Once every process in this training is running, the question stops being what should I do and becomes when do I do it. This is the calendar that holds all of it together.
The shape is simple: a daily check that takes minutes, a weekly cycle built around one meeting, a fortnightly harvest, and a monthly planning block.
Adjust it to suit you — but keep the cadences. Most of these processes fail not because they are wrong but because they get run irregularly.
Prefer to watch? One hundred and sixty-eight seconds on what belongs in the daily check, how the weekly cycle is ordered, and why monthly work needs blocked time.
Daily — minutes, not hours
Check each listing is live and correct: Buy Box held, main image right, price right, coupons as intended.
Check account health.
Check performance notifications.
That is the whole daily job. It exists to catch the things that cost you money by the hour — a suppressed Buy Box, a listing gone inactive, a policy warning — see Escalating an Amazon Case.
Everything else waits for the weekly cycle, because reacting daily to normal noise is how people spend their whole week optimising.
A daily pass over Buy Box, price, images and account health across a catalogue is a five-minute job when it is one screen and an hour when it is a tab per product — see Alert Categories, Priorities and What Actually Triggers Them.
Weekly — the meeting, then the work
1. The weekly meeting
Review three things: last week's performance table, inventory levels, and keyword performance.
Then decide what needs attention this week and which products you are pushing versus fixing. See The Weekly Meeting.
2. Urgent tasks and quick wins — immediately after
Cut budgets on products selling too fast and heading for stockout.
Raise budgets on products back in stock.
Cancel deals where they no longer make sense.
Adjust target TACOS up or down per product.
Add or remove promotions and coupons.
Do these in the hour after the meeting, while the decisions are fresh. They are small, they are quick, and they are the ones that get forgotten.
3. The weekly PPC work
Bleeder reports 1.0 and 2.0 — see The Bleeder Reports.
Bidding optimisation — see Bid Optimisation: Six Rules.
Placement bid optimisation — see Placement Bid Optimisation.
Deals for the coming period — see Running a Deal Calendar.
MSRP renewals — see Adding a List Price Strike-Through.
Fee review, including referral fee discounts still applying.
Inventory level check, and ship more where needed — see Monitoring Inventory Against Sales.
4. Fix product issues
Whatever time is left goes to the problems the meeting surfaced.
This is the proactive part of the week — listing work, relaunches, ranking pushes, offer improvements. It is also the first thing to get squeezed, which is why it sits explicitly on the calendar rather than in the gaps.
Fortnightly
The harvesting report, and launching the campaigns it produces — see Search Term Harvesting: Criteria and Bids.
Fortnightly rather than weekly, because search terms need time to accumulate enough clicks to be judged.
Monthly — set aside one or two days
Review your P&L and set target TACOS per product for the coming month — see Setting Target TACOS per Product.
Inventory planning and sales forecasting — see Inventory Forecasting and Purchase Orders.
Lifetime bleeder targets — see Lifetime Bleeder Targets.
Ad type performance and ad placement performance reports, for the high-level view — see Ad Type and Placement Mix.
Portfolio and account-level share of spend.
Best Seller badge opportunities.
Subscribe & Save trend.
Block the time. Monthly work has no natural trigger, so it only happens if it is scheduled.
Why the cadences are what they are
Daily is for damage. Things that cost money by the hour.
Weekly is for optimisation. Enough data to be readable, frequent enough to compound — and slow enough that you are not reacting to noise. See Optimisation as a Calculated Bet.
Fortnightly is for anything needing accumulated clicks.
Monthly is for decisions rather than adjustments — targets, forecasts, structural reviews.
Put every one of these in a calendar and a task tracker. A process that lives only in someone's memory is a process that runs when they are not busy, which is never.
Common mistakes
Doing PPC work before the weekly meeting, and optimising products you were about to deprioritise.
Skipping the quick wins, which are the cheapest actions of the week.
Running harvesting weekly, on data too thin to judge.
Letting monthly work slide, because nothing forces it.
Treating the daily check as optional. It is the only defence against fast, expensive failures.
Filling the whole week with optimisation, and never reaching the product work that actually grows the business.
Related
- The Weekly Meeting — the meeting the week is built around.
- The Nine-Report PPC Routine — the reports inside the weekly block.
- Setting Target TACOS per Product — the monthly decision everything else runs against.