Automotive Ads - Create a Catalog

To promote your automotive inventory on Facebook, you need to create an automotive catalog with automotive details. Your catalog is a structured data file with a list of cars to showcase. Each line of the file contains all information needed to create a vehicle listing.

To create a catalog, you should connect a data feed or upload data to Meta. The data should contain all the required fields for the vehicles that you want advertise, which are listed below.

Step 1: Set Up Your Automotive Catalog Feed

To set up a vehicles feed, you need a catalog and a feed of your inventory hosted at a location of your choice.

From your Business Manager/Commerce Manager, create a new automotive (Vehicles) catalog by using the supported format and fields for your use case:

To use Automotive Inventory Ads with an on-Facebook Vehicle Detail Page (VDP), you are required to:

  • set up fb_page_id
  • make sure your price is greater than 0

Step 2: Create Data Feed

You can either have a single auto feed to represent all vehicles in your catalog or multiple auto feeds where each feed represents a single dealership or a specific region's vehicles.

See Reference for a list of supported formats and supported fields.

Step 3: Schedule Uploads

For details on how to schedule feed uploads, see Catalog - Schedule Product Feed Fetches.

You can download a sample feed (CSV, TSV, XML format) if you try to create an automotive catalog via Commerce Manager.

See also Direct Upload Feed Reference.

Step 4: Create Vehicle Sets

Reference Docs

After the catalog upload is set up and working properly, you can create vehicle sets.

A vehicle set is a subset of your catalog. Vehicle sets are defined by filters that are applied to the vehicle catalog. For example, you can create a vehicle set with all vehicles with a year later than 2015.

A vehicle set with all vehicles in your catalog is pre-created for you.

Example - Create a vehicle set containing all the vehicles that manufactured in 2016

use FacebookAds\Object\ProductSet;
use FacebookAds\Object\Fields\ProductSetFields;

$vehicle_set = new ProductSet(null, <PRODUCT_CATALOG_ID>);

$vehicle_set->setData(array(
  ProductSetFields::NAME => 'Test Vehicle Set',
  ProductSetFields::FILTER => array(
    'year' => array(
      'eq' => 2016,
    ),
  ),
));

$ vehicle_set->create();

The filter parameter is made up of the following operators and data:

OperatorsFilter Type

i_contains

Contains substring. Operator is case-insensitive.

i_not_contains

Does not contain substring. Operator is case-insensitive.

contains

Contains substring. Operator is case-insensitive.

not_contains

Does not contain substring. Operator is case-insensitive.

eq

Equal to. Operator is case-insensitive.

neq

Not equal to. Operator is case-insensitive.

lt

Less than. For numeric fields only.

lte

Less than or equal to. For numeric fields only.

gt

Greater than. For numeric fields only.

gte

Greater than or equal to. For numeric fields only.

Step 5: Debug Your Automotive Feed (Optional)

Using the Product Feed Debug Tool, you can paste in a product feed, and validate the feed for errors and warnings.

To debug your automotive feed, in the catalog selection drop-down menu, select Vehicles.

This is helpful in the early stages of integrating automotive ads to discover whether the current feeds you may already have are supported by Meta.