Curated first

A catalog or carousel ad shows several designs at once. The shopper clicks one of them — and if the ad lands on a collection page, that design is usually buried somewhere in the grid. To the shopper, it looks like the wrong page.

Curated first closes that gap. The link carries the clicked product, and the theme moves it to the first position in the grid: the shopper sees the design they clicked, with the rest of the collection right behind it.

• Only the order changes. Nothing is hidden, removed or filtered out — the clicked design trades places with the first card, and everything in between stays where it was.
• Plain links are untouched. Without the parameter in the URL, the collection behaves exactly as it always has.
• The product does not have to be in the collection. If it is not there, the theme fetches it and shows it first anyway.
• Filters and sorting clear the pin. Once the shopper starts browsing on their own, the normal order returns.

Curated first ships switched on, so on a fresh BuildMyPOD store there is usually nothing to do here. It is still worth opening the panel once to confirm the parameter name, because your ads have to use the same one.

1. In Shopify admin, go to Online Store → Themes and press Customize on your BuildMyPOD theme.
2. Open Theme settings (the gear icon at the bottom of the left sidebar).
3. Scroll to BMP: Curated first.
4. Make sure Enable curated-first pinning is toggled on, then press Save.

• Enable curated-first pinning — the master switch. Toggled off, every curated-first link behaves like a plain collection link.
• URL parameter name — the parameter your links carry, first by default. Change it only if something else on your store already uses that parameter, and then use your name everywhere.
• Swap image to pinned variant — when the link names a variant, the pinned card shows that variant’s image instead of the product’s main image. Leave it on if your ads run per colour.

You do not build a link per product. In a catalog campaign, you change one field on the ad and Meta fills in the clicked product for you — every product in the catalog gets its own curated-first landing automatically.

Catalog campaigns (Advantage+ catalog ads)

By default, a catalog ad sends the click to the product page. Override the ad’s deep link and the click goes to your collection instead, with the clicked product carried along in the parameter:

1. In Ads Manager, open the ad (not the campaign or ad set) of your catalog campaign.
2. In the Destination section, choose Manual destination and set Main destination to Website.
3. In Website URL, put your collection URL — it is the fallback for any click that cannot use the deep link.
4. Tick Override catalog website links.
5. In Set catalog deep links, type your collection URL with the parameter, up to the equals sign:

   https://your-store.com/collections/collection-handle?first=

6. Press + and pick product.url so the tag sits right after first=. Meta replaces it with the clicked product’s URL on every impression.
7. Publish, then preview a few different products and click through — each one should land on the collection with itself first.

Single image or video ads

One creative, one product: here Meta has nothing to fill in, so you paste a finished curated-first link (built in the next section) into the ad’s destination.

1. In Ads Manager, open the ad and find the Destination section, with Main destination set to Website.
2. Paste your curated-first link into Website URL, question mark included.
3. Keep your tracking in the ad’s Tracking section, under URL parameters. That box takes key=value pairs only — never start it with a ?. Meta joins them onto your link, so ?first= survives.
4. Publish, then open the ad preview and click through to confirm the landing.

Catalog campaigns never need a hand-built link — Meta builds it for you. Build one yourself for everything else: a single image ad, an email, an organic post, or a quick test. It is your normal collection URL with one parameter on the end — the handle of the product you want first.

https://your-store.com/collections/collection-handle?first=product-handle

A filled-in example

The store tuned-in-tees.com is running an ad for the product vintage-mic-tee and wants it to land on the best-sellers collection:

https://tuned-in-tees.com/collections/best-sellers?first=vintage-mic-tee

Where the handles come from

• Collection handle — open the collection on your storefront and take the part after /collections/.
• Product handle — open the product and take the part after /products/. The handle alone is enough — no /products/ prefix in the parameter.
• Variant id (optional) — pick the variant on the product page and copy the number Shopify adds as ?variant=….

1. Open your link in a private / incognito window. A window logged into your admin can behave differently from a shopper’s.
2. The product from the ad should be the first card, top-left.
3. Click it and confirm it opens the right product — and the right variant.
4. Apply any filter or change the sort. The pin should disappear — that is by design, not a bug.
5. Try it once on a phone, since that is where your ad traffic lands.