Best practices for catalog

Last updated: September 2024

Investing in a high-quality product catalog can enhance the audience experience, boost engagement, and improve your advertising performance results.

Ensure correct permissions

To make changes to a catalog, such as adding items or creating product sets, you need to have the Catalog Management role. To learn more about appropriate permission levels, refer to Manage your catalog.
If you are managed by an agency or partner, we recommend sharing your catalog access with your agency or partner Business Center account. This prevents losing permissions to your catalog if your agency or partner changes.

Event match rate represents the percent of signals events shared that can be matched to the SKU ID in your catalog using the Content ID attribute. You will want to optimize your event match rates towards 100% for optimal ad delivery targeting higher intent users that maximizes performance results.
For more details on how to optimize your event match rate, refer to Best practices for increasing catalog event match rates.

Use high-quality images or videos that are at least 500x500 pixels. If the minimum image specifications are not followed, the product will not be approved during review.
All images must be in JPEG or PNG format. Images uploaded using an image link must be complete, valid and end with .jpeg or .png extension in its URL. For example, https://www.tiktok.com/t_shirt_image_001.jpg
Showcase your product prominently by using a white background and by avoiding blurred images, placeholders, distracting logos, watermarks, or images with too many background elements. This will increase the likelihood of your products being displayed and promote call to action.

Having minimal product issues or disapprovals allows for a wider selection of items to be delivered and showcased to audiences, maximizing the potential of your catalog. Learn how to spot and resolve common product issues with diagnostics dashboard.
Comply with all applicable laws, rules, and regulations that apply to the targeted advertising regions as each product is reviewed against our policies to ensure the safety of our audiences. Learn more about dangerous products or services.
In the event of false disapproval, you may submit an appeal request. To learn more, refer to How to appeal rejected catalog products.
Avoid spelling mistakes, exaggerated claims, or unrecognizable symbols such as ®, ™, © that may result in product disapproval. Use precise and distinct product titles and descriptions that highlight important information. Additionally, the title attribute should not exceed 150 characters while the description attribute should not exceed 20,000 characters.
Ensure your server or hosting site has necessary permissions that allow Tiktok to fetch product information smoothly and timely without any restrictions. This can be done by whitelisting TikTok's IP address or by reaching out to your dedicated sales representative.

Refresh your catalog on a daily basis to provide optimal audience experience by keeping your product information consistent and up to date in both your catalog and website from any changes in prices or availability. To learn more, refer to How to manually refresh products in your catalog.

Ensure product titles and descriptions are consistent with the information provided on your landing page for optimal delivery and audience experience.
Ensure your product links are accurate by making sure they start with either http:// or https:// , your website is properly functioning, and has the necessary permissions and robots.txt configurations for scraping. We regularly review the accuracy of your product data with the information provided on your landing page through web-scraping technology to ensure its consistency and quality. By doing so, you can help ensure that your products are reviewed in a timely manner and prevent them from being disapproved.

Providing optional attributes such as Shipping, Brand Name, Age, Gender, Color, Size, Google Product Category, and any other details about your products can help to enhance your products visibility. The more comprehensive and accurate your optional attributes are, the better the chance of providing your audiences with the most suitable recommendations.
Classifying your products into 2 to 3 levels of Google Product Category will aid customers in finding your products through search and filters, enhancing overall recommendations and ad performance results. For example, Apparel & Accessories will have sub-category of Clothing, then will have a category for Dresses.
Placing key information at the start of your product title and descriptions will help to capture audience attention, even if the full name is not visible in certain ad formats.

Variants are different versions of the same item, such as a dress that comes in different colors and sizes. Setting up variants in your catalog can benefit you by allowing audiences to see other variants on your product page, and displaying a wider selection of items since only one variant of each item will be delivered in your ads.
If you offer multiple variants of the same product, ensure that you add an item_group_id attribute and assign the same ID to all products of the variants. Note: Each product within a variant must still have its own sku_id attribute.

Create product sets to group products according to their use case, such as category, themes or specific hero items, to promote them in a more targeted manner. Shopping Ads is recommended for the following use cases:
- Brand Promotion: If you have a large catalog and want to promote your brand without specifying products.
- Category Promotion: If you have a few hot or seasonal products, or if you want to promote a specific category.
- Hero SKUs: If you only have 1-3 products, such as new product launches, small medium businesses, or promotions for hot products.

Ensure that Enhanced Catalog Review (ECR) is enabled for your catalog. To learn more, refer to About Enhanced Catalog Review.