only the fields you are overriding in the rest. Do not include columns you are not changing. A blank cell is treated as a value in some setups and clearing a field by accident is a bad afternoon.
3. In Commerce Manager, open the catalog, go to Catalog then Data sources, and choose the primary feed.
4. Choose to add a supplementary feed against that data source.
5. Upload the file or give a scheduled URL. A scheduled URL is better for anything recurring, because the sale then starts and ends on its own.
6. Map the id column to the id field, and each other column to its field.
7. Wait for the run to finish, then open a product in the catalog and check the field shows the new value.

Step seven is not optional. A feed that uploaded with zero errors can still have matched zero products.

Primary feed or supplementary feed

The id problem

Nearly every failed supplementary feed is an id problem.

Shopify feeds through the Facebook sales channel usually prefix ids. The product with id 7412345678 in your admin might appear as shopify_US_7412345678_41234567890. The last part is the variant. Catalog ads run on variants, not products, so your supplementary feed has to carry the variant level id.

The safe way to get them is to export the catalog from Commerce Manager and read the ids out of that export. Do not build them from your admin by hand.

If your ids are right and rows still do not match, check for a hidden character. A CSV saved from a spreadsheet can carry a byte order mark on the first cell. That turns id into something that is not id.

Scheduling a sale with one file

The tidy pattern for a promotion is one scheduled supplementary feed with three columns: id, sale_price and sale_price_effective_date. Set the date range and the price. Meta applies the sale price inside the window and drops back out of it after.

Add image_link to the same file if you are also swapping in badged creative, and the sale visuals and the sale price move together. When the promotion is over, delete the feed. See how to add sale badges to Meta catalog ads for what to put on the image. Product feed optimisation for Meta covers the fields worth getting right in the primary feed.

What to check after every upload

• The data source shows the run as finished, not queued.
• The number of items updated is close to the number of rows you sent.
• One product you know by name shows the new value in the catalog.
• The ad preview shows the new image, not a cached old one. Image changes can take some hours to reach delivery.

You can see badged creative on your own catalog before you build a feed. Paste your store URL into the preview.