Run the First 14-Day Launch Review

Outcome: Review sessions, conversion, spend, search terms, buyer issues, and inventory every few days before scaling.

What to do in this lesson

Watch: start with the lesson video.
Learn: use the summary and key points to capture the operating principle.
Do: complete the action steps against one real product, SKU, campaign, supplier, or workflow.
Submit: write one action card with owner, evidence, next step, risk, status, and review date.

Watch

Hosted on Google Drive.

Lesson summary

This lesson teaches about the maintenance, graduation, and optimization stages of an Amazon product launch. It emphasizes the importance of deploying new keyword campaigns in a controlled manner, monitoring key metrics like sales, conversion rate, and ACOS, and transitioning from the launch phase (Phase 1) to the profitability phase (Phase 2) when certain stability criteria are met.

The lesson also provides guidance on specific optimization tactics during the launch phase, such as focusing on conversion rate optimization, reducing wasted ACOS, and gradually expanding the PPC campaigns.

Key points

Deploy new keyword campaigns in rounds when metrics start to plateau, rather than all at once
Use organic sales percentage as a key indicator for when to add more PPC campaigns
Transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2 when you meet certain stability criteria (e.g. 10 reviews, conversion rate stabilizing, pricing near target)
Focus on conversion rate optimization and reducing wasted ACOS during the launch phase
Maintain a higher ACOS tolerance during launch compared to post-launch

Action checklist

Review the graduation criteria document to understand when to move from Phase 1 to Phase 2
Optimize your ranking campaigns for conversion rate, especially by placement
Reduce wasted ACOS on your targeting/discovery campaigns
Graduate to Phase 2 when you’ve met the stability criteria, even if you haven’t hit all the metrics perfectly

