Use Scale / Fix / Harvest / Exit Lanes

Outcome: Assign every SKU to a clear action lane instead of treating all products as growth candidates.

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 how to conduct a Product Performance Audit (PPA) - a set of tasks to analyze how a product is performing and identify areas for improvement. The key steps include setting up the necessary tools, reviewing competitor data, tracking keywords, calculating gross profit margin, and running sponsored ad reports.

Key points

Conduct a PPA at least quarterly for each product, adjusting frequency based on the product lifecycle stage
Use a PPA checklist to evaluate different areas of product performance and identify what needs improvement
Ensure the seller partner and advertising APIs are connected in the Title Tools account settings
Review and update the competitors in the Keyword Relevancy and Product Research tools
Verify you have a good number of keywords tracked in the Keyword Rank Tracker tool
Calculate the gross profit margin for the product to understand how much can be invested in PPC

Action checklist

Create a PPA checklist and set up a cadence to regularly review each product
Connect the seller partner and advertising APIs in the Title Tools account settings
Review and update the competitors in the Keyword Relevancy and Product Research tools
Add keywords to the Keyword Rank Tracker tool
Calculate the gross profit margin for each product

Full transcript

Open transcript

Hey Titans, Anna Silva here. In this video, I’m going to show you how to conduct a product performance audit. What is a product performance audit? We’re going to call it PPA for short. PPA is a set of tasks you should carry out periodically to analyze how a product is performing and where to focus your effort to improve sales and profit. It should be done at least quarterly for each of your products, but certain tasks may be done on a monthly basis or even weekly depending on what part of the life cycle the product is. If you’re launching, if you’re trying to grow the product or relaunching or maintaining. To help you with your PPA, we created a checklist. This is what the checklist looks like and I’m going to put a link at the bottom of this video so you can use it. So once you get to this checklist, you would come to file and make your own copy so then you can update with your notes and valuation. Here at the bottom, you may create a tab for each of your products and maybe put dates on it so you can create a cadence and periodically you would go through each of the product and perform a full PPA. Also, you may divide the tasks among different members of your team. So here in Column C, you’re going to see there the dropdown where you can evaluate the different areas. You may say that’s good, can be improved, add here in the notes. You might need to say or whoever’s performing the PPA will identify what needs to be improved and maybe somebody else on the team can then carry on to make improvements to that specific area. The next thing we need to do before performing the PPA is to make sure we are set up correctly. I’m going to show you how to do all that. So we need to make sure the title tools are connected and synced. We need to make sure the keyword relevancy tool and product research tools have the right competitors. Also, we want to make sure we have a good amount of keywords in our keyword tracker tool and we also for each of the products that we’re doing this for, we need to understand what the gross profit margin is. And then we’re going to run some sponsored ad reports. If you go to the dashboard in the title tools and you click at the very top here with your initials, then go to profile information and then account settings. That’s where you’re going to see if your account is set up correctly. You may have multiple brands, multiple store names, and that is fine. What we want to see here is that for both the seller partner and the advertising APIs are connected. In this case, we can see that the seller partner is connected for this store, but not on this one, and none of the APIs for the advertising is connected. So you would then click on this button here and follow the prompts to connect. And then you would click on sync with Amazon. The next step of the setup is to go into our keyword relevancy and product research tools and make sure we have the right competitors there. So again, go to the title tools in your dashboard. On the left side, you’re going to see my products. If you have a lot of products, there’s going to be a search feature there. You can search for your product. And on the right side of the product that we’re going to be conducting the PPA, you’re going to see several icons. The keyword relevancy tool is going to be in this graph icon and the product research tool is going to be on this glasses icon. And let’s go to each of those tools to see how we would make sure we have the correct competitors there. So here I’m in the keyword relevancy tool and I can toggle back here at the top between the keyword relevancy and product research tools. So let’s start with the keyword’s relevancy. Depending on when you did this, the first thing you may want to do is update the product data. This is updated fairly recently, so I’m going to keep it that way. But then you also want to make sure these products here are all still your competitors and they are like for like, they have the same intent. They are still making money. If not, if you decide that you’re missing competitors or some of the competitors that are here are not relevant anymore, you would come into here at At Asins. At Asins and under At Asins, you’re going to see the Asins of your competitors. You can come here, remove a few, add a few more. You can have a maximum of 10 products here in the keyword’s relevancy and a maximum of 20 products in the product research area. So here, again, all I’m doing here right now is make sure these competitors are correct. Then we’re going to go back here once we start the PPA to compare ourselves with these other products. So again, then product research. It’s very similar. Under a competitor here, you want to make sure the competitors are valid. And if not, you can come here into more actions. Add at Asins the same way you can add Asins or remove through this model here. And save or cancel. You can have 20 products here. We’re going to use this tool later right now again. We’re just wanting to make sure the competitors you have here are still valid. The other tool we want to check is the keyword rank tracker. So the same way we went into my products and found the icons. We’re going to look at this other icon where the keyword rank tracker is and we don’t need to check if we have enough keywords there. So here, yeah, my keyword rank tracker. And I can see here that I have no keywords. If this is the first time I’m doing this, I’m not going to have any keywords. The tools do not put keywords here automatically. So you’re going to need to do it. So if they’re not keywords, I will click on add keywords either this button here or this button at the top. And I can import keyword sets from when I did my keyword research or I can manually add keywords. So make sure you do that before you continue. The next step of our setup here is to understand the gross profit margin for this product. To calculate the gross profit margin, we’re going to subtract the landed cost, referral fees and FBA fulfillment fee from the selling price. Once you have your gross profit, we’re going to divide that by the selling price to get to your profit margin. So this gross profit margin, you need to understand what this is and this does not include any PPC cost or trying to see here if there’s enough room for us to invest on PPC and still make an overall profit on this product. Attention, if this number is below 25%, 25% is the very minimum we want to see here. So we have room to invest on PPC. If that’s the case, you may need to analyze this product a little further. Maybe there’s some kind of negotiation you can do with your supplier to reduce the landed cost. Maybe there’s improvements you can do on shipping or even the packaging. This might be a little too high and there might be improvements you can do on the packaging to reduce this amount here. So that’s it for here. Again, just make sure you keep this number in mind for that specific product. So when we do the rest of the PPA, we know how much we can afford on PPC.

Resources

Source lesson: 4: How to Perform a Product Performance Audit (PPA) Setup Instructions
Resources: none attached yet.

Track: 05 — SKU Growth & Cashflow Operations
Module: SKU Scorecard