Your Menu, Running as Facebook and Instagram Ads
Catalog ads that show real dishes at today's prices, synced automatically from your menu — and every tap lands on that dish on your own ordering site.
What Are Catalog Ads?
Catalog ads are the product cards you see in Facebook and Instagram feeds — a photo, a name, a price, often several in a carousel. Meta assembles them from a product catalog, and keeping that catalog honest is normally the tedious part: exports, spreadsheets, re-uploads every time a price moves. Ordering.Tools removes that step. Every venue gets a live product feed; Meta downloads it on a schedule — hourly if you want — and what it receives is your menu at that exact moment.
The ads and your checkout can never disagree. Prices come from the same menu that charges the guest, photos are the ones on your product pages, and a dish that is sold out or outside its serving hours simply is not in the feed. When someone taps a card, they land on that dish on your own site — one tap from the cart, on your own domain if you use one.
Why It Wins Orders
Ads That Never Go Stale
Change a price, mark a dish sold out, swap a photo — the next Meta download picks it up. Nobody sees an ad for something you no longer serve, at a price you no longer charge.
Retarget With the Exact Dish
Your site's Meta Pixel reports which products a guest viewed and carted, with the same product ids the catalog uses. Meta shows that guest the dish they almost ordered — not a generic banner.
Every Click Builds Your Own Channel
Cards link to your own ordering site — your domain, your checkout, your customer relationship. Ad budget spent here grows direct orders.
Set Up Once, Then Forget It
Copy one URL from your dashboard into Meta Commerce Manager. There is no export button to remember and no menu file to re-upload — the feed follows the menu by itself.
How It Works
Copy your feed URL
One URL per venue, in your dashboard under Marketing → Meta Catalog Ads. It serves your menu as a product catalog in the exact format Meta expects.
Paste it into Commerce Manager
Create a catalog, add a Scheduled feed as its data source, paste the URL and choose how often Meta refreshes — hourly keeps time-limited menus accurate.
Connect your Meta Pixel
Link the pixel to the catalog. Your ordering site already sends view, add-to-cart and purchase events with matching product ids — nothing to re-tag.
Launch an Advantage+ catalog ad
Meta builds the creative from your products automatically and shows each person the dishes they are most likely to order.
What You Get
A live product feed
A hosted, always-current catalog of your menu, generated fresh on every Meta download.
- Only dishes guests can order at that moment — availability and serving schedules respected
- Real prices in your currency, identical to your checkout
- Hourly, daily or weekly refresh — your choice in Meta
- Works per location, including branches of a chain
Pixel events that match the catalog
Catalog ads only work when the pixel and the catalog speak the same product ids. Yours already do — out of the box.
- View, add-to-cart and purchase events carry catalog-ready product ids
- Purchase events include the ordered items
- Respects your cookie consent banner
- No tag manager or developer work
Photos and descriptions handled
Every ad card needs an image and a description. The feed uses your product photos and writes a clean fallback description when a dish has none.
- Product photos served from a fast CDN
- Your logo steps in when a dish has no photo
- Descriptions auto-generated when missing
- Category carried per product, for filtering ad sets
Landing pages that convert
Each card links to the dish's own page — with its photo, options and an add-to-cart button right there.
- Custom domain used when you have one
- Pages in your menu's own language
- Guests are one tap from the cart
- The same page Google indexes — one canonical URL
Where It Pays Off
Promote bestsellers to new locals
Run an Advantage+ ad on your whole catalog and let Meta find people nearby who order food online. The card that wins is a real dish they can order in two taps.
Bring back the almost-ordered cart
A guest added a pizza and got distracted. Retargeting shows them that pizza — current price, current photo — until they finish the order.
Launch a new menu item
Add the dish to your menu and it is in the next feed download. Point a campaign at its category and the ad is live the same afternoon.
Lunch offers that keep themselves honest
A lunch menu served 12:00–15:00 appears in the feed only while it is actually orderable. Set Meta's refresh to hourly and the ads follow your kitchen's clock.
Chains: one brand, per-location ads
Each branch has its own feed with the brand menu and its own landing links, so a city-wide campaign can still send every guest to the right location.
Seasonal campaigns without cleanup
When the summer menu ends, its items leave the feed by themselves. No orphaned ads pointing at dishes that no longer exist.
Facebook and Instagram Ads for Restaurants, Powered by Your Live Menu
Most restaurant ads on social media are static images: a designed post, a photo with a price baked in, a boosted announcement. They work until the menu changes — then every published asset quietly goes wrong. Catalog ads solve this differently: Meta assembles the ad from structured product data, so the creative is generated from what you actually sell. The catch has always been maintaining that product data. Ordering.Tools closes the loop by serving your menu as a Meta product feed directly from the ordering platform, so the same system that takes the order also feeds the ad.
What is a Meta product feed for a restaurant?
A product feed is a structured file listing every item you sell — name, description, price, photo, link, availability. Meta Commerce Manager downloads it on a schedule and keeps a catalog in sync with it. For a restaurant this means every dish becomes an advertisable product: dynamic ads can show your menu to new customers, retarget people who viewed a dish without ordering, and always land clicks on the dish's own page on your ordering site.
Do I need a developer to set it up?
No. The feed URL is generated for every venue automatically — you copy it from the dashboard and paste it into Meta Commerce Manager as a scheduled feed. The Meta Pixel integration is equally automatic: your ordering site already fires the standard commerce events with product ids that match the catalog, which is the part that normally requires manual tagging work.
What keeps the ads accurate?
The feed is generated live at the moment Meta downloads it. Sold-out dishes, items outside their serving schedule and products you have hidden are excluded automatically; prices are read from the same menu your checkout charges. With an hourly refresh schedule, your ads track your kitchen within the hour — without anyone exporting, editing or re-uploading anything.
Your Menu Is the Ad
Copy one URL, connect it once in Meta Commerce Manager, and your Facebook and Instagram ads stay as fresh as your kitchen.
Related features
Other tools restaurants use alongside this one.
Test two descriptions, two photos, or two prices side by side. See which one gets more orders. Pick the winner. Done.
Learn moreStop staring at a blank text field. Generate product descriptions in one click for every language your menu supports.
Learn moreType a business question in plain English, Bulgarian, Greek, or Turkish. Get a charted, numerically-correct answer in seconds — backed by your live bills and orders, not a guess.
Learn moreUpload a photo, PDF, or Word document of your existing menu. Claude reads every category, item, price, and allergen — you review the result and commit a complete menu in one click.
Learn more