Meta can find your active promotions and show them on your Facebook and Instagram ads. The promotion can come from Shopify, from your website, from your other ads or from an offer you created in Commerce Manager or Ads Manager. Meta says that campaigns with promo codes enabled showed a 4.6% average lift in conversion rate for small and medium businesses (Meta Business Help Center).
But Meta picks the code. An old code, a code for one customer group or a discount you never meant to give in ads can end up on an ad, and the discount also goes to people who would have paid full price. If your website has codes for one channel or one group of customers, I would turn Detected offers off and choose the promotion manually.
How Meta shows promotions
- Meta highlights a promotion on an ad when its systems expect that it is likely to drive more purchases.
- In the in-app browser Meta applies the code automatically at checkout on your website. Where auto-apply is not available, the shopper sees the code and can copy it.
- On some surfaces Meta shows the offer before the click. For example, on Instagram stories the call to action changes to See offer.
- When several promotions are available, the delivery system shows the one most likely to drive engagement.
Source: Meta Business Help Center.
Automatic or manual choice
When you create an ad in a Sales campaign with the Website conversion location, you choose at the Destination step:
- Automatically source promotions. Meta takes promotions from your ad creative, your existing ads, your website and the offers synced in Commerce Manager.
- Manually select a promotion. You pick one from the list or add a code yourself, with the offer amount and the dates.
Automatic sourcing saves manual work, because Meta updates active promotions during the campaign. You cannot turn promotions off for a single ad, but you can change the promotion on any ad. The settings apply when you create, duplicate or edit an ad, and ads that you do not change keep their settings (Meta Business Help Center).
How to turn detected offers off
- Open Commerce Manager.
- Turn off Detected offers.
After that, promotions from your website and your other ads stop appearing on your ads. The switch does not apply to offers synced from Shopify, so unsync the discount in Shopify too (Meta Business Help Center).
What to check before a sale
- Which codes are visible on the website, for example on banners, in pop-ups and on checkout pages. Meta sources promotions from your website.
- Whether the website has codes for one channel or one customer group. If it does, turn off Detected offers or choose the promotion manually.
- Whether expired or test codes are still on the website.
- In Ads Manager, which promotion each sale ad shows.
A code made for one channel, such as an influencer or an e-mail list, breaks that channel’s attribution once it shows in ads. Constant discounts in ads also teach customers to wait for a code. Keep automatic sourcing only when your website has one public promotion that you are glad to show to everyone, and otherwise choose the promotion manually for each sale.