Flight Ads - Catalog & Feed

To promote your flight inventory on Facebook, you have to share information about your flights with Facebook. You do this by creating a flight catalog and then filling it with flight routes. There are three ways to fill your catalog and keep it up to date.

1. Upload CSV or XML files for 'flight feeds' with flight inventory
2. Use event activity to automatically fill your catalog
3. Combine a flight feed with automatically generated flights

You can create and manage your flight catalogs in your Commerce Manager:

1. Create a flight catalog
2. Upload your feed to Facebook
3. Create product sets out of your flight catalog
4. Associate the catalog to your event sources

Flight Feed - Upload Your Flights to Facebook

A flight feed is a file with your flight inventory. Every line or item in the file represents a single route. You can use one or more flight feeds, as long as all feeds together contain your full flight inventory.

Supported Flight Feed Formats

CSV > Sample - Description

CSV sample | TSV sample (flattened)

• The first row must list the chosen field names in the order the values will be given. Subsequent rows then supply the corresponding values for each flight.
• Fields containing whitespace or commas should be enclosed in "double quotes".
• Nested or multi-value fields such as image can be represented using JSON-encoded values or by a set of "flattened" plain-text columns labeled using JSON-path syntax, such as image[0].url, image[0].tag[0], image[0].tag[1]. Both conventions can be used interchangeably in the same file.

XML > Sample - Description

XML sample

• A root <listings> XML node encloses a set of <listing> nodes, each of which represents a flight.
• The file must begin with a valid <?xml declaration tag.

Supported Fields - Flight Ads

The following supported fields are designed for items you add to your product catalog.

For localized catalogs, see supported fields for flight ads.

Image Object Parameters

Product Deep Links

Provide deep links in feed following the App Links specification. Deep link information in feed takes precedence over any information Facebook collects with App Links metadata with our web crawler.

If you already have deep link information from App Links, you don't need to specify this data. Facebook uses information from App Links to display the correct deep link. To display deep links in your ads, see Advantage+ Catalog Ads, Ad Template.

Autogenerate Flights - Add Routes to Catalog Automatically Using Event Activity

Facebook can automatically add routes to your catalog based on pixel and app event activity. Every time an event is received with a route that does not yet exist in the catalog, it can be added automatically. This allows to you use flight ads for all your flights without having to deal with flight feeds.

To enable this, make a POST request to your flight catalog and set generate_items_from_events to true.

curl \
  -F 'flight_catalog_settings={generate_items_from_events:1}' \
  -F 'access_token=<ACCESS_TOKEN>' \
  https://graph.facebook.com/<VERSION>/<CATALOG_ID>

Routes that are added automatically don't have an image (to display in the ad). Therefore, you need to provide a generic image to use for all autogenerated routes.

curl \
  -F 'fallback_image_url=http://example.com/some.image_1.jpg' \
  -F 'access_token=<ACCESS_TOKEN>' \
  https://graph.facebook.com/<VERSION>/<CATALOG_ID>

As soon as your catalog is associated to a pixel and/or app, and receiving flight ads events, your catalog populates. You can verify this by querying the catalog.

curl \
  -F 'access_token=<ACCESS_TOKEN>' \
https://graph.facebook.com/<VERSION>/<CATALOG_ID>/flights

Combined - Use Flight Feeds with Automatically Generated Flights

You can combine uploading a flight feed with autogenerated routes. Combining these options allows you to leverage flight ads for all your flights, while providing custom images for your most important routes using a flight feed.

To do so, just combine the steps uploading a flight feed with automatically filling your catalog.

The following sections are only relevant if you want to manage your catalogs using this API.

Create a Flight Catalog using the API

A flight catalog is a container for your flight inventory. To use the catalog API, make sure you have the appropriate Marketing API Access Level and that you have accepted the Terms of Service by creating your first catalog through Business Manager.

To create a flight catalog for flight ads, set vertical to flights:

curl -X POST \
  -F 'name="Test Flight Catalog"' \
  -F 'vertical="flights"' \
  -F 'access_token=<ACCESS_TOKEN>' \
  https://graph.facebook.com/v10.0/{business-id}/owned_product_catalogs

Upload Your Flight Feeds via the API

Once you've created the catalog, you need to upload your flight feed(s) to Facebook. Use the API to create a feed object for every feed you want to upload. We support scheduled and direct uploads.

Filter Flight Catalog to Flight Sets

A flight set is a subset of your catalog. To set up flight ads, you need to create, at least, one flight set.

Flight sets are defined by filters that are applied to the flight catalog. For example, you can create a flight set with all routes that depart from London. Do note you can also create a flight set without any filters. In that case, the flight set will contain all flights in your catalog.

use FacebookAds\Object\ProductSet;
use FacebookAds\Object\Fields\ProductSetFields;

$flight_set = new ProductSet(null, <PRODUCT_CATALOG_ID>);

$flight_set->setData(array(
  ProductSetFields::NAME => 'Test Flight Set',
  ProductSetFields::FILTER => array(
    'origin_airport' => array(
      'eq' => 'LHR',
    ),
  ),
));

$flight_set->create();

from facebookads.adobjects.productset import ProductSet

flight_set = ProductSet(None, <PRODUCT_CATALOG_ID>)

flight_set[ProductSet.Field.name] = 'Test Flights Set'
flight_set[ProductSet.Field.filter] = {
    'origin_airport': {
        'eq': 'SFO',
    },
}

flight_set.remote_create()

curl \
  -F 'name=Test Flight Set' \
  -F 'filter={"origin_airport":{"eq":"LHR"}}' \
  -F 'access_token=<ACCESS_TOKEN>' \
  https://graph.facebook.com/v2.11/<PRODUCT_CATALOG_ID>/product_sets

The filter parameter is made up of the following operators and data: