I've never been able to get my Broad Dynamic Products Ads (BDPA) to perform. You know, the dynamic product ads aimed at a broad audience for acquisition rather than retargeting.

That is until I made a simple optimization. Now, I consistently see a ROAS > 3.5.

Here's what I did:

First, let me explain BDPA a bit more. Normally, after you browsed products from your favorite brands, you're probably used to see these image carousels of products.

These are Dynamic Product Ads. BDPA are the same, but targeting a cold, broad audience instead of retargeting.

The smart thing about BDPA is that when you target a broad audience, Facebook will show your products to people who've expressed interest in your type of products.

In other words, if FB sees that someone is looking at pants, FB will show your pants to that someone.

Now, the product feed. The product feed can be seen as an excel sheet you send to Facebook. The sheet includes all relevant information about your products that Facebook needs to show your products in ads such as:

- URL
- Name of product
- Price
- Link to the product page

If you dive into the FB docs, there's also a field called google_product_category that is recommended for you to include.

This field allows you to specify a code (from a list made by Google) that defines exactly what your product is. E.g. code 204 is pants, and 2271 is dresses.

As you can imagine, this field is important to include and map correctly to your products.

If FB doesn't know that it's pants you're selling, it's very difficult for the algorithm to show your ads to people looking for pants.

Alright. Back to the optimization that fixed my BDPA ads. As you might have guessed, it's related to the above field.

It's simple, actually. I never got around to specify the category code for each of my products in my tool. Instead, I relied on a fallback "apparel" category.

Recently, I finally came around to fixing this hoping that it would save my BDPA ads.

The result? Oh boy. I'm seeing a huge difference in performance before/after, and I'm expecting some carry-over to my other dynamic product ads (retargeting) as well.

The problem is that, afaik, Shopify's Facebook channel and ~most 3rd party product feed apps either don't include this field or don't let you map it specifically to each of your products in the app.

But, there's a solution:

1. Install the Google channel in your Shopify store.
2. In your backend, product by product, map the google category via More actions -> Google Fields.
3. Ensure that your product feed app/whatever pulls data from this. I know the Flexify app does.

Did you enjoy this thread?

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Data-driven eCommerce is my niche. I regularly post threads like this.

Do you want to learn how you can optimize your product feeds even further?

I'm working on a long newsletter about how you can improve the ROAS of your ads with multiple optimizations like the above.

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