Facebook Catalog Pixel Product Data Source - Remove Deleted Products - facebook

I have been creating facebook pixels and catalogs for ecommerce sites, the catalogs are connected to the pixels, and they can add, update and remove products automatically. Great.
Problem is I don't understand how the "remove deleted products" feature works.
This is found under the catalog "product data sources", in a connected pixel settings.
*Add New Products (on/off)
*Update Existing Product Info (on/off)
*Remove Deleted Products (on/off)
Add/update is easy enough, when someone views a product page, the pixel fires, and the catalog gets the information.
But the pixel is not tracking or receiving information from our sites backend, it has no way of knowing when we deleted a product.
How would it know?
I've been searching and searching for some kind of documentation describing this feature but am so far empty handed. If someone knows where that is, that would be very helpful.
I've been talking to facebook support and it's just going in circles:
Facebook: (First response after asking how this feature works)
"Thanks for being patient! It looks like that option would be for the Pixel to update any products that have been deleted from your website!"
My reply: "Right, but I was just wondering how it knows a product has been deleted?
As I understand it the pixel updates products as they are viewed on the website, so when a customer goes to a product page, it will add or update this product.
But what triggers a product deletion? "
Facebook: "When you delete the product, that is when it'll start implementing. So when you delete the product that what "triggers" it!"
My reply: "How does it know though? The pixel is not tracking our sites backend when we remove a product.
Does it trigger if a previously existing product page 404's or redirects?"
Facebook: "When you remove that is not deleting when you delete that is when it will start tracking. It will know when you delete the product., it will not trigger if the product 404's or redirects."
I don't even know how to respond to the last one, I don't understand his answer at all.
Please help.

Related

Is there a way to display the Product Title before the Brand Name in Facebook Page Shop?

I exported all the tags required by Facebook from my third-party online store (Lightspeed) and the data stream works as expected in terms of automatic updates, but products on my facebook page shop (Shop tab) are displayed with the brand name first — L'Oratoire Saint-Joseph — followed by the product title.
See it live : https://www.facebook.com/osaintjoseph/
The unfortunate result is that the text under many products is exactly the same. Is there a way to display the Product Title before the Brand Name?
Lightspeed support told me I had to take it up with Facebook. I am awaiting their reply. See my questions in the fb developer forum here : https://developers.facebook.com/settings/developer/community/
There are 3 ways to add products to Facebook Shop:
Manually
Data feed (e.g. CSV import)
Third party plugins (which you’re using).
Manually – the user is only able to enter 4 properties; title, description, image & variant. See facebook.com/business/help/293945421560847. There is no concept of product brand.
Data feed – this allows for additional properties, such as brand name. In the table, see example files and select product (csv, tsv or xml) facebook.com/business/help/120325381656392?id=725943027795860. However it looks like all Facebook does is concatenate string, that's the product title becomes "{brandName} – {productName}". It look like brand name is not used anywhere else. Nor is there an option to change the way it's displayed. If you edit the product, you should be able to see this in the Product Title.
Shop tab (third party plugin) – (May be it's me, but I found their documentation hard to follow) – They send an XML feed to Facebook support.shoptab.net/hc/en-us/articles/200583466-XML-Feed-for-Facebook-Storefront-with-ShopTab. They do not appear to have a concept of brand. Try and examine the data. I would expect the brand name to appear in the product title. Alternatively they allow for CSV, which also doesn't contain brand name support.shoptab.net/hc/en-us/articles/200583906-CCNow-Integration-with-ShopTab-s-Facebook-Store-App
Summary
If possible, examine the data that is sent from Shop tab to Facebook.
Try and find out if you’re able to exclude / alter the string concatenation of brand name from product title in Shop tab. If not raise a support ticket with them.
Alternatively see if you can manually edit the product title in Facebook. It’s not a long-term fix, but helps understand how the system are integrated.

Wrong image on facebook catalog

I have developed a daily csv file with php and mysql technology. Facebook uses this csv to show all our products on our facebook store.
The problem is that facebook displays a wrong image for some products. I have checked my csv and the image is right.
After that, I accessed to facebook catalog administration over a wrong image, then I saw that the product is showing the right image on the administration page.
Example:
Wrong image: https://www.facebook.com/products/image/?item_id=2344243688984642&display=multi&version=1&image_id=2169702346485626&image_width=186&image_height=186&display_option=background_padding&logging_boundary=item_preview
The right image that appears on 'edit product': https://external.xx.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php?d=AQCLCxZ9xrRUhd9m&url=https%3A%2F%2Fshop.atosa.es%2Fimg%2Fp%2F1%2F0%2F1%2F1%2F1011.jpg&_nc_hash=AQDWNd_Ct7njTn3V
It seems the wrong image is hosted by facebook and the right image by our server
I think that FB has a cache or something similar that do not update the image.
Any idea to update that wrong images?
I believe once before when you've been creating your catalog you still served a wrong image to FB. When FB fetches you feed now it sees the same URL and doesn't update the image because of that.
The solution would be to add any arbitrary parameter at the end of you image link like.
https://youserver/image.jpg?id=1
It should still return your image, but be a new link so that FB could recognize smth has change. It helped in many cases I had with wrong images in catalogs.
The ultimate solution would be to change the product's ID in the feed which will lead to FB creating an absolutely new product in the catalog. Mind, that it will discard product stats and you'll have to send that new ID in pixel or you mobile app.
Try the link solution first. You can also duplicate the product just adding a test one to the feed and check if a new fake test product looks correctly.
Let me know if it helps.

Attempted Frozen Title Change: Any FB developers?

