Price
Prints whatever sits in the price field. If your feed carries stale prices, the overlay carries them too, and shoppers land on a different number.
price
At a glance
What Meta gives you, and what you owe.
The dividing line is simple. If the information already lives in your product feed as a field Meta reads, an overlay can print it. If it does not, the pixels have to come from somewhere else.
| Enrichment | Meta overlay | Built into creative | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current price | Yes | Optional | Cheapest possible win. Costs one correct feed field. |
| Strikethrough price | Yes | Optional | Silent unless both sale price and original price are populated. |
| Percent off | Yes | Optional | Reads louder than a number for discounts above roughly a quarter off. |
| Free delivery | Yes | Optional | Needs shipping cost set to zero, not just a shipping promise in copy. |
| Category-specific offer | No | Required | Making charges, exchange value, bundle terms. None of these is a catalog field. |
| Star rating and review count | No | Required | The strongest trust signal in the set, and Meta will not print it. |
| Bestseller or low-stock badge | No | Required | Needs live inventory or sales rank mapped onto the image per SKU. |
| Brand frame, logo and colours | No | Required | The only thing separating your white cutout from every other white cutout. |
| Lifestyle or in-context background | No | Required | Shows scale and use. Hard to shoot per SKU, which is why most skip it. |
| Product-level video | No | Required | Opens Reels and Stories inventory that static catalog ads leave idle. |
Swipe the table sideways
Native overlay coverage per Meta's Advantage+ catalog ads documentation. Confirm current placement support before planning around it, since Meta has expanded this feature more than once.
Native layer
The four overlays, and what quietly breaks them.
Meta's dynamic overlays replaced the older labels feature, and each type can now be switched on independently. You can let Meta choose the most relevant one per product, or set shape, font, colour and position yourself.
Strikethrough price
Needs both a sale price and an original price. Brands that overwrite the original on discount get no strikethrough at all, and never find out why.
price · sale_price
Percent off
Derived, not entered. It is only as accurate as the two price fields behind it, so rounding surprises show up here first.
price · sale_price
Free delivery
Fires when shipping cost is zero in the catalog for that shopper's location. A free shipping threshold described only in ad copy will not trigger it.
shipping
Meta announced the move from labels to dynamic overlays in 2025. Trade coverage from Search Engine Land.
Built layer
Why the built layer is a volume problem.
Everything Meta does not render has to be baked in before the feed points at the image. That is not one design job. It is one design job repeated once per SKU, then again the next time pricing, packaging or ranking changes.
Per SKU against per shape
Forty products fit a designer's week. Four thousand need a pipeline.
Hand-built enrichment grows with every SKU. Templates grow with product shapes, and a catalog of thousands usually collapses into fewer than ten.
A brand with 40 products can hand this to a designer. A brand with 4,000 listings across sizes and colourways cannot, which is where teams either give up on enrichment or build a pipeline that renders it from the same feed Meta already reads.
From live work
The built layer, in real client creative.
Every ad below is production work QuickAds has run for jewellery brands. They are social and retargeting creative rather than raw feed renders, but they show what the built layer looks like once it exists, and how little of it Meta's four overlays could have produced.
Raw feed image
Start from zero enrichment
A clean product shot, well lit, nothing added. This is what most feeds hand Meta. It is not a bad image. It carries no price, no proof, no offer, and nothing that says whose product it is.
Every layer in the cards that follow had to be put there by somebody.
C. Krishniah Chetty & Co.
An offer no overlay can express
Fifty percent off making charges is the offer that moves gold in India. It is not a price, a strikethrough, a percentage off the item or free shipping. It is a discount on a labour cost.
Brand frameOffer blockSeasonal hook
None of Meta's four overlay types can render this. The whole offer block is part of the image.
C. Krishniah Chetty & Co.
A claim attached to no product field
Full exchange value on gold bought anywhere is a company policy, not a product attribute. Nothing in the catalog holds it, and the terms marker has to travel with it.
Brand frameOffer blockTerms marker
Built in, which also means it has to be rebuilt the moment the terms change.
C. Krishniah Chetty & Co.
A next step drawn inside the pixels
The button sits in the image, not in the ad unit. For a purchase decided in a showroom rather than a cart, the invitation has to name the showroom.
