Feed-based catalog campaigns have been around for years. Despite some improvements, they largely remain the same— carousels of single products on a white background.

“But you can add the price, a custom label, a custom frame, or other items from a limited list.”, you might say. And you would be right. However, that’s not enough.

Catalog campaigns are invaluable for eCommerce websites because they fulfill their specific role very well. They are a great revenue source for both retargeting website visitors and reaching new audiences.

The real question then becomes:

How can we stand out in our customers’ extremely busy feeds with our catalog ads?

The answer is Enhanced Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs). Let us explain why below.

Why Do We Need Enhanced Dynamic Product Ads?

Enhanced Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs) help you to stand out in the customer’s busy feed.

They allow you to create creatives that align with your brand guidelines personalized for every product in your portfolio, with all the specific features you want to include. Whether you have 1,000, 10,000, or more than 100,000 products, Enhanced DPAs can handle it flawlessly.

Another undeniable benefit of Enhanced DPAs is that your campaigns do not restart every time you make a change. Every edit in the creative is feed-based, so no changes are made in the social media business managers.

This is significant! No need to go back to a learning phase. We bet you can relate to the frustration of being asked to make a “simple and small” change in your campaign, knowing it will reset your optimizations and force you to start all over again. With Enhanced DPAs, that’s over!

Let’s dive deeper into the topic.

What is DPA?

DPA is a type of ad within Meta, Pinterest, and other advertising ecosystems that automatically promote products to the right audience based on user behavior and product catalog data.

In today’s competitive advertising landscape, personalization is crucial for capturing consumer attention and driving conversions. DPAs leverage product and user data to deliver highly relevant product ads, making them a powerful tool for digital marketers.

There are two main types of DPAs – Standard and Enhanced. Standard DPAs have a few limitations. Enhanced DPAs on the other hand provide much richer functionality and flexibility.

Cons of Standard DPAs

While DPAs are effective, the standard setup has several limitations. Standard DPAs offer limited creative flexibility, leading to less personalized user experiences.

Additionally, the ability to include detailed product information is so limited that you lose tons of revenue opportunity. Meta leaves most of the possible customizations only for the text fields and not the visual itself.

Managing campaigns through Meta Ads Manager can be cumbersome and slow. This is especially true for accounts with many ad sets and ads. Any changes often result in resetting the campaigns and disrupting the algorithm.

Standard DPAs also lack the functionality to schedule changes, requiring manual updates that can be time-consuming.

What are Enhanced DPAs

Enhanced DPAs utilize third-party tools to address and overcome the limitations of standard DPAs. Depending on the tool, they offer several advanced features that solve the common problems associated with standard DPAs.

Enhanced DPAs provide greater creative flexibility, allowing marketers to use of dynamic templates across the entire product catalog or different templates for selected parts of it. This enables you to create highly personalized and engaging ads tailored to specific product groups or buyer personas.

Enhanced DPAs enable the inclusion of various data elements, such as

• review ratings
• sale names
• sale end dates
• discount percentages
• additional product images

This enriched information makes the ad creatives more relevant and appealing to the audience.

Benefits of Enhanced DPAs

1. Creative Possibilities at Scale

Enhanced DPAs ensure each product in your catalog has a tailored creative, presenting the right product with the right message to the right customer at the right time.

2. Scheduling Changes

With enhanced DPAs, you can schedule changes in advance. This allows you to optimize work hours and free up more time for strategic thinking and planning. In addition, it eliminates the need for manual updates during weekends or holidays.

3. Testing Capabilities

Enhanced DPAs offer unmatched testing capabilities. You can test various elements such as review ratings, sale names, sale end dates, delivery dates, discount percentages, and additional product images to determine what improves performance.

4. Synergy Across Channels

Winning templates on Meta can be implemented across other advertising platforms like Pinterest, TikTok, and Snapchat, and vice versa, ensuring consistent and optimized performance across multiple channels.

5. Preserving the learning

Enhanced DPAs preserve the learning accumulated in your campaigns. This ongoing optimization improves the effectiveness of your ads over time. Not resetting the campaigns ensures that the compounding effect of learning is not disrupted, allowing the campaign to build on its past performance data continuously.

6. Improved performance

Typically, increasing ad spend often leads to a decrease in Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). However, in our tests within the jewelry industry, we observed a remarkable 136% increase in ROAS despite increasing ad spend by 70.89%. This demonstrates that Enhanced DPAs not only boosted ad revenue but also improved efficiency. Additionally, the cost per purchase was reduced by 41.20%.

How to prepare your infrastructure for Enhanced DPAs?

To effectively implement Enhanced DPAs, it is important to prepare your infrastructure properly. Here’s how:

Tracking

Fixing tracking infrastructure is ROImonks’s first priority, and for good reason. If not implemented correctly, including a redundant setup that sends events through both the browser and server, everything else becomes nearly useless. The butterfly effect is fully applicable here.

Ensure that your implementation includes at least the following:

1. All relevant e-commerce events such as view_content, add_to_cart, initiate_checkout, add_shipping_info, add_payment_info, and purchase.
2. The view_content event should also be implemented on listing pages and resend with every filter or sorting change. The algorithm should know what products your visitors have seen to serve them the most relevant products in retargeting ads.
3. Additionally, send less common events like search and add_to_wishlist to provide Meta with more context, which could improve performance.
4. Ensure all e-commerce parameters and customer match parameters are sent with your events.

Product feed

1. The product feed is the foundation of your Enhanced DPA. Ensure it includes mandatory fields like product_id, name, brand, category, regular price, sale price, website link, images, etc.
2. Consider including additional fields that can be tested in your templates, such as sale end date, sale name, delivery date, and specific product attributes.
3. It is crucial that the product_id and content_id match across your product feed and tracking events. This alignment allows Meta to accurately identify which product was viewed on your website and show the same item from your catalog to the customer. You can review your catalog match rate in the Events report in the Commerce Manager.

Campaign structure (guidelines for Meta)

1. To align your account structure with the implementation of enhanced DPAs, organize your campaigns and ad sets for optimal targeting, template testing, and overall management. Plan to test different ad formats such as carousels, single images, and videos.
2. Ensure that Meta’s enhancements at the ad level (Advantage+ creative) are turned off to prevent unexpected behavior.

Testing

To maximize the benefits of Enhanced DPAs, it’s essential to continuously fine-tune your ad templates by testing different elements. This ensures that your ads remain relevant and effective, adapting to changing market trends and consumer behaviors. Changes in templates can have a significant impact on your results.

Conclusion

Enhanced DPAs provide significant advantages over standard DPAs by offering greater creative flexibility, scalability, advanced testing capabilities, the ability to schedule changes, synergy across different channels, and improved performance.

By properly preparing your infrastructure and testing different concepts, you can maximize the performance and efficiency of your social media campaigns. If you’re interested in learning more about how to utilize the full potential of Enhanced DPAs for your project, contact ROImonks without hesitation.

✉️ P.S. Subscribe to our newsletter if you want to get tips like these straight to your inbox. ⬇️