How to customize Meta Advantage+ catalog ad creative with templates

Scroll past a few catalog ads and you know the look. A product on white, a title, a price. Yours, and everyone else’s.

It doesn’t have to stay that way. Here is what you can change inside Meta Ads Manager, where that runs out, and how a template gets your brand, price, reviews and the right shape into every ad. Image and video. With a real test between two looks.

Why every catalog ad looks the same

Advantage+ catalog ads (Meta’s new name for dynamic product ads) are built from your product feed. Meta takes each product’s image, title and price and assembles the ad. So the ad can only be as good as the image in the feed.

For most stores, that image is the pack shot from the product page. It was shot to sit in a tidy grid of products. It was never meant to stop a thumb in a feed.

What you can change inside Meta Ads Manager

Meta gives catalog ads a few creative tools of its own. Find them in the ad’s creative settings.

• A frame. An image you upload, such as a border or your logo, laid over every product image.
• Catalog info labels. The current price, a struck-through sale price, the percentage off or free shipping. You set how they look.
• Advantage+ creative enhancements. Meta can also touch up your images itself, with generated backgrounds or expanded images.

If a price sticker on every ad is all you want, stop here.

Where Meta’s tools run out

• One frame fits all. The same frame sits on your bestseller and on last season’s leftovers. It can’t show one product’s 4.9 stars or flag another as new.
• Labels stop at price, discount and shipping. Reviews, a headline written for the product, a badge for new arrivals: none of them are on the menu.
• You decorate the photo you already have. A pack shot on white stays a pack shot on white, now with a sticker.

Put the design in the feed instead

Meta shows whatever image your feed hands it. So hand it a finished ad.

A template is one ad layout that Renable renders for every product in your catalog. The rendered image goes out in the feed as the product’s image. Meta runs it like any other catalog ad, except now it looks like your brand. Product data drops in as named placeholders, like [Product name] and [Price], so each product fills in its own.

• Your brand. Your colors, your fonts, your logo. The product sits on your background, cut out from its white one, or in a lifestyle shot.
• Price that knows about sales. The was-price and a percentage-off badge appear only on products that are actually discounted.
• Reviews on the image. Connect your review feed and the ad shows the product’s stars, its review count, or a line from a real review. Hide the stars where the score is low.
• Promos with an end date. A Black Friday banner that shows between two dates and disappears by itself.
• Always current. When a price or a product changes, its ad image is made again.

You don’t need to be a designer. Start from a ready-made template and swap in your colors, or describe the ad to Aimée, the AI agent inside Renable. She builds it in Studio, Renable’s template editor. Nothing reaches your ads until you publish.

The right shape in every placement

Send one fixed image and it runs everywhere. That is how you get a square ad letterboxed into Stories, with empty bars above and below it.

A template holds several sizes at once. Square for the feed, portrait (4:5), and story (9:16) for Stories and Reels. The product data is shared. The layout is set per size, so the story version can keep the price clear of Meta’s buttons.

Renable sends all the shapes to Meta as one design with one name, like cozy-corner. An ad that runs that design stays on it, and Meta picks the shape that fits where the ad is showing. For that, the ad needs Meta’s Adapt to placement setting switched on in its Advantage+ settings. More in the help center: Adaptive designs.

Give the same design a video

Any template can be a video. Give it a length of up to 30 seconds, animate the elements, and every product gets its own video with its own price and reviews. Add the video to the same design as the images. Meta chooses image or video for each impression through a setting it calls Dynamic Media.

There is a second reason to do it. Dynamic Media is on by default, and where a product has no video, Meta may add one it found itself: from your product pages, your Facebook Page or your Instagram. In Meta’s own words, a video you add yourself “takes priority over all automatically added videos, which makes them disappear from the catalog.” Supply your own and you decide what plays.

Add a video when you are ready for Meta to use it. Any ad with Dynamic Media on can draw on it, pinned or not. The steps are in Get video into your catalog ads.

Which look sells? Test two designs on one catalog

You have an everyday design and a bolder one. You don’t need a second catalog or a second feed to find out which sells. Both designs already live in the same feed.

1. Duplicate the ad set. Same catalog, same audience, same budget. Name each copy after its design so the report makes sense later.
2. Pin a different design to each. Open each ad set’s ad in Meta Ads Manager. In the Renable Options panel, click Use on the design that ad set should run.
3. Let Meta run the test. Meta’s A/B test splits the audience evenly between the two ad sets. Two ad sets running side by side without it are not split evenly.
4. Read the winner in Ads Manager. Then pin more ads to it.

Four things keep the test honest:

• Pin while the ad sets are paused. A switch makes a new version of the ad’s creative. Meta may review it again, and a live ad can restart its learning. Paused, both start together.
• Give both designs the same shapes and the same media. If only one has a story version or a video, that difference is what you end up measuring.
• Check coverage first. The panel shows how many products a design renders for. A product the design can’t render for shows your everyday design in that ad set.
• Compare feed and portrait placements. Stories and Reels show your everyday design in both ad sets, so they are not part of the test.

Adding a design never changes which image a running ad shows. So build the Black Friday look weeks early. It waits in the feed until you pin an ad to it.

Not sure where to click? Open Aimée in a side panel beside Ads Manager. She sees the ads you have open, tells you which design each one runs and where to click next, and quotes what Meta reported for the period you ask about. She reads. You make the changes.

Renable Options, the Chrome extension that puts the panel and Aimée inside Meta Ads Manager, is in early access. See what it shows on every ad, or the full walkthrough in Test two designs against each other.

What it takes

Templates need a product feed that Renable imports and sends on to your Meta catalog. Aimée drafts templates, and you publish them. She can’t upload your logo, fonts or photos, so add those in Studio yourself. Meta still decides which ad shows where. More on the Meta side: Renable for Meta.

No feed yet? Start here: How to export a product feed from Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and BigCommerce

Selling sizes and colors? How to handle variants and out-of-stock products in Meta catalog ads