15+ Common Facebook Product Feed Errors And Their Fixes

Uploading an accurate and detailed Facebook product feed on Meta Commerce Manager is very important to market your products effectively across Facebook. This is because when product feeds are accurate, there are fewer chances of product disapprovals and any type of negative impact on our ad visibility. 

However, to ensure your feeds are accurate and compliant with the platform’s guidelines, you must avoid all the common Facebook product feed errors. 

What are those common feed errors? Is it difficult to identify and fix them?

To answer all these questions, we have come up with this blog. 

In this blog, we will learn about some of the most common and recurring Facebook feed errors. Additionally, we will also understand how you can easily resolve them to ensure that there is no disruption in your Facebook marketing efforts. 

Let’s get started! 

What is a Facebook Product Feed? 

A Facebook product feed is a file containing a list of your products and their attributes, like title, price, image, etc. 

This feed file is mainly prepared in CSV, TSV, XLSX, or XML formats. It is useful for uploading your items and their data to your catalog in Meta Commerce Manager. You can either upload it manually from your computer, or use a URL or Google Sheet, as Meta recommends.

How is a product feed different from a catalog? In Meta’s words, a catalog is a container that includes all the information of those items (products) that you are interested in marketing across different Meta platforms. Whereas, as we discussed, a feed is a structured file (in XML, CSV, or other formats) that includes your products and their attributes, etc., and is mainly used to send product data to different marketplaces or even upload product data to catalogs as in the case of Meta.

List of Common Facebook Product Feed Errors (With Solutions) 

Now we will go through each type of Facebook feed error that is the most common amongst merchants. 

1. Issues Related To Accessing Your Data Feed File

Whenever you see one of the following errors, “your data feed field couldn’t be accessed,” “failed to connect to FTP server,” etc., it means that Facebook cannot access your data feed from your server or hosting site. 

This is one of the most common Facebook product feed errors that many merchants face. To prevent or fix it, ensure that: 

• Your file URL is directly linking to the downloadable file. It cannot link to an individual product page or any other Facebook page. 
• The file URL should be accessible. 
• URL headers are in the correct format. For example, you cannot set the content-encoding to UTF-8. 

2. HTML Format Isn’t Supported

Facebook only accepts the following formats for the product data feed field: 

• XLSX 
• CSV
• TSV 
• XML (RSS/ATOM) 
• Google Sheets format

If you try to submit your product feed file in any other format (e.g., HTML), you will get an error. 

3. Field Can’t Be All Uppercase Letters

You will notice this error when you write the text entirely in capital letters for certain fields in your feed, such as description. For such fields, Facebook recommends that you stick to sentence case. 

Thus, avoid descriptions like ‘A VIBRANT T-SHIRT FOR SUMMER’. Instead, your description should be, ‘A vibrant t-shirt for summer.’ 

4. Missing Required Fields 

This error occurs when an item in your Facebook catalog is missing a required field. The required fields for every product include: 

• id 
• title 
• description 
• availability 
• condition 
• price 
• link 
• image_link 
• brand

Ensure you add these fields in your feed file before you submit it on Meta Commerce Manager. 

5. Missing Universal IDs

For the products you submit in your Facebook feed, ensure that you are including one of the following product identifiers: 

1. Brand Name 
2. GTIN 
3. MPN 

If you get the “Universal IDs are missing” error, ensure that each item in your feed includes at least one of the following fields: Brand, MPN, or GTIN. 

In case you don’t have any of these identifiers, then your product won’t get approved on Meta. It is because this is a required field.

6. Products Can’t be Added By Multiple Data Feeds 

While Facebook allows merchants to use multiple data feed fields to upload items to their catalog, the same product (identified with its content ID) cannot appear in multiple data feeds. 

To fix this issue, 

• Manually check if you accidentally listed the item in multiple feeds. If that’s the case, you should only keep the product in the original file (where you uploaded the item first) and delete it from other feeds. 
• Check if you recently uploaded a new feed file by accident, thinking that it would update your existing feed. If that’s the case, please note that the new feed won’t help update your existing feed file. Rather, it will create a separate feed with overlapping products. 

Delete the newer feed file from Data sources, and instead update your original product data feed file.  

7. Invalid Column Headings 

As discussed earlier, Facebook requires you to submit some required fields in your feed. When you notice this error, it means either these required fields are missing from your feed, or Facebook couldn’t recognize those fields because you used different names. 

To fix this, 

• Review Facebook’s feed specifications and include all the required fields. 
• Also, use the name of the field in US English exactly as mentioned in their guidelines.
• Or create feed rules to automatically map your custom field names to those that Facebook supports.  

