How to Create a Facebook Product Feed for WooCommerce Store

With over a staggering 3 billion (36.7% of the global population) monthly users, Facebook is the undisputed king of online social media. It is the 7^th most valued brand and has the 2^nd most used mobile app in the world.

Along with its enormous popularity among general users, it’s also the living and breathing space for a vast number of businesses, especially eCommerce businesses.

Facebook also prioritizes eCommerce/WooCommerce brands like yours and offers a number of tools to promote and sell your products on the platform. Let’s check out some statistics to find out how impactful Facebook is for businesses like yours.

• Almost 55% of Facebook users either follow brands they like or research products on the platform.
• In 2023, it’s expected that about 37% of Facebook users will make purchases while using the site.
• 53% more people are likely to buy from a company if they can send a text message on Facebook.
• Each month, an average retail Facebook page reaches around 974,000 people.
• About 19% of online shoppers in the United States start their shopping journey on Facebook.
• Facebook ads typically have a high conversion rate, averaging around 9.21%, and generate the highest return on investment (ROI).

However, a WooCommerce store generally has a large number of products. How can you efficiently add and manage these products on Facebook?

A Facebook product feed is the answer. With the right tools, you can effortlessly list and manage all of your products on Facebook through a WooCommerce Facebook product feed.

In this article, we will discuss how you can promote your WooCommerce products on Facebook and how to create and connect a Facebook product data feed.

Let’s dive in.

How to Promote WooCommerce Products on Facebook

Facebook offers multiple ways for you to promote your Woo products besides having an official Facebook page for your brand. Let’s discuss the eCommerce promotional options the platform offers.

Facebook Shop

The new Facebook Shop can act as a fully functioning eCommerce site itself. Previously, the shop page merely displayed products in a gallery form with little detail.

However, the new Shop page is nothing short of your own WooCommerce home or shop page. It has a slider in the header where you can display your featured products or special promotions.

The shop page also displays your WooCommerce collections or categories at the top as a header menu. When a user clicks on any entry, it will take them to the product detail page.

On the product detail page, Facebook displays your product gallery along with important product details. You can choose to direct your shoppers to your Woo product page to complete the purchase or allow them to checkout on Facebook.

Here’s an example of in-app checkout on Facebook.

What information your Facebook Shop displays and what information your shoppers will see on the product detail page will depend on your Facebook product feed.

Facebook Dynamic Ads

Facebook dynamic ads are a type of ad that automatically shows people the products from your catalog that they are most likely to be interested in. These ads are powered by machine learning, which means that Facebook can predict which products each individual user is most likely to want to see, based on their past behavior and interests.

To create a dynamic ad campaign, you need to create a WooCommerce product feed for Facebook and upload it to the Commerce Manager. Once you have done this, you can create a dynamic ad campaign and select your Facebook product feed.

and select your Facebook product feed.

After that, Facebook will automatically create dynamic ads and show them to the right people, people who are most likely looking for those products or would be interested in them.

Here are some of the benefits of Facebook dynamic ads:

• These ads are automated. As a result, they can save you time and effort.
• These ads are tailored to individual shoppers. This makes them more effective than other ads.
• With dynamic ads, you can target/retarget the people who already visited your store.
• You can use these ads to up-sell and cross-sell products to your customers.

Here are some examples of ways businesses can use these ads:

• If you have a clothing store, you can display dynamic ads to the people who abandoned your cart or visited your store but didn’t take any action.
• Travel companies can make use of these ads to promote specific location vacation packages to the people who have searched those locations online before.
• Software developer companies can use these ads to promote software to people who would most likely need them. Facebook dynamic ads can target people who have purchased some other software and most likely need the one this software company is offering.

Overall, Facebook dynamic ads are a powerful advertisement medium that can help all sorts of businesses to increase sales and reach new/old customers.

Facebook Marketplace

Facebook Marketplace is a place for everyone to buy and sell products, be it an eCommerce store or people in general. Adding products and selling them through this platform is pretty straightforward, and that’s why it’s incredibly popular.

However, Marketplace is limited to specific areas. You need to select a specific location (for example, your city) where you want to sell the products.

Marketplace is great for targeting local customers in your area. The more details you provide on the listings, the greater the chance it will create to be displayed at the top.

For US-based stores, Facebook allows the upload of a Facebook product catalog feed to list the WooCommerce products automatically.

As you can see, WooCommerce product promotions on Facebook rely heavily on a Facebook product feed. Let’s find out what a product feed is in the first place.

What is A Facebook Product Feed?

For a busy eCommerce/WooCommerce store, it is impractical to add products one by one on channels like Facebook. Primarily because you would need to add/change/update the details every now and then.

Therefore, you need to find a way to add products in bulk and manage them with minimum effort. A product feed can help you with that.

A WooCommerce product data feed is a file through which you can export all your Woo products and list them on multiple channels. A product feed is created most commonly in spreadsheet CSV format and contains your product information, such as product titles, prices, descriptions, conditions, etc.

