Doctrine
Commerce plumbing is unglamorous and decisive: dynamic product ads cannot run without a healthy catalog, and a catalog wired to a broken pixel just automates showing people the wrong products. Order matters: pixel first (see pixel-conversions), catalog second, product sets third. Product sets are angles for inventory: "best sellers", "under $50", "new arrivals" are different promises to different buyers.
When to use
- Ecom stores with enough SKUs that per-product creative is impractical.
- Before any retargeting play that shows people what they browsed.
- Needs a Meta Ads MCP with write access; creation steps are confirmed before running.
Run it
Catalog setup, step by step, confirm with me before each write:
- List my existing catalogs and their product counts. If a catalog already exists, audit it instead of duplicating: how many products, how many rejected or missing images/prices?
- Check the pixel link: is the catalog connected to my pixel, and are the product IDs in my purchase events matching catalog IDs? If not, stop and tell me; nothing downstream works until this does.
- Propose 2-3 product sets that match my angles (for example: best sellers, entry-price items, the category my ads target). Show the filter logic.
- On my approval, create the sets and tell me exactly which ad type they unlock (dynamic product ads, advantage+ catalog ads) and what a $20/day test on the best set would look like.
## Guardrails
- Audit before create: duplicate catalogs are how accounts end up advertising stale prices.
- The pixel-to-catalog ID match is a hard gate. Skipping it produces ads for out-of-stock products at wrong prices.
- Product sets mirror angles: a set nobody wrote an angle for is inventory, not a campaign.
## Good output looks like
One healthy catalog, 2-3 named product sets tied to angles, and a clear go/no-go on whether dynamic ads are ready to test.