8. Incorrect Number of Columns 

• This error occurs when your data feed file has formatting errors. Due to these formatting errors, there is a mismatch between the header row and the columns in your feed. This further affects Facebook’s capability to read and interpret your product data.

To fix or prevent this issue:

• Ensure that each product’s row has the same number of columns as the header row.
• Delete any extra or unused fields.
• For CSV files you have created in a text editor, ensure that you use double quotes for all the fields that include a comma. For example, “Red, Large”, should be submitted as “Red, Large”.

9. Missing or Incorrect Prices

This error usually occurs when the price for a product item is formatted incorrectly or is missing in your data feed. 

Facebook has shared several solutions to fix this Facebook feed error, some of which include: 

1. Do include the price for every product in the price field in your data feed. 
2. Use the correct format for submitting prices in your feed: a number, which is followed by a space, followed by the ISO 4217 currency code (e.g., 29.99 USD). 
3. Use full stops instead of commas as decimal points. 
4. Ensure that the prices in your feed are accurate and match those that you are displaying on your website. 

Note: To read about other solutions to fix the Missing or Incorrect Prices feed error, refer to this Facebook page.

10. Missing or Duplicate IDs

This error occurs when your feed has missing or duplicate content IDs (unique identifiers for each item) for products. 

To fix or prevent this error: 

• Add the correct and unique content ID for each product or variant in your feed. Ensure that you add the ID in the correct field in your feed file. For example, id for products, vehicle_id for vehicles, etc. 
• Use SKUs as content IDs for your products. 
• Avoid capitalization for differentiating between content IDs. 
• Even if you want to add variants such as a pair of jeans in different colors, each variant should have a unique content ID.

11. Missing Name or Titles 

This error occurs when you have not submitted a title or name for the item in your data feed. Ensure that you include this field in your product feed, as most inventory types require either a title or a name field. 

Note: Read about Facebook’s product title guidelines for catalogs on their help page.

12. Invalid Data Feed File Location 

If you host your feed file on a different server, such as Dropbox or Google Drive, you may notice this error of invalid feed file location when trying to upload it. This is because the link you provide doesn’t lead to the feed file. Rather, it leads to an incorrect webpage or other location. 

How to fix it? 

• Ensure that your feed URL starts with http, https, ftp, or sftp.
• The URL directly links to the downloadable feed file. 

13. Invalid Facebook Category

Even though this is an optional field, ensure that the Facebook product category that you enter for your items is accurate. Facebook recommends that you follow their official taxonomy for providing the most specific category. 

For example, food & beverages > beverages > milk

14. Duplicate Items 

This error occurs when you end up adding the same product more than once in your feed. 

Always ensure that you are not uploading an item to your catalog that already exists in it. Otherwise, your upload will fail. 

To resolve this issue, review your feed, remove the duplicate items, and upload the new file to Meta Commerce Manager. 

15. Missing or invalid URL Links

This error occurs when any product link is missing or invalid in your data feed. Facebook recommends that you include a valid URL that directs users to a web page where they can learn more about the product. 

To fix or prevent this Facebook feed error: 

• Include a valid link in the link field.
• Ensure that your links aren’t broken and always start with “http://” or “https://”
• Don’t link to those pages where users will have to sign up or register to view the item. 
• Use URLs that you will not change in the future. 

16. URL or Any Sub-Chunk (URL or Domain) is in The Blocklist

You will notice this error when Facebook detects a malicious or blocked link in your feed file. Note that even typos or incorrect formatting can trigger this issue. 

To avoid or fix this issue, 

• Ensure all your links are valid and don’t have any spelling or grammatical errors. 
• Check that the description field doesn’t have any spacing issues. It’s because spacing issues or accidental full stops can be interpreted as suspicious links by Facebook’s spam filters. 

Note: If every link and its formatting appear fine to you, yet you are noticing this error, contact Facebook’s support team.

17. Invalid [gender] or [age_group]

You can only submit Meta’s supported values for the gender and age group attributes (which are optional). 

For the gender field, the supported values are: female, male, and unisex.

For age group, the supported values include: adult, all ages, teen, kids, toddler, infant and newborn.

How to Identify and Fix Facebook Feed Errors?  

Here’s the step-by-step process for identifying issues in your Facebook data feed that you uploaded to any catalog: 

1. In Commerce Manager, go to Catalogue and then Data Sources. All the data feeds that you have uploaded will appear here. 

