Introducing Meta's Video Catalog Ads (or Product Level Video)

In the world of digital marketing, video advertising has become a powerful tool to captivate audiences and boost the visibility of products and services. In this context, Meta has introduced a new advertising solution: Video Catalog Ads.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction 

• Understanding Video Catalog Ads

• Creating Video Catalogs on Meta

• Meta Video Catalog Ads Specifications

   

Uploading videos as part of your digital marketing strategy has gained a lot of momentum and the recent rise of new video marketing trends supports this. In fact, quality visual content has been proven to help drive sales and improve ROI. 

With Video Catalog Ads or Product Level Video, you can upload video assets directly into your catalogue at the product/SKU level.   

Video Catalog Ads offers advertisers per-catalogue personalisation to improve performance while delivering inspirational video creatives at scale to drive effective new customer acquisition.

Understanding Video Catalog Ads

Video Catalog Ads or PLV is intended to complement and enhance an advertiser's existing investment in product catalogue sales and conversion campaigns on Meta. As such, Video Catalog Ads should be considered and used as part of the marketing elements to generate results and not a substitute for existing Advantatge+ catalogue ads or Advantage+ Shopping campaigns.


Here's what Video Catalog Ads have to offer:

Video creatives at scale

Advertisers can scale existing video production investments across all Meta locations with Reels, Feed, Stories and Watch. 

Creative personalisation

Machine Learning identifies and targets the highest-value customers and delivers personalised, high-performing creative at scale, choosing from images or video. 

Improves product discovery

Helps advertisers using catalogue ads effectively incorporate video as an incremental lever to drive product discovery, especially with broad audiences.

Creating Video Catalogs Ads on Meta

To create Video Catalog Ads on Meta you need to follow certain steps to make them work. Below, we show them to you:

• Create your videos

The first step is to obtain the video files you want to use for the advertising campaign. 

You need to choose the video files, which can then be attached to the individual products within the catalogue. 

And, of course, the aim is to make these videos as relevant to the product as possible: try to use the change to create dynamic videos including the most important product-specific information.

• Incorporate videos into your catalogue

The videos must then be entered into your catalogue.

• Upload video URLs in Meta Commerce Catalog

Once you have uploaded your videos to the online repository of your choice, the next step is to upload the URLs into your Meta Commerce catalogue.  

If you have just added the videos to your existing catalogue, the videos will be imported automatically, otherwise you will need to change the data source.

Once this is done, Meta will automatically download and store the video files for an internal integrity check.

You can then launch the video catalogue ads campaign.

• Set up your campaign

The last step is to set up the campaign in the same way as any other dynamic product ad or dynamic ad campaign for a broad audience.

This can be done through manual campaigns, Advantatge+ Shopping Campaigns or Advantatge+ App Campaigns promoting the new set of products containing the video URLs.

Meta Video Catalog Ads Specifications

Having understood how Video Catalog Ads are created, we will now show you the specifications for the correct incorporation of this type of ad.

• In terms of aspect ratios, advertisers are encouraged to upload multiple videos with aspect ratios of 9:16/4:5/1:1 for the same product. This gives advertisers full control over the appearance of their creative in different aspect ratio positions.

• Advertisers should set up a split test with two campaigns to accurately compare performance: one with a single manually uploaded video and the other with a product-level video uploaded through the catalogue.

• To maximise video delivery during testing, advertisers should consider creating product-only test product sets with video URLs associated with them.

• A minimum of 20 products is recommended, but there are no mandatory minimums.

• The size of each video should not exceed 200 MB. There are no length restrictions.

• In Ad creative where you see Catalogue assets you will see the option to "Automate media asset". The system will prioritise videos for all eligible placements and will resort to image only when necessary.

Video Catalog Ads offer brands a way to connect with audiences. This type of ad, combined with the broad audience, redefines the way brands reach their target audience.