What is a Product Catalog?
A product catalog is the structured list of your SKUs and their attributes (title, price, availability, category, images, ratings). It’s the source of truth for catalog ads.
Understanding Product Catalogs
A product catalog is more than a list; it is the structured backbone that connects your products to delivery systems and creative. Clean, complete attributes help platforms understand what you sell and who should see it, reducing ambiguity and wasted spend. When the catalog mirrors how you merchandise—categories, brands, price tiers—it becomes a reliable control surface for testing and scaling. Standardized naming and taxonomies make reporting clearer and troubleshooting faster. Strong catalogs also reduce disapprovals and mismatches that derail performance.
For creative, the product catalog powers dynamic templates that render price, ratings, promos, and media directly on the ad. That turns every impression into a tailored product story with less manual work. Catalog hygiene improves both pre‑click relevance and post‑click continuity by matching ads to the right landing pages. As you expand to new channels, the same catalog fuels performance across social, search, and CTV. Small data fixes compound across every impression.
Why Product Catalogs matter
Product catalogs matter because they determine how precisely platforms can match your items to shoppers and placements. A clean catalog expands eligible inventory while protecting efficiency, so you can scale without guesswork. It also turns creative into a system by feeding on‑ad clarity directly from the data.
- Relevance: Better attributes → better matching.
- Scale: One catalog feeds many platforms.
- Creative: Templates pull price, reviews, and promos directly.
How Product Catalogs work
Product catalogs work by exporting structured product data (CSV, XML, API) that platforms ingest on a schedule. The platform validates required fields, flags errors, and indexes items for eligibility and ranking. Campaigns then reference subsets of the catalog through product sets to control which SKUs can serve. Dynamic templates render titles, prices, and reviews from the catalog so ads stay accurate without manual updates. Freshness matters—price and availability must stay synced to avoid disapprovals and bounce. Consistent taxonomies enable cross‑channel reuse and clearer reporting.
Meta Information
- Primary Keyword: Product Catalog
- Secondary Keywords: product feed, catalog feed, SKU catalog
- Target Word Count: 900–1,100 words
- Meta Title: What is a Product Catalog? The Source of Truth for Ads | Marpipe
- Meta Description: A product catalog is a structured list of SKUs and attributes. Learn why clean catalogs drive performance across channels.
- URL: marpipe.com/ad-glossary/product-catalog
# What is a Product Catalog?
A product catalog is the structured list of your SKUs and their attributes (title, price, availability, category, images, ratings). It’s the source of truth for catalog ads.
Understanding Product Catalogs
A product catalog is more than a list; it is the structured backbone that connects your products to delivery systems and creative. Clean, complete attributes help platforms understand what you sell and who should see it, reducing ambiguity and wasted spend. When the catalog mirrors how you merchandise—categories, brands, price tiers—it becomes a reliable control surface for testing and scaling. Standardized naming and taxonomies make reporting clearer and troubleshooting faster. Strong catalogs also reduce disapprovals and mismatches that derail performance.
For creative, the product catalog powers dynamic templates that render price, ratings, promos, and media directly on the ad. That turns every impression into a tailored product story with less manual work. Catalog hygiene improves both pre‑click relevance and post‑click continuity by matching ads to the right landing pages. As you expand to new channels, the same catalog fuels performance across social, search, and CTV. Small data fixes compound across every impression.
Why Product Catalogs matter
Product catalogs matter because they determine how precisely platforms can match your items to shoppers and placements. A clean catalog expands eligible inventory while protecting efficiency, so you can scale without guesswork. It also turns creative into a system by feeding on‑ad clarity directly from the data.
- Relevance: Better attributes → better matching.
- Scale: One catalog feeds many platforms.
- Creative: Templates pull price, reviews, and promos directly.
How Product Catalogs work
Product catalogs work by exporting structured product data (CSV, XML, API) that platforms ingest on a schedule. The platform validates required fields, flags errors, and indexes items for eligibility and ranking. Campaigns then reference subsets of the catalog through product sets to control which SKUs can serve. Dynamic templates render titles, prices, and reviews from the catalog so ads stay accurate without manual updates. Freshness matters—price and availability must stay synced to avoid disapprovals and bounce. Consistent taxonomies enable cross‑channel reuse and clearer reporting.
Best practices
- Standardize titles and categories; include brand and variant.
- Keep price, availability, and sale windows in sync.
- Add ratings/review counts for social proof overlays.
- Use custom labels for margin, season, lifecycle.
- Include multiple image angles and video URLs when available.
How Marpipe Helps
- The Challenge: Managing product catalogs across multiple platforms requires manual validation, enrichment, and synchronization—becoming unsustainable as catalog size grows. Missing attributes, broken images, and inconsistent data lead to disapprovals and wasted spend. Keeping pricing, availability, and product data aligned across channels requires constant manual updates.
- Marpipe's Solution: Marpipe's feed management tools keep your product catalog clean, enriched, and synchronized across all platforms. The platform integrates with your ecommerce store to automatically sync pricing, availability, and product attributes. Automated enrichment adds missing fields like ratings, review counts, and custom labels that improve targeting and creative quality. Catalog health dashboards highlight issues before they cause disapprovals, and centralized updates ensure your product catalog stays consistent across Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Snap, and CTV.
- Proof Points: Brands using Marpipe's product catalog management see 95%+ feed approval rates and reduce catalog maintenance time by 80%. Automated enrichment and synchronization ensure product catalogs stay accurate without manual updates.
- CTA: Explore Feed Management and see how Marpipe keeps your product catalog healthy and enriched.
