Preparing Feeds

Indivio supports turning a number of data sources into feeds that can be used to personalize ads.  

For creative production and validation, feed rows typically contain the variations of text, colors, images, video clips, and audio used to customize the image or video creative.  For campaign production, feed rows will also contain the targeting attributes and other ad creative fields.   

Jump to a Feeds topic   

• Formats and format-specific requirements
• Requirements for all feeds
• Geo-Location
• Multiple templates
• Text formatting
• Image references
• Validation feeds for verifying the template design

Formats and format-specific requirements

• CSV / TSV
• GSheets (public URL or with Google connection)
  • add g-helper at indiv.io email to the sheet
  • tab must be named "variations" 
• Facebook Catalog (product, flight, hotel, vehicle, etc.)
  
  • Product set ID
• JSON in API

Requirements for all feeds

• UTF-8 encoded characters
• A column with header in first row named “id” with unique, non-blank values in all rows
• For media (image, video, audio) assets, ensure the URL is publicly accessible
  • Google Drive - default share link is supported (e.g.  
  • Dropbox links - default share link format is supported; set the url parameter to "&raw=1" to see image previews (
• Color is specified as rgb(#,#,#).- e.g. rgb(255,255,255)
• Protected column names - do not use
  • "template_name"

Geo-Location

Indivio supports automated Facebook ad-set creation based on custom targeting, including city, zip, dma, regions, and countries.  Indivio will automatically translate targeting strings to Facebook-compatible targeting.

• city:
  • CITY, STATE, COUNTRY
  • e.g. "San Francisco, California, United States"
• zip:
  • ZIP CODE
  • e.g. "94027"
• dma:
  • MARKET NAME
  • e.g. "New York", "Los Angeles", "Chicago" 
• regions:
  • REGION NAME
  • e.g. "Alabama", "Alaska", "Alberta"
• countries:
  • COUNTRY NAME
  • e.g. "United States"

See more details from Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/audiences/reference/targeting-search/#geo

Sample geo-location gsheet feed (feel free to copy and modify): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17dy-sUNqnjI7rroyRrhqyFW2NC9kXytCPefBmXJP37M/edit?usp=sharing 

Multiple templates

• If you plan to use multiple templates with your feed, you should prepare a column where each row has the name of the template to be used
• Note you cannot use the column name "template_name"

Text formatting

• For carriage returns in text in a video: \n
• For carriage return in Facebook ad text: \r\n
• Emojis from a feed will work in ad creative, but do not currently work in templates

Image references

• Formats supported:
  • .jpg
  • .png
• Http url example:
  • https://www.domain.com/sample-image.jpg
• Google drive share example: 
  • https://drive.google.com/file/d/115x_xf3u321wroACKjEfEia9mOcU0dZ/view?usp=sharing
• Dropbox share example: 
  • https://www.dropbox.com/s/nzz7ex8h3ssssk9/183504206208.jpg?raw=1
  • adding the raw postfix allows you to see images in your Indivio Feed 

Validation feeds for verifying the template design

In order to validate your template design will produce accurate variations, you should create a validation feed for testing.  Here are tips for creating a validation feed: 

• columns - prepare a column for each element you want to make dynamic - text, color, media (image, video, audio)
• column names - we recommend snake_case formatting of names without spaces, special characters, or leading numbers.
• matching layers - make sure your column name matches the layer name in After Effects
• rows - prepare an adequate number of rows so that you'll have enough variations to cover different test cases - especially if you have conditional layers
• text - have the expected range of character length and special characters
• images - have the expected range of image aspect ratios as variations

Related:

• Create Feed - CSV