Every product in your catalog is being treated the same.
Same budget logic, same bids, same promotions, across products with completely different jobs.
Some should be defending margin. Some have room to grow. Treated alike, neither gets what it needs.
Every product has a job
A product that already ranks and sells steadily isn't in the same position as one still earning its place. The first should protect margin. The second needs investment to climb.
Push both the same way and you overspend on the first and underfund the second.
How it shows up
- Best sellers carrying ad budget they don't need. They'd sell anyway. The spend protects position they already hold.
- Products with room to grow getting whatever's left. The ones that need the push get the leftovers.
- Products that should be cut, still advertised. A fee structure or margin that doesn't work at any volume won't be fixed by more traffic.
- One ACoS target for the whole catalog. A blended target hides that some products should run at a loss to rank and others should run lean.
- One promotional calendar for every product. Deals timed to the calendar instead of to what each product needs.
Why it happens
- Reporting is blended. Account-level ACoS and total margin average the winners and the losers into one number that describes none of them.
- The catalog grew one launch at a time. Nobody went back to decide what each product is for now.
- The data sits in different places. Margin in finance, search visibility in Search Query Performance, stock in inventory. The decision needs all three.
- Nobody looks at where else a product could sell. A product can answer more than one kind of search.
Fifteen minutes, no call required
List your top ten products by revenue.
Next to each, write one word: defend, grow, or cut.
Then look at last month's ad spend on each.
If the “defend” products carry most of the budget and the “grow” products get what's left, the budget is split by habit, not by job.
If you couldn't pick a word for some of them, that's the finding.
How we fix this
- We start with the market, not the product. For each product: how big its market is, and whether that market is expanding or shrinking.
- Then where the product stands in it, against the others competing for the same shoppers.
- Then what you want the product to do. Your plans for it matter as much as the data.
Each product gets a job, and the whole strategy follows it.
Where profit matters more than volume, profit comes first: budget, bids, promotions and targets are all built around that. Where there's room to grow, that's where the investment goes.
The same review finds what's missing. Products worth launching, and adjacent markets where the products you already have could sell.
Tracked every week against each product's target, and on every call you see where each one stands.
A product with a second job
A chew is also a toy, and for some dogs it's a calming product. Existing SKUs went into the adjacent categories where they answer a different need — new volume without a new product. Gross profit grew alongside revenue, which is the part that's easy to lose when an account gets bigger.
Read the full case →Part of the work was looking at each product and asking what else it could be. No new product was needed.
Let's sort the catalog
We'll audit the account and show you, product by product, which should be defending margin, which have room to grow, and which are costing you. If it's a fit, we talk about working together. If it isn't, you keep the audit.
Book a call (opens in a new tab)Engagements start at
$2,000/month
Month-to-month for the first three months.