Adwisely noticed that something other than Adwisely is adding products to the Adwisely product catalog in your Meta Business Manager. This article explains what that catalog is, why the extra source causes problems, and how to remove it.

When you connect Adwisely to Meta, Adwisely creates a product catalog inside your Meta Business Manager. You can find it in Commerce Manager, next to any other catalogs you own.

Two things are worth knowing about it:

It exists only to run your ads. Adwisely fills it from a single data file that contains the products your campaigns are meant to advertise, and keeps that file up to date. It is not the catalog behind your Facebook or Instagram Shop, and it is not meant to be.

It can contain media built for ads only. Depending on your plan, Adwisely adds product videos and review overlay images to the products in this catalog. They are designed to catch attention in a feed of ads, not to sit on a product page in your Shop.

A Meta catalog can be filled by more than one data source at the same time. When a second source starts adding products to the Adwisely catalog, the catalog stops matching what Adwisely selected for your ads.

Your ads spend on products nobody chose. The extra source usually brings in your whole store, including single variants, out of stock items, and products you deliberately kept out of advertising. Meta can show any of them, so budget goes to products that were never meant to be advertised and your results drop.

Your Facebook and Instagram Shop can show ad media. If your Shop is pointed at the Adwisely catalog, shoppers browsing your Shop see the videos and review overlays Adwisely built for ads.

This happens when Meta is set to crawl your website and add whatever it finds to the catalog. Adwisely did not set it up, and nothing in Adwisely needs it.

To remove it:

1. Open the Adwisely catalog in Commerce Manager. The button in the Adwisely app takes you straight to its Data sources page.

2. Find the source whose type is Website and remove it.

3. Leave the Adwisely source, the one listed as a data file, exactly as it is. That is the source your campaigns run on.

Removing the Website source does not delete your catalog and does not stop your campaigns. The next Adwisely update refills the catalog with the products your ads are meant to use.

The Facebook & Instagram app by Meta runs your Facebook and Instagram Shop. As Shopify puts it, the channel "has one product catalog for Facebook Shop, Instagram Shopping, and Facebook Marketing", and on your store that one catalog is the Adwisely one.

To confirm it: in your Shopify admin open Settings, then Sales channels, then Facebook & Instagram, and look at Connected Product Catalog. If it names the Adwisely catalog, this is the source Adwisely detected.

The channel cannot switch catalogs from its settings page. Which Meta catalog a store is connected to is held on Meta's side, so Shopify cannot change it for you. There are two ways forward, and the first one is the safe one.

1. Ask Meta support to move you (recommended). Open the Facebook & Instagram channel in your Shopify admin and click Get support. Ask for this, in these words:

My Facebook & Instagram sales channel is connected to the wrong catalog. It is connected to a catalog created by my ads partner, Adwisely, which exists only to run ads. Please disconnect my Shop and the sales channel from that catalog and connect them to a catalog created for this store by the Facebook & Instagram channel itself. Do not delete or change the Adwisely catalog, my ads run on it.

Have your store URL and the name of the Adwisely catalog ready, they will ask.

2. Remove and set the channel up again. Removing the Facebook & Instagram channel in Shopify and adding it back lets you pick a catalog again at the setup step, where you choose to create a new one. Only do this if support cannot help: reconnecting starts a fresh Shop, so your Shop's history on Meta does not come with it, and Meta sometimes blocks a fresh connection while the old one is still in place.

Either way, once your Shop runs on its own catalog, your Shop shows your normal product photos again and the Adwisely catalog goes back to carrying only what your ads need.

Meta supports several other ways to fill a catalog, including partner apps and manual uploads. If Adwisely reports a source it does not recognise, the fix is the same shape as the Website one.

Open the Adwisely catalog's Data sources page, remove anything you did not set up together with Adwisely, and leave the Adwisely source, the one listed as a data file, in place. If you are not sure what a source is, send us its name before removing it.

Adwisely rechecks the catalog every day. Once the extra source is gone, the warning in the Adwisely app disappears on its own. There is nothing to confirm and nothing to switch back on.

If you are not sure which source to remove, or the warning is still there a day later, reach our support team at help@adwisely.com or via the in-app chat before changing anything.