Brand frameBaked CTALifestyle setting
Meta's own call-to-action button offers a fixed list. It does not offer this one.
C. Krishniah Chetty & Co.
Positioning carried by the image
Three words doing the work of a targeting brief. They tell a shopper when the piece is for, which is the question a bare render of the same ring leaves open.
Brand frameLifestyle settingPositioning line
Nothing here maps to a feed column. All of it is production.
True Sanity
Objections answered before the click
Real stones and open pricing are the two doubts this category runs into. They are claims about how the brand operates, not attributes of any single stud.
Brand frameValue propsBaked CTA
Catalog data cannot assert a pricing philosophy. The creative can.
Tap to play
True Sanity
Then the format upgrade: product video
Shot at nine by sixteen, cutting between rings on different hands, the copy landing across two beats and closing on the wordmark and a URL. Thirty-seven seconds, built as a retargeting cut, which is the classic catalog job.
9:16On-screen copyEnd card
This is the last row of the table above. It opens the Reels and Stories inventory a static catalog render leaves idle, and no overlay setting in Ads Manager will generate it. For a clip on every SKU, see catalog product video.
Client creative shown with permission. Offers pictured ran as dated campaigns and are shown as case history, not as live promotions.
Method
Shipping enrichment across a whole catalog.
The order matters. Most teams start at the creative and work backwards, which is why enrichment stalls. Start at the feed, because every layer downstream reads from it.
| # | Step |
|---|---|
| 01 | Fix the feed fields firstSale price, original price, shipping cost, availability, GTIN. Four of the enrichment layers are free the moment these are correct, and the rest depend on the same data to render accurately. |
| 02 | Split product sets by margin, not categoryCategory sets feel tidy and spend badly. Margin bands and price bands give you a lever over where delivery concentrates once the system starts optimising. |
| 03 | Design one template per product shapeNot one per SKU. Tall bottles, flat apparel and boxed goods each need their own safe areas, but a catalog of thousands usually collapses into fewer than ten shapes. |
| 04 | Render per SKU and point the feed at the outputEach enriched image gets its own URL in the image link column. This is the step that turns enrichment from a design exercise into a pipeline. |
| 05 | Re-render on change, not on schedulePrice drops, stock-outs and new review counts should trigger a rebuild of the affected images only. Monthly full rebuilds waste effort and still ship stale badges in week three. |
| 06 | Add motion where the placement rewards itReels and Stories inventory sits mostly idle for static catalog ads. Short product-level clips give the system somewhere else to spend. |
Step 4 is where the tooling matters. Catalog Ads renders one template per product shape across every SKU and writes each finished image back into the feed, so step 5 becomes a list of changed rows rather than a rebuild.
Failure modes
Five ways enriched catalog ads go quietly wrong.
None of them show up in a design review. They show up three weeks later, in a stale badge or a cropped offer or a long tail nobody sees.
Mistake 01 · What the image carries
Stacking every badge at once
Rating, discount, shipping and scarcity on one 1080 square leaves no product visible. Past two enrichments per image, the thing you are selling starts to disappear.
What to do instead
Pick the two layers that answer the category's biggest doubt, and let the product take the rest of the frame.
Two layers · product first
Mistake 02 · When the offer ends
Badges that outlive the offer
A baked-in 30% off badge keeps running after the sale ends unless something triggers a re-render. Native overlays expire with the feed. Built layers do not.
What to do instead
Tie every built badge to a feed field or an end date, so the change that ends the offer also triggers the rebuild.
Badge · field · rebuild
Mistake 03 · Where the effort goes
Enriching the whole catalog evenly
Most spend lands on a small slice of products. Weeks spent on the long tail go to SKUs that never serve.
What to do instead
Enrich the products that actually take delivery first, then work outward once the templates are proven.
Top-spend slice first
Mistake 04 · How it crops
Overlays fighting the crop
A badge placed for the square feed render gets cut on a 9:16 placement.
What to do instead
Set safe areas per aspect ratio, not once for the square, and preview every template at each size before it renders.
1:1 · 4:5 · 9:16 safe areas
Mistake 05 · How long it lasts
Treating enrichment as a one-off
Catalogs change weekly. Enrichment built as a project decays into a liability within a quarter.
What to do instead
Run it as a continuous creative process: the feed changes, the affected images rebuild, and someone reviews them.
Continuous, not a campaign