What is CPAS? How Meta Collaborative Ads work with Shopee and Lazada

CPAS is a Meta ad format that lets a brand advertise on Facebook and Instagram using a product catalog shared by a retailer or marketplace, such as Shopee or Lazada, and send shoppers straight to the product page on that marketplace to buy. Meta's help pages call the product Collaborative Ads. The abbreviation CPAS still appears in Meta's own tools, for example in the "Catalog is not CPAS compliant" error message, and advertisers in Thailand still say CPAS.

What separates CPAS from an ordinary ad is measurement. A brand that sells through a marketplace cannot install its own Pixel on the Shopee or Lazada product page, so it has no way to know whether an ad click became an order. Collaborative Ads solve this by having the marketplace send the product view, add-to-cart and purchase signals back to Meta, which then reports to the brand only the part that concerns its own products.

How CPAS (Collaborative Ads) works with Shopee and Lazada

Collaborative Ads are built on the same system as Advantage+ catalog ads, where the image, name and price of each product are pulled from a catalog and assembled into an ad automatically. The difference is that the catalog belongs to the marketplace, not the brand. Following Meta's documentation, the flow runs like this:

1. The marketplace holds a large catalog in Commerce Manager and creates a catalog segment, a subset of that catalog containing only one brand's products.
2. The marketplace shares the catalog segment with the brand's business portfolio (formerly Business Manager) and sets what the brand may do with it, for example use it for advertising.
3. An admin of the brand's business accepts the shared asset in Collaboration Center and accepts the terms of service. The sharing party can add its own conditions, such as requiring the brand to open a new ad account for this work or to give the retailer view access to ad performance.
4. The brand builds a sales campaign in Ads Manager, selects the catalog segment in place of a normal catalog, and can group products into its own product sets.
5. A person who sees the ad taps through to the product page on the marketplace's website or app and pays there.
6. The marketplace's Pixel or SDK sends view, add-to-cart and purchase events back to Meta. The system uses them both to decide who sees the ads and to produce the brand's reports.

Meta's developer documentation tells brands to use a separate ad account for each retailer. Once an ad account is linked to a retailer, it can only select catalog segments belonging to that retailer. A brand running CPAS with both Shopee and Lazada therefore needs at least two ad accounts. How to request a segment, who to contact and through which channel are set by each marketplace, so those details have to come from the marketplace's own account contact.

What you need before running CPAS ads

The brand's checklist is short, but every item is a hard requirement.

• A business portfolio for the brand and someone with admin rights, because accepting a catalog segment is an admin action.
• Products already listed on the marketplace, and the marketplace's agreement to share a catalog segment. Meta's help page tells brands to find participating retailers, and to learn about retailer eligibility, through its retailer directory or their Meta sales team.
• A separate ad account for each marketplace.
• The brand's Facebook Page or Instagram account to act as the identity of the ads.
• An ad budget and a profit target that already account for marketplace fees.

The brand does not install code on the product page. The events used for measurement come from the marketplace's Pixel or SDK. Meta's documentation requires the seller side to send the standard events ViewContent, AddToCart and Purchase with product IDs that match the catalog.

Several limits are worth knowing before starting. The brand cannot edit the catalog segment. Product names, prices and images come from the marketplace's data, so a wrong price or image has to be fixed on the product listing in the store. The ad's destination link must point to the retailer's website or app and cannot be switched to the brand's own site. The product description field in the ad template is locked, and custom tracking specs are disabled.

How CPAS differs from a normal Facebook ad that links to your store

Many brands start with a plain link ad: paste the Shopee or Lazada store URL and let the system find people who click. It can run immediately with nothing requested from the marketplace. But Meta receives no signal after the click, so the system can only find people who tend to click, with no idea who buys, and the brand cannot retarget people who added a product to the cart and left. The table below compares the mechanics of the two approaches.

A store that sells on its own website does not need CPAS, because it already owns both the catalog and the Pixel. In that case it can run Advantage+ catalog ads with its own catalog.

How marketplace sales are measured

Once a campaign uses a catalog segment, Ads Manager shows a set of metrics tied to the shared products: content views, adds to cart, purchases, purchase value and catalog segment ROAS. They are available at ad account, campaign, ad set and ad level. The purchases with shared items metric counts purchase events that include at least one item in the segment, based on data from the Meta Business Tools the retailer has connected.

A second report sits in Collaboration Center and works at product level. Meta explains that this report includes every conversion that falls within the catalog segment, so it can count purchases of products that were not in the ad's product set. Purchase numbers from the two sources do not have to match.

Keep these limits in mind when reading the numbers.

• Reporting covers only products in the segment. If a shopper clicks the ad and buys one of the brand's products that is outside the segment, that sale does not appear.
• The figures are sales Meta attributes to the ads under the account's attribution setting. They are not the store's total sales.
• The marketplace's seller back end counts orders from every source: people who searched in the app, people who came from on-platform ads and people who came from Meta. It will not match Ads Manager, and that is normal.
• Reports are aggregated. Meta says the brand has no access to the retail partner's Events Manager or to raw event-level data from its pixel, and the shared-item metrics count only products in the brand's catalog segment.

