Updates and timing
When we read your feed
- Every hour by default. You can set any interval from 1 to 24 hours on the store's overview.
- Straight away when you press Sync now, or when you save a change to your brand, templates or rules.
- At the moment a sale price or a scheduled rule starts or ends (checked every 5 minutes), even between regular updates.
- If a read fails, we try again within an hour, and your last good feeds stay in place meanwhile.
What makes a new image
| Change | New image? | Your feed meanwhile |
|---|---|---|
| Price, sale price, sale dates, title, photo, or offer text (promo, instalments, “from” price) | Yes | Your original photo until the new image exists, never an image with an old price |
| Logo, colours, font, digits, template | Yes | The previous image, which still shows the right price |
| A field no template shows, such as the description | No | The same image; the field passes through to your feed |
| Nothing | No | The same image |
Sale start and end times
A product counts as on sale only when its sale price is lower than its price and the time is inside its sale_price_effective_date, if it has one. Scheduled rules use the dates you set, in your store's time zone. When a sale ends, the product goes back to its original photo at that moment and then gets its regular-price image. This happens even if your feed cannot be read at the time.
Render only what changed
Every image is stored under a fingerprint of everything that produced it. On each update we compare fingerprints and draw only the images whose fingerprint is new.
For a store with 20,000 products, that means:
- The first update draws an image for every product, in each size and language you use.
- An update where nothing changed draws nothing.
- If 300 prices change, only those 300 products are drawn again, and the other 19,700 keep their images and their URLs.
- A new logo or template redraws every product once, and the old images stay in your feed until the new ones are ready.
How long until it shows in ads
The time from a price change in your store to the new image in your ads is our update interval, plus the time to draw the image, plus how often Meta or Snapchat fetch your feed. With hourly fetches set in your catalog, a change shows within the next update and the following fetch. See the Meta guide for the schedule setting.