The Catalogue and the Feed: From Your Store to Every Platform

You think your advert knows your product.

It does not. It knows a row in a table.

**And everything it decides — who it appears to, which phrase it is matched against, and which image and

price it shows — comes from that row alone.**

The rule this course rests on

Your advert knows nothing about your product except what is in the feed.

Read it twice.

The platform does not visit your store to understand what you sell. It reads a file you sent it ←

**and if the file is incomplete, out of date, or written in your language rather than the buyer's, that is

what it will advertise about you**.

And the practical consequence: **improving the feed changes your results without changing a budget, a

keyword or an audience — and it is the cheapest improvement in all of advertising**.

What a feed actually is

And it is nothing mysterious:

A table. A row per product, and a column per piece of information: an identifier, a name, a

description, a price, availability, a link, and an image.

And it reaches the platform in one of three ways — **a file you update, a link the platform reads

periodically, or a direct connection to your store — and the third is the best where available, since it

leaves less room for lag**.

And what matters is not the method ← but that there is one source from which every destination comes

(lesson five).

Four questions this course answers

1. Which fields do I actually need? ← (lesson two).

2. Why does my product not appear to whoever searches for it? ← (lesson three).

3. Why were my products rejected? ← (lessons four and seven).

4. How do I serve a store and three platforms from one source? ← (lessons five and six).

And try them now: answer all four. **And if your answer to the third is "I do not know why", that is why

you are here — a rejection always has a written reason, and the problem is that it goes unread**.

Where the feed appears

Four destinations coming from the same file:

1. Shopping adverts in search ← and here the feed is the targeting itself ← **there are no keywords

to buy** (the "Google Shopping" course).

2. Dynamic adverts ← which show a visitor the product they viewed ← **and do not work without a

catalogue**.

3. The conversation catalogue ← what the customer sees inside the chat before asking the price.

4. Your own pages ← the structured data on the product page comes from the same source ← **and that

is in the "Technical SEO" book**.

And all four share one thing: they show what is in the feed, not what is in your store — **and if

the two differ, what is in the feed appears**.

What this course is not

It is not about running a campaign — any platform, any setting, any budget — **that is in the other

advertising courses, and this is about the file all of them rest on**.

Nor is it about building your store — nor about choosing an e-commerce platform.

Nor is it about ownership and permissions — that is the "Business and Ad Accounts" course, **which comes

before this one**.

And I will not explain the interface buttons. Screens change every few months, **and the field names

themselves change ← what does not change is that every platform needs an identifier, a price,

availability, a link and an image, and accepts no contradiction between what it says and your store**.

And I will not name a platform or a tool. Names change and the fields do not.

When this course does not concern you

Three cases, and I will say them before you continue:

1. You do not sell products with pages and prices ← **a service priced after a conversation, or work by

the project ← so you have no catalogue ← and go straight to the other advertising courses**.

2. Your products are very few and rarely change ← a handful of lines ← **lessons two and three are

enough for you, and the rest is structure you do not need yet**.

3. Your store is not ready ← **pages with no visible price, stock that is never updated, or links that

change ← and this is the most honest: the feed reflects your store, so if your store is not in order

you have amplified its disorder across four platforms**.

And the third is the one people resist: a feed does not repair a store — it publishes it.

What you need to start

• A list of your products with prices and availability
• A permanent link for each product — and this is a condition with no compromise
• An image for each product on a clear background
• Someone who can edit your store — or you

Action steps

1. Write the rule: your advert knows nothing about your product except what is in the feed.
2. Open your feed if you have one and read three complete rows.
3. Compare them against the product page itself — do they match?
4. Answer the four questions and record where you hesitated.
5. Go honestly through "when this does not concern you", starting with the third.
6. Make sure every product has a permanent link.
7. Do not create a second feed for a second platform before lesson five.
8. Fix your store first if it is not in order.