A sensible way to work is to let Ads Manager answer which ads produced sales, and let the seller back end answer whether the store's total moved while the campaign was live.

Minimum budget and the ROAS to expect

Meta does not publish a minimum budget specific to Collaborative Ads in the help pages and documentation that could be checked. Ad sets follow the same minimum daily budget rules as other Ads Manager campaigns, which depend on currency and how the ad set is charged. Marketplace-side conditions, such as which seller types qualify or how much spend is required before a catalog segment is shared, are set by Shopee and Lazada themselves. Any such figure must be confirmed with the marketplace before planning.

The same goes for ROAS. There is no central figure that holds for every brand. These factors drive the result:

• Price and profit per unit after marketplace fees and shipping.
• The quality of the product page in the store, including reviews, images, price against other sellers and vouchers. The ad only delivers people to the product page, and the buying decision happens there.
• Stock. When best sellers run out, the system has fewer products left to show.
• The number of purchase events the system receives. An ad set with few purchases learns slowly.
• Timing. Results during a marketplace sale campaign and during an ordinary week differ widely, so neither should be used as the target for the whole year.

What a brand can calculate for itself is break-even ROAS: 1 divided by the gross margin after variable costs. An illustrative example for the arithmetic only: a product sells for 500 baht and leaves 150 baht after product cost, fees and shipping, a 30% margin. Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by 0.30, about 3.3. A campaign returning less than that loses money on each order. These numbers are an example, not a figure to expect from CPAS.

The ROAS shown in Ads Manager is purchase value of products in the segment divided by ad spend. It does not subtract discounts, fees or returns, so whether a campaign pays has to be judged against the brand's own break-even point.

Which brands CPAS suits

CPAS suits brands whose main sales already come from a marketplace, with several products for the system to choose from, steady stock and enough profit per unit to cover ad cost after fees. A brand that already uses Facebook and Instagram for awareness but has never been able to show how much those ads sell on the marketplace gains the most, because CPAS is the route that makes that number visible.

Three situations call for a second thought. The first is a brand with a single product and a thin margin: a catalog ad has nothing to rotate, and the break-even point is high. The second is a brand that wants to own its customer data for CRM. The purchase happens on the marketplace, so the buyer data stays there, and if that is the main goal, sending people to the brand's own website fits better. The third is a seller that has not yet been given a catalog segment by the marketplace, which cannot start whatever its budget.

Mistakes that make a CPAS campaign hard to read

• Using one ad account for several marketplaces, which conflicts with the way an account is linked to one retailer at a time.
• Expecting Ads Manager to equal the seller back end, then concluding the measurement is broken when it does not.
• Setting a product set so narrow that only a few products remain, leaving the system no options to match to each person.
• Letting the main products go out of stock during the campaign.
• Judging results by ROAS without working out break-even first.
• Leaving a wrong product name or image in place because it cannot be edited in the ad, when it can be fixed on the product listing.

CPAS in the Thai market: what marketers should plan for

Many Thai brands sell through Shopee and Lazada while running their advertising on Facebook and Instagram. CPAS connects the two sides. The planning question is how to split roles with on-platform advertising. Marketplace ads catch people who are already searching inside the app, while CPAS brings people in from outside it. The two work at different points in the decision and should have separate budgets. Brands already using a Shopee Ads service or a Lazada Ads service should read both sets of results side by side so the same sale is not counted twice.

Timing matters too. Requesting a segment, accepting it in Collaboration Center and setting up a new ad account take several steps. A brand that wants CPAS for a major sale campaign should prepare ahead and launch early enough for the system to receive events before the day itself. Brands that sell on both a website and marketplaces should put all channels in one ecommerce marketing plan and decide which products are pushed to which channel.

Frequently asked questions about CPAS

Are CPAS and Collaborative Ads different things?

They are the same product. Collaborative Ads is the name Meta uses on its help pages, and CPAS is the abbreviation that still appears in Meta's own tools, such as the "Catalog is not CPAS compliant" error. In Thailand the term CPAS is still widely used, especially for campaigns run with Shopee and Lazada.

Does the brand need to install its own Pixel?

Not on the product page, because that page belongs to the marketplace. The events used for measurement and learning come from the marketplace's Pixel or SDK, and the brand sees results through the catalog segment metrics in Ads Manager.

Can one ad account run CPAS for both Shopee and Lazada?

No. Meta's documentation tells brands to use a separate ad account for each retailer, and once an account is linked to one retailer it can only select that retailer's catalog segments.

What is the minimum budget for CPAS?

Meta states no minimum budget specific to Collaborative Ads on the pages that could be checked. Ad sets follow the normal Ads Manager minimum daily budget rules. If a marketplace has its own spend conditions, they must be confirmed with that marketplace.

Can the brand see data on customers who buy through CPAS?

Not at the individual level. Reports show aggregate figures such as purchases, value and ROAS for products in the segment. Meta says the brand cannot access raw event-level data from the retail partner's pixel.

CPAS answers a question marketplace brands have asked for a long time: how much do Meta ads sell? It works well only when the account structure, product sets and profit target are set before launch. The Relevant Audience team manages Meta campaigns through its Facebook Ads service and helps plan off-platform ads and marketplace ads so they work together.