Full transcript

Open transcript

The next thing we’re going to talk about is essentially what we’ve been talking about a week. Maintenance, graduation and optimization. We’re going to review it one more time to make sure it’s crystal clear because this is a key part of launch, right? We don’t want to add things too fast, but we also don’t want to go too slow and we’re going to talk about how to climb the balance there. So a four phase one, and I’m trying to find like the most simplest way to explain this. But you add another round of PPC keywords, one session sales and conversion rate has started to stabilize. Or even day, whenever you see things start to level off, that’s when you can add more. In other words, when you have put your keywords in the campaigns and sales go up, impressions go up, sessions go up, clicks go up, all that’s things go up right at the start, but as soon as those things start to plateau and you’re starting to get the same thing over and over every day, but it’s not quite enough because you’re still in the launch phase, you add another round of PPC keywords. So just as a caveat to this, this section here, and this is essentially going to apply for non-subjective and semi-subjective products, but even for you guys, if you are finding that the momentum is hard to gain because of either an indexing issue, which hopefully you’ve already solved. But for whatever reason, you may not have enough keywords or they’re all lower volume, whatever it may be. I want to be clear, you guys can deploy a broad match campaign in phase one if the momentum is not there. But if you have enough single keyword campaigns with enough search volume, and every time you deploy them, you get a nice bump in traffic, you nice bump in sales, then you do not have to do this. But it is just something I wanted to call out that you can deploy those. But the key point here, when we were looking at each round of keywords, you deploy these five, right? For example, essentially, there’s, let’s say there’s only 10 keywords total that this product has. When we deploy these five keywords at the start of our launch in round one, as soon as we start to see stabilization and sales clicks and conversion rate, we can move to round two. We’re still in phase one. We’re just deploying another round of hyper-relevant keywords where we can maintain the highest amount of control. We’re going to repeat this process, whereas many keywords as we have. So if you’ve got 50, it’ll be 50. If you’ve got 20, it’s going to be 20, the F3, it’ll only be three. And you might be able to want all of those in just one round. But the key point on this is that when you see that stability start to come through, you can add more keywords. And this is essentially the case for everything. For graduation criteria, we’re going from phase one to two. So once all of those hyper-relevant keywords have actually been deployed, then you have reached that point of stability with all of those ranking campaigns, you can move into phase two. So if we were to try to simplify this with a graphic here, what you have on the left is our organic sales percentage. And then on the bottom here, you have essentially campaign expansion or adding more campaign targets to your products portfolio in PPC. And so think of this as like the start of phase one, if you’re launching your first round of keywords. And once that happens, you have this really cool uptick in organic sales, right? Because you start to rank for these keywords and you get organic sales, and that’s all great. But eventually they start to plateau, and they might even fall down a little bit as other campaigns that you deployed in round one start to see more momentum. So when you start to see that happen, you can add another set, another round of keywords. And you should see another spike up in traffic and conversion and sales. And then again, another round. Now let’s say you’ve depleted all of your rounds. So let’s say this is a round five or two, whatever it may be. And you get to this point and things start to drop off. Great. Now you graduated to phase two. Okay. You’ve reached a point of stability. You’ve exhausted all of the keywords that you have to deploy, and it’s time to move on. Add more traffic because you are at a point of stability, which is, and if you just stay there and do nothing, things do eventually start to fall down. In terms of organic percentage, the reason why you see that dip, right? Like obviously on the launch, we want to continually go up. And yes, with Justin talking about when he talks about a plateau, and then where you see that dip is, when you deploy new campaigns, that percentage of PVC sales will go up again, right? Which means your organic percentage is going to go down a bit. So we keep talking about that as a benchmarking tool for success or progress, but just know as you deploy more keywords, PVC percentage starts to take over a little bit more. And then as it starts to get more organic rank based off of what you just put in, it’ll start to go back up. And so you’ll see these little dips in organic percentage. But then you should pick back up if you deploy the right hyperlevel keywords and if you stay focused and focus on conversion rate optimization. The way to think about organic sales is it’s like the throttle on the gas pedal in the car. So the organic sales percentage is the brometer that’s varying your speed. And then the number of keywords you’ve deployed is the pedal. And as you deploy more PPC, you’re going to get more PPC sales because you’ve deployed hyper targeted targets. But then you’ve got to wait a bit of time for that flywheel to take effect for it to have the impact on the organic rank one, two weeks depending on the competition, the volume and the category. Maybe it’s sometimes a few days if it’s low competition. But the lag between you adding those new keywords, getting those high targeted paid PPC sales. And then the lag of the organic benefit kicking in is what that’s exact is. And you use your organic sales percentage as your decision that your speedometer on how quickly you start expanding those keywords. So let’s look at this from a more data driven standpoint. We talked about graduation criteria as we were moving from phase one to phase two. So there’s this little section for graduation criteria. All three of these are captured in this document. So y’all were using this initially to pinpoint exactly what phase and stage your product was in. But the same document is essentially what you’re going to use to figure out when you can graduate. So going back to phase one, remember the focus at this point is to prove your product concept. You’re trying to prove that you can even make a dollar with this product. So during phase one, that’s why we’re launching multiple rounds of hyper relevant keywords. If we can’t