You can list product feed files on marketplaces such as Amazon, Target, eBay, Walmart, etc. You can also promote on affiliate sites and price comparison engines such as Google Shopping, Yahoo Shopping, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, etc.

And, of course, you can list and promote your products on social media sites, including Facebook, with a data feed file.

Facebook Product Feed Specification

Facebook has its own guidelines and attribute lists you must follow to create a product feed. Here’s a Facebook product feed example –

The red-marked column headers are different characteristics of your WooCommerce products. In a product feed, these are known as attributes. Every channel that supports product feed upload or connection has its own list of attributes.

Here are the Facebook attributes for different platforms.

Facebook product feed requirements for Shop

• id
• title
• description
• availability
• condition
• price
• link
• image_link
• Brand, MPN, or GTIN (include at least one)

Attributes for Marketplace (USA only)

• id
• title
• description
• availability
• inventory
• condition
• price
• link
• image_link
• Brand, MPN, or GTIN (include at least one)
• Facebook/google_product_category

Attributes for page shop, dynamic ads, Instagram shop

• id
• title
• description
• availability
• condition
• price
• link
• image_link
• Brand, MPN, or GTIN (include at least one)

How to Create A Facebook Product Feed

Tools like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel can create CSV spreadsheet files. This means you can create a Facebook product feed for WooCommerce using this software.

You can set the attributes as column headers and insert your product information underneath them. However, we highly discourage this manual method from WooCommerce store owners like you.

Here’s why.

• It can be time-consuming: If you have a large number of products, it can take a long time to enter all of the required information into a spreadsheet manually.
• It is prone to errors: Even a small mistake in your product feed can cause your products to be rejected by Facebook or displayed incorrectly.
• It is difficult to keep up with changes: If you make any changes to your product data, such as adding new products, updating prices, or changing inventory levels, you need to update your product feed accordingly. This can be difficult to do manually, especially if you have a large number of products.

To avoid all the challenges and difficulties of the manual feed generation process, you should use a WooCommerce Facebook product feed plugin. A product feed plugin can automate the process of creating and managing your Facebook product feed, which can save you time and effort.

One such plugin and what we found as the best in the market is CTX Feed. This plugin automates almost the entire product feed generation and management process.

The plugin has built-in templates for the Facebook catalog feed, and you can create a Facebook product feed in just two clicks. In addition to that, the plugin has advanced and useful features like automatic updates, feed hosting, link connection, category mapping, etc.

Along with CSV, the plugin also allows you to create a Facebook feed in other formats, such as TXT and XML.

How to Create a Facebook Product Feed Using A Plugin

If you have purchased the paid version of the plugin, you can upload it from your WordPress dashboard. Otherwise, install the free version from the plugin repository.

This is the menu you need to click on to start creating a Facebook data feed.

The Templates dropdown has over 130 channel templates. These templates are integrated with channel guidelines and attribute requirements. Select your channel.

The plugin will automatically populate Facebook product feed attributes. CTX Feed will also automatically copy-paste your product data into a feed file when you click generate.

To find your feed file, go to Manage Feeds. Here, you can also set automatic updates on set intervals.

From the settings, you can download or copy the feed link to connect to Facebook.

Uploading & Displaying WooCommerce Products on Facebook

The platform responsible for managing eCommerce product promotions across different Facebook tools is called Meta Commerce Manager. We must mention that the commerce Manager is the central hub for overseeing product promotions on both Facebook and Instagram.

Log in to the platform with your Facebook details. If you are there for the first time, you will see a similar screen.

Click the button and proceed to the next screen.

If you only want to create a Shop using your Facebook product feed, then select the first option. To promote your products in every possible place on Facebook and Instagram, select the Catalog option.

On the following screen, select eCommerce.

You need to select the Upload Product Info box and click Create to create an empty catalog.

This is how it would look.

Find and select Data Feed from Catalog>>Data sources.

Yes, we will upload a Facebook spreadsheet feed file.

Facebook allows you to connect a feed in three ways.

1. Uploading a feed file
2. Connect through a URL
3. Connect a Google Sheet feed

We will go with the URL option. Let’s go back to CTX Feed and copy the feed URL.

Now, insert/paste the URL in the following box and set the update frequency from the Data Feed Schedule tab.

Here’s how the process works. Imagine you made some changes to your product info in your Woo store. With CTX Feed, those changes get collected, and the feed file updates at your chosen interval.

Facebook then fetches these updates from the Facebook product feed URL and refreshes its listings according to the schedule you’ve set above.

Therefore, once you’ve set up your Facebook feed with CTX Feed, you can sit back and let Facebook and the plugin take care of everything automatically.

Save and upload to complete the process.

Wrap up

Given its widespread reach, Facebook is a marketing channel you cannot possibly ignore. You can significantly increase your traffic and sales and grow your brand reputation through this channel.

However, to effectively promote your products on this platform, you must create a well-optimized product feed for your WooCommerce store. We hope this article will guide you to create a Facebook product feed efficiently and help you reach your target audience.