Product Insights in Meta Ads: what it is and how to read it

Product Insights is the Meta Ads report, still in beta, that shows the advertising performance of individual catalog products: views, clicks, spend, purchases and attributed conversion value (Meta Help Center). So the data drops from campaign level to the single product.

It's an interesting development for anyone running e-commerce and catalog campaigns. It needs careful reading, though: a product that absorbs more budget isn't necessarily the one generating the most value, and attributed sales don't always match truly incremental ones.

Meta says the feature isn't available to all accounts yet. I also walk through it in my YouTube video, which is in Italian.

Where do you find Product Insights in Ads Manager?

Product Insights is in Ads Reporting: in Ads Manager, click Ads Reporting on the left and open the Product insights tab at the top (Meta Help Center). Inside there are four sections: Overview, Product sets, Benchmarking for comparing yourself with similar businesses, and Reports, which you can schedule and export.

You can also get there from a campaign: in Breakdowns choose Product ID next to Delivery, then click View product insights in the bottom right (Meta Help Center). In accounts that have received it there's also a shorter route: open a catalog campaign and in Charts look for the panel with your campaign's top products. From there a button takes you to Product Insights.

The panel lets you compare seven metrics per product, from spend to attributed purchases.

What can you do if Product Insights isn't in your account?

If you can't find it, open the campaign and in Breakdowns choose Product ID. That way you analyze spend per product, but not sales. It's a partial alternative that at least shows you where the budget is concentrated.

When the feature arrives, data quality depends on your tracking. You need to share conversions with Meta, and for better data Meta recommends passing the contents parameter with the details of each product in the order (Meta Help Center). If quantity doesn't come through, it's counted as 1 (Meta Help Center).

How do you read Product Insights metrics?

The seven panel metrics look similar to the ones in Ads Manager, but they count different things. That's why the numbers may not match the campaign's (Meta Help Center). I'm using the Help Center names here: in the panel they may differ slightly. The full report has others too, such as Product CPC and Product set purchases.

Metric	What it counts	Keep in mind
Product amount spent	the spend assigned to the product	it goes to the first product viewed in the ad
Product views	each time the product is seen	in a carousel they can exceed the ad's impressions
Product clicks	clicks on that product	Ads Manager counts them on the ad
Product attributed orders	orders	one checkout is one order, with any number of items
Product purchases	the individual items bought	they also include products outside the promoted set
Product attributed orders conversion value	the whole basket	it can include other products
Product purchases conversion value	the value of that product alone	it excludes the rest of the basket

The detail that changes the reading is the first row. Spend is assigned to the first product viewed in the ad, not split across all of them (Meta Help Center). In Meta's example, with 30 spent on an ad with a red sweater and a white T-shirt, all 30 goes to the sweater, which appears first, and the T-shirt stays at zero (Meta Help Center).

So before saying a product is eating the budget, check whether it's simply first in the carousel. The total may not add up either, because part of the spend, such as spend on static ads, can't be assigned to a product.

Same caution on Product attributed orders ROAS. It uses the value of the whole basket and assigns spend only to the first product viewed, so it can come out higher than what you see in Ads Manager (Meta Help Center). In Meta's example it's 7.83: a 235 basket divided by 30 of spend (Meta Help Center). If you're interested in the topic, I've written about why ROAS is a useful but dangerous metric.

How do you use Product Insights to make decisions?

The most useful comparison is between the budget a product absorbs and the results Meta attributes to it. A product with lots of spend and few orders is the first one to look at, bearing in mind the spend limitation I just explained.

Meta suggests a few practical readings (Meta Help Center):

Lots of views and few clicks: the product gets seen but doesn't attract, so consider updating the image or video, price or title.
Lots of clicks and few purchases: look at the landing page, for example whether the product is out of stock or the price doesn't match the ad.
Product purchases above zero and Product set purchases at zero: that product sells but sits outside the set you're promoting, so consider adding it.
Same products in several campaigns: they can compete with each other for delivery, and consolidating can help.

The same page has a calculation worth trying, the cross-selling ratio. Divide Product attributed orders conversion value by Product purchases conversion value: in Meta's example, a 170 basket over 65 of product value gives 2.6. Above 1, that product may be driving other sales.

Are attributed sales extra sales?

Not necessarily. Attributed sales means Meta links them to your ads, by default with the attribution setting you use in Ads Manager (Meta Help Center). It doesn't mean the sale wouldn't have happened without that ad.

Product Insights tells you where to look. It doesn't tell you how many of those sales are truly extra.

Read also

More notes on how to use Meta Ads data:

Product Insights in Meta Ads: which products absorb the budget and which bring in purchases