2. Check the Last update section for your data feed. You might see two types of errors:

• 🔴Items failed to upload. This indicates that some products in your feed have issues. Thus, Facebook didn’t add those items to your catalog. 
• 🔴 Feed upload failed. This highlights that your feed has one or multiple issues, which have prevented it from uploading to your catalog. 

3. To identify the feed errors, you can either:  

• Click on the Download Issue Report button on the right side under Next Update.

• Click on the data feed to open its overview and check the Summary for Upload Session. Under this section, Facebook will highlight the reasons why the feed or item updates failed. 

4. Once you have identified the cause of feed errors, you can refer to the information we have shared above in the blog, understand why the issue is occurring, edit your data feed file, fix the errors, and update your data feed file. 

If you are using scheduled feed uploads, just save the updated feed file on your hosting server (e.g, Dropbox) or website. During the next scheduled upload, Facebook will automatically ensure that your catalog is updated with the correct information.

In case you are using Shopify or WooCommerce, then you can edit your feed manually, or use a data feed solution to optimise it and sync it to Meta Commerce Manager.

That’s it! You have fixed the Facebook feed errors easily! 

Best Practices For Maintaining a Healthy Facebook Product Feed 

Now, we will explore some best practices for ensuring that your Facebook feeds are always accurate and error-free. 

1. Follow Facebook’s Data Feed Specifications: Always review the guidelines and specifications shared by Facebook for data feeds. It will help you understand what type of fields are mandatory and required in your feed, which ones are additional fields, along with the list of acceptable file formats and many other details.

This will help you ensure your feed complies with those guidelines and you don’t have to suffer from product disapproval. 

2. Use Scheduled Updates: Manually updating your feed every single time might not be feasible. Moreover, it will make you prone to errors. In such cases, it is best to use scheduled updates. These can be useful to automatically fetch product details from the feed file that you are hosting on a server or your own website.  

Pro tip: Along with scheduled updates, you can also connect your Meta Commerce Manager with e-commerce platforms for accurate product data sync.

3. Leverage Product Data Rules: Product data rules can be helpful to resolve common Facebook product feed errors, such as fixing excessive capitalization or even adding missing fields. 

These rules enable merchants to make bulk edits to their feeds easily. Moreover, you can automatically rectify product data whenever you are uploading data feeds. 

Moreover, even if you are reusing a data feed from another platform, such as Google Shopping, product data rules can help you match a field in your feed to Facebook’s recognized fields. For example, you can map Google Product Category to Facebook Product Category. 

4. Use Facebook’s Feed Template: If you are uploading a CSV file from your computer, you can use the feed template provided by Facebook. It will help you better understand how to format your file. 
5. Use a Feed Management Software: A product feed management tool can help you easily optimize your Facebook product feeds. Any good software will allow you to bulk edit data, optimize your feeds with AI, and maintain an accurate feed for Facebook. 

Conclusion

Now you know how to identify and fix common Facebook product feed errors! To ensure that your products are never disapproved, regularly review your feed’s quality, follow Facebook’s data feed specifications, and use a feed management tool. 

With this, your Facebook ads for e-commerce or other marketing efforts will never have any downtime! 

FAQs

Q1: How do I fix missing or invalid required fields in my Facebook product feed?

Ensure all required fields like ID, title, description, availability, price, link, brand, and image_link are accurately added to your feed. Once you add these fields, submit your feed again on Meta Commerce Manager. It should help resolve the error. 

Q2: Why are my product images not displaying correctly on Facebook?

Check that image URLs are correct, accessible, and in supported formats (JPEG, PNG). Ensure images meet Facebook’s size and aspect ratio requirements.

Q3: What causes duplicate item errors in my feed?
Duplicate errors occur when you accidentally or intentionally end up uploading an item multiple times in your catalog. In such cases, delete the item (which is already added to your catalog) from your feed file and upload it again. 

Q4: How can I prevent price formatting errors?
Include the prices for all items in your feed. Additionally, use the correct format with three-letter ISO 4217 currency codes (e.g., 19.99 USD). Avoid symbols like $ or €. Also, maintain consistency with your website pricing.

Q5: What tools can help merchants optimize their Facebook feeds?
If you are a Shopify merchant, consider using AdNabu, which helps to AI-optimize your Shopify products for different channels like Facebook, Instagram, Google Shopping, etc. 

In addition, other feed management tools, such as DataFeedWatch, GoDataFeed, etc., can also help manage and edit Facebook feeds.

Check Out These Related Articles:

• How to Optimize Facebook Ads
• 10 Best Selling Items on Facebook Marketplace
• 6 Shopify Facebook Product Feed Apps
• Facebook Xml Product Feed Example
• How to Connect Shopify to Facebook