AdRoll feed for Shopify

AdRoll treats the hosted URL as a requirement, not an option: the feed must be a public URL it can periodically crawl, in XML, CSV, JSON or TXT form, optionally compressed with zip or gzip, encoded in UTF-8. The whole catalog belongs in one file; register several and their products merge into a single catalog. The crawler publishes its identity, IP 54.69.18.100 and the User-Agent “AdRoll Dynamic Creative Feed Parser bot”, so a filtering server can allowlist it.

Feedflock hosts the file on a stable URL and regenerates it on your schedule, as often as every hour, so every AdRoll sync reads current prices and stock. One caveat from AdRoll's own rules: don't restructure a live feed. Rearranging columns or changing the file type without telling support can break the parser configuration and hurt ad performance.

AdRoll says it in one sentence: if your product feed uses the Google Products Feed (aka Google Base) format, it can be set up automatically. The help centre's field table is written in Google's vocabulary (title, description, link, image_link, price, sale_price, availability, google_product_category, brand), with product_id the only name that is not Google's. The template emits Google's <g:id>, which a manually configured parser can be pointed at anyway: a parser configuration's path is simply the tag name in the feed.

The required set is five (product ID, title, link, image link and price), with description, sale price, availability, category and brand recommended. Nothing beyond those ten is worth sending. AdRoll parses a field only once it has a parser configuration for it, so a gtin or a condition element would travel down the wire and be ignored.

This is the one channel where the feed is deliberately not variant-level. AdRoll asks for one unique entry per distinct product, because a product page fires a single ID into the pixel's adroll_custom_data and the feed must carry one row that matches it. Feedflock renders one item per product, with the cheapest sellable variant standing for the row.

That match is the whole integration: if the pixel-captured ID doesn't match an ID in the feed, personalization fails. AdRoll grades it as a match rate and calls anything under 40% a fault. The template's default id is the numeric Shopify product ID (the value a theme's {{ product.id }} puts in the pixel), and AdRoll's own debugging recipe is to compare the two in the browser console, case-sensitively. On Shopify, AdRoll's native integration can sync the catalog without a feed at all; this template is for control over the file, or for shops not on that integration.

AdRoll states a value shape in exactly two places. The price is an amount, a space and the ISO 4217 code (19.99 USD), with one currency per feed. Availability is exactly in stock or out of stock, spelled with spaces; there is no preorder or backorder. VAT is never mentioned, so the feed sends what the landing page charges, which is also AdRoll's own best practice, because a banner that disagrees with the page wastes ad spend.

Just as notable is what the field table lacks: no shipping element, no barcode, no condition. Temporary unavailability is handled by availability, not removal. AdRoll recommends marking a product out of stock rather than blacklisting it, because a blacklist can outlive the restock.