Dynamic Product Ads

Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) are a Meta ad format that connects directly to your product catalog and automatically generates personalized ads based on each shopper’s browsing behavior. Instead of designing a separate ad for every product, you set up one ad template, connect your catalog, and Meta handles serving the right product to the right person.

How DPAs Work

The mechanics rely on three pieces working together:

1. The Meta Pixel (or Conversions API) — tracks which products a visitor viewed, added to cart, or purchased on your site.
2. Your product catalog — a structured feed of your inventory, typically a spreadsheet or data feed containing product ID, name, image URL, price, description, and availability.
3. The DPA ad template — a single ad design with dynamic placeholders. When Meta serves the ad, it fills in the placeholders with the actual product data for that viewer.

When someone views a jacket on your website but doesn’t buy, Meta can later serve them an ad showing exactly that jacket — with the current price and your specific copy template — wherever they are on Meta’s network.

DPAs vs. Standard Product Ads

With standard ads, you manually select which products to feature and design each creative. This breaks down at any meaningful catalog size. A brand with 500 SKUs cannot feasibly run hand-crafted ads for every product.

DPAs solve this by making the catalog itself the creative engine. The tradeoff is that you give up precise per-ad creative control in exchange for full catalog coverage and automatic personalization.

DPAs in Practice: Ridge Wallet

In our Ridge Wallet teardown, we found that Ridge uses DPAs heavily for their wallet product line — leveraging their deep catalog of colorways and materials. The catalog ad format lets them retarget shoppers who viewed a specific Slim or Bifold variant without manually creating retargeting ads for each SKU.

Prospecting DPAs vs. Retargeting DPAs

DPAs are used for two distinct purposes:

• Retargeting DPAs — shown to people who already viewed products on your site. High intent, typically high ROAS. The “you left something behind” use case.
• Prospecting DPAs (Advantage+ Catalog Ads) — shown to new audiences who haven’t visited your site. Meta uses behavioral signals to predict which of your products each new user is most likely to buy. Lower ROAS than retargeting DPAs, but scalable for new customer acquisition.

When to Use DPAs

DPAs are most effective for:

• E-commerce brands with catalogs of 50+ products
• Retargeting cart abandoners and product-page viewers
• Cross-selling related products to recent purchasers
• Brands with high SKU count where manual creative management is impractical