Product Research & Launch

Before You Add a Product

Adding products is the obvious way to grow an Amazon brand, and it is usually the wrong first move. A second product does not fix a first product that is under-ranked, under-priced or badly advertised — it just splits your attention and your cash across two problems instead of one. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and nineteen seconds on why you maximise what you have first, what high revenue on low reviews is telling you, and the four-listings rule that saves hours. The precondition Only start product research once your existing listings are genuinely maximised — in organic ranking, in sales, and in profitability. That is a real test, not a feeling. If your current products still have obvious ceiling left, that ceiling is cheaper to reach than a new product launch, and far less risky. You already have the reviews, the rank and the sales history. When every active product is optimised, the only remaining constraint on growth is having more things to sell. That is the moment this framework earns its place. What you are actually looking for The whole of product research reduces to one question: is there a market here I could realistically compete in? Which, in practice, means finding markets where listings make good money on low review counts. That single signal carries most of the weight. A listing turning over $50,000 a month with 150 reviews is telling you the market rewards a good offer rather than an entrenched position — and that in three months, that listing could be yours. A listing turning over the same money on 8,000 reviews is telling you the opposite. A market worth entering Several listings making $50k+ a month with under 200 reviews. Average review count under 500 across listings making $25k+. Few Amazon-owned or overseas-manufacturer-direct listings in the top results. Room for a competitive offer at 40%+ margin. Repeat purchase behaviour — anything eligible for Subscribe & Save has a second sale built in. A market to walk away from Revenue concentrated in one or two listings. That is a market with a winner, not an opening. Multiple listings at 5,000+ reviews. Recognisable brand names holding the top spots. Many Amazon-owned or manufacturer-direct listings. The single hardest rule to apply, and the most useful: if searching the main keyword returns more than four listings with over 5,000 reviews, walk away. Those four will hold the top organic positions almost permanently, and everything you do will be for fifth place. The shape of the process Five stages, narrowing hard at each one: | Stage | What happens | |---|---| | 1 | Set up a scoring sheet so markets can be compared | | 2 | Generate 50+ ideas across six research methods | | 3 | Score them, take the top 15 | | 4 | Deep-analyse those 15, cut to 7 | | 5 | Define an offer and get real supplier costs, pick 1–3 | The number that matters most is 50. Fifty ideas is the minimum, not the target. Most will fail on competition, margin or compliance, and the quality of your final choice is determined almost entirely by how many candidates it beat. Being lazy at the generation stage is the most expensive shortcut available, because you cannot recover from it later — you can only choose the best of what you gathered. Expectations, honestly No process guarantees a winner. What a process does is raise the number of shots and improve the average quality of each one. The framework's own track record makes the point: the same method produced 150 ideas in four weeks and two brands. One failed completely. The other reached $5M in revenue at 25% margin. That is roughly the distribution to expect, and it is why you do not bet everything on the first idea you like. Your categories, benchmarked Where your existing account helps You are not starting from nothing. Your current catalogue is data about what your customers buy and what sells alongside it. What is bought with your products is one of the strongest signals for a next product, and it is in your own account rather than in any research tool. See Find Your Next Bundle and ASIN Purchase and Upsell Analysis. What people search around your products tells you where adjacent demand sits. See Understanding Search Query Performance. How your categories are performing tells you where you already have traction to build on. See Category Insights: Benchmarking Your Categories. Related - Six Ways to Find Product Candidates — generating the fifty. - Scoring Product Opportunities — comparing markets on data rather than instinct. - Designing the Offer — what you actually sell once you have picked a market.

Six Ways to Find Product Candidates

The goal of this stage is volume: fifty product ideas minimum, and more is better. Six methods, each finding the same signal from a different direction. You are always looking for one thing — a product selling well on a low review count — because that single product is a flare telling you the market behind it may be open. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and twenty-eight seconds on the four steps you run on every candidate, the six places they come from, and the review-count trap that catches people out. What you do with every candidate The same four steps, whichever method surfaced it. Once you have the habit, each takes two or three minutes. 1. Find the product's main keyword, usually from its title. 2. Search that keyword on Amazon and