This has been asked a few times over the past couple of years but as Facebook tells me "Facebook engineers actively participate on StackOverflow.." So I'm hoping get get some joy here.
We have uploaded a video to youtube, passed it round and made sure we are happy with it, made it public and tried to change the title from 'xxx - final' to the actual title. However, Facebook shares are showing the old prerelease title but not the actual title, leading to much confusion amongst our subscribers and those trying to share the video. I should add the time between clicking the 'public' button to updating the title was a matter of minutes and seconds.
I have run it through the Facebook debugger and the scraper can see the changes but the problem persists along with the following debugger message:
"Attempted Frozen Title Change It appears that you are trying to change the property og:title from xxx to xxx. If so, you are not allowed to for this object because too many actions have been published against it."
This is obviously a real problem for us. Has anyone come up with a definitive solution or course of action? We can't simply delete the video because its for a band and there have been numerous post to not only Facebook but fan forums and elsewhere already and deleting and re-uploading the video would require an alternative url.
Many thanks
I managed to talk to a FB developer about this. Is seems that its a protective measure to stop click baiting, fake links and so on. His advice was make sure you upload the file as you want to see it when it goes live - ie. Don't use 'video 4.. final version' or some similar 'temporary' title because as soon as people start to view click or comment it becomes locked.
The engineer I spoke to was kind enough to unfreeze the video so all was well in the end, but looking at the comments of others who have had the same problem I was pretty lucky as it was a long standing Youtube account with 100,000's views and hundreds of links pointing to it meaning they were comfortable that I wasn't 'trying it on'.
So the bottom line is: if you want to upload a video and share it with your Facebook account, make sure the you have set the titles, tags and any metadata on the video immediately and before you paste to, or, share on youtube or there is a strong possibility that even though you can update that info on Youtube, Facebook won't recognise the changes and instead use the information it has in its database when the video was first scraped.

Facebook Like posting different to what debugger showing

I cant figure this one out, i have built a site with an e commerce system and i want visitors to be able to like an individual product and thus that product be added to their feed.
I have added all the open graph code to the relevant place, but when someone clicks "Like" is shares a default thing rather than the perticular product. this is the one i have been using for an example
https://pinnaclesupplement.co.uk/index.php/shop/168/10/weight-gainers/serious-mass-2-72kg-detail
so I tried using the facebook debugger to see if i could figure it out, but thats is showing the correct info and exactly what i want to show up on peoples feeds! here is a link for that.
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=https%3A%2F%2Fpinnaclesupplement.co.uk%2Findex.php%2Fshop%2F168%2F10%2Fweight-gainers%2Fserious-mass-2-72kg-detail
You have your Like button set up to point to http://www.pinnaclesupplement.co.uk – so when people klick like, they only get the “default thing”, your basic site’s description.
If you want customers to like a specific product page’s URL – then you should point the href parameter of the Like button there.

Open Graph Action and Object Resubmission

As I submit an application for "read" action on Open Graph I received the following response.
Status: Changes needed
Unfortunately, your article.read built-in submission does not meet the read requirements specified at: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/actions/builtin/#read. You must give users the ability to turn sharing off/on globally as well as remove an article that was shared within the app. In addition, read actions should only be generated when there is a strong indication that the user is actually reading the article. Please note that we cannot accept resubmission as this time due to technical limitations, so you will need to create a new submission. We plan to have this resolved within the next couple of weeks. We suggest making the required changes and checking back. We appreciate your patience. Note: If you are creating an aggregation based on the object, you need to add 6-7 unique sample objects, and then create a corresponding sample action acting on each of these unique objects. (You can not just create 6-7 sample actions pointing to the same sample object). Submission Checklist: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/checklist
Please make changes below and resubmit for review.
Unfortunately, this "guide" is not helping with anything. Firstly, I have no idea where to do this:
You must give users the ability to turn sharing off/on globally as well as remove an article that was shared within the app.
Second of all, I don't even know how to "resubmit"!
Any help would be appreciated.
I was experiencing the same thing. You have to click on the name of your action that you submitted. Once you do that, Facebook provides detailed instructions why they didn't approve the action and what you need to do before you resubmit. Once you review the message, you can make the necessary changes and save the action again. Then you'll have the option to resubmit. In my case Facebook said that I need to provide more detailed instructions what the user needs to do to get an action published. They provided this example: "User must create an account, enable Timeline sharing in the settings, view a product within the app and then click the “want” button underneath the product image to trigger a story". I did that and resubmitted. Hopefully it works this time around. Good luck.
To resubmit, just delete the rejected action and create a new one. You can use the same action name as before. You then go through the submission process again as you did the first time.
Facebook have recently updated their guide to implementing their built-in action types. For the Read action type, see https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/actions/builtin/#read. You will see a sample application that meets the following criteria required for the use of this action type:
Turn sharing on/off globally on each page an article appears.
Remove articles they shared within your app on each page an article appears.
Only generate read actions when you're sure someone is interested in reading the article.
Built-In actions can't be resubmitted. It is a FB Bug:
https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/364663400220101?browse=search_4f44876aabaef7501649601
From this answer on FB tools and support I got this:
You can start a new submission at the bottom of the "Items in Review" page:
https://developers.facebook.com/apps/337449599791917/review-status/items-in-review/
That link didn't work for me.. so I just went to the app dashboard and clicked on status and review
clicking on the start a new submission button loaded a dialog that prompted me to select which items to "re-review".. so I only selected the problematic one:
after that it loads a form for you to resubmit, so here you gotta re-upload the iOS simulator build etc..
and that's it!