convert for the most relevant stuff that our product is viable for, then we really can’t do anything else. We’re going to be profitable if we can’t even generate revenue. So phase one’s about generating that initial wave of revenue where the employees, many hyper relevant keywords that are available to us, depending on your product type. We are looking for that kind of critical mass when it comes to revenue and units sold. So generally 10 units a day, 10k a month, somewhere in that range. It’s not an exact number. And as far as traffic goes, this is when you’re sending your initial pipsy traffic. So where we’re sending phase one traffic hyper relevant keywords or broad campaign for those of you that are in subjective product types, you are also using targeted discovery. You’re sending that initial traffic to your listing. Once this has been achieved, you can move to phase two. You’ve deployed that initial traffic. You’ve proven you can make a revenue with this product and you are announcing a plateau. Okay, you now can start working towards profitability, which is what we expect to see happen in phase two. So we can use metrics to help define this. We can go into be really wordy as well. You guys already have this document. So read through it. It talks about the expectations in phase one and two for non-subjective, semi-subjective and also subjective products. And then there’s also a very metric-based version of this. So if you’re going to go from phase one to phase two, if we look at it from a metric standpoint, you at least have 10 reviews. You start writing at the market average or better. Your conversion rate is stabilizing as you get more reviews, but probably still a bit unstable. The pricing is probably below your target pricing, right? We just talked about pricing strategy. So it’s likely not quite at target yet. And as far as indexing geo code issues and categorical issues, you should have none. This obviously isn’t really a metric thing, but you can’t add a bunch more traffic if you’re having indexing issues. It’s not going to help you. It’ll hurt you. And even in phase one, going into phase two, you’re still aiming for these targets. Obviously, when you add a new campaign, especially a discovery campaign, you’re going to see a spike in your wasted aspen. That is why we deploy our neveless. So that spike is minimal and not a huge 30%, 40% wasted aspen. From a PPC perspective, tacos should be around break even or within two times of your CM2. This likely is not going to be break even, but it’s going to be somewhere in that range. Again, the expectation in phase one is you’re probably not profitable. You can be, but it’s unlikely that’s not the goal. The goal is organic ranking and reviews as far as your PPC sales percentage. So 50% PPC for non subjective, 60% percent percent my is 70% for subjective. That’s pretty typical. Hopefully it’s better for that PPC optimization. You should be optimizing at this point where you haven’t really talked about that just yet, but this is something that should be happening. If you haven’t optimizing campaigns, why in the world would you add more PPC conversion rate above listing conversion rate, always and forever that will always be the standard no matter what product type, no matter anything else PPC clicks, they’re increasing but slowing down. This is what we’re referring to PPC clicks, conversion rate, and essentially the traffic and conversion when that starts to stabilize or slow down, then it’s time to start moving on sessions. Same things. So sessions are essentially just the organic measurement of a click, right? So sessions should also be increasing but slowing down as a result of the traffic you’ve deployed, getting its organic ranking and your stuff at bottom of page one, top of page two or something like that. As far as proper metrics go, we’re not going to talk about those here, but that is a general expectation when you go from phase one to phase two, if you’re looking for a metric-based analysis, if you will, this would be it. I do not want you guys to get hung up on I have to take every box. That’s not the point here. If you can take about 60 to 80% of these, then you’re likely in a good space. Every launch is different. They can go sideways real quick. The idea behind this though is if things are going sideways, don’t put more fuel on the fire. So once you have stability, which means things are not going sideways, then you can add more fuel to the fire. Campaign optimization should start the moment your campaigns go live. Now that doesn’t mean you’re tinkering, that just means that the optimization process will begin. Your eyeballs have to be on your campaigns. This is the most important part of your launch up to this point. Your product is live. Have campaigns deployed. You need to make sure you are optimizing your ranking campaigns, especially for my non-subjective and semi-subjective sellers here, conversion rate optimization by placement here. This is the number one role for our goal when you’re optimizing your ranking campaigns. For targeting discovery, this is all the same stuff we talked about, right? This should be very familiar. Wasted that’s been reduction on for relevant search terms, conversion rate optimization for those search terms, and then search term graduation for anything that is really winning and deserves its own campaign based on its search volume, all right? Tacos, now I want to make sure this is super clear because we are talking specifically about launch. Your tacos and your conversion rate tolerances are going to be higher during phase one. If your normal tacos tolerance is say 12%, once your product is ranked, fully launched, then while you are launching, it might be as high as 30%, 40%. No, that’s probably not going to be profitable, might be a little bit over. But again, you have no credibility. The expectation is your conversion rate sucks, and so does your tacos. Now for those of you who did product development exceptionally well, you can actually skip over this, and you can get the profitability much faster. That’s why we’re putting so much emphasis on product development as the key starting point of a product launch in general. And as Mark is always saying, don’t tinker. You can mess around with it a little bit if you’re finding I don’t get any impressions or clicks or anything like that, but you should not be in the campaigns every single day. It’s the same maintenance protocol. The only difference is tacos and conversion rate tolerance is going to be a bit higher. So quick review. We have talked about everything up to this point, which has primarily stuck to phase one.

Resources

Source lesson: Launch Strategy: Phase 1 PPC Maintenance, Graduation & Optimization
Resources: none attached yet.

Track: 03 — Listing, Launch & Review Engine
Module: Launch Readiness