Keep dynamic and catalog ads from promoting unavailable products. Learn how Advantage+ uses availability signals and how to prevent out‑of‑stock exposure.
How do Meta catalog ads typically avoid showing unavailable items?
They require manual pausing of each item inside Ads Manager daily
They crawl your site inventory live and ignore your feed data
They replace out‑of‑stock items with lookalike items from competitors
They respect the catalog item ‘availability’ field and can exclude out‑of‑stock products at delivery time
Where would you start troubleshooting if many items show as out‑of‑stock unexpectedly?
Page Settings → Templates and Tabs
Business Settings → Ad Account Roles
Audience Manager → Saved Audiences → Interests
Commerce Manager → Catalog → Items, then filter by availability issues
Which feed attribute must stay consistent with your site to prevent out‑of‑stock ads?
google_product_category numeric code only
color swatches rendered via CSS
price and availability synced with the merchant source
custom_label_0 naming schema
What safeguard helps when products go out of stock between scheduled feed fetches?
Set campaign budget to learning phase only
Change all images to PNG format
Disable the pixel to stop event ingestion
Raise feed update cadence or enable server‑side updates via API to shrink the staleness window
In Advantage+ catalog ads, what happens if an item in a set becomes unavailable mid‑flight?
can drop that item from delivery while other items continue serving
The entire campaign pauses until the item returns
All ads switch to a generic placeholder image
The ad forces a 404 redirect to the category page
What’s a recommended QA step before enabling new product sets for prospecting?
Publish with highest budget to accelerate learning
Preview catalog ads and verify live links and availability flags
Disable all diagnostics to avoid noise
Start with international geos to find errors faster
Which policy‑related consequence can result from chronic price/availability mismatch?
Mandatory switch to manual placements only
Forced use of static image ads for 30 days
Removal of the pixel from your assets
Account‑level ad restrictions until data parity is restored
What structure reduces risk when seasonal items churn stock rapidly?
Merge all products into one broad set to maximize delivery
Disable the data source and upload CSVs monthly
Segment product sets by inventory volatility and update them on separate schedules
Run only single‑image ads without a catalog
If your platform supports it, which integration best minimizes latency for availability changes?
Quarterly product feed audits only
Manual spreadsheet edits each Friday
Nightly CSV email attachments
Real‑time updates with the Catalog/Marketing API with webhooks or server pushes
Which metric should you watch to confirm safeguards are working for shoppers?
Landing‑page 404 rate and add‑to‑cart attempts on unavailable SKUs
Outbound CTR only
Frequency per user
Page likes gained
Starter
Topic basics locked in; keep practicing.
Solid
Strong grasp; refine edge cases and QA habits.
Expert!
Excellent. You balance automation, signals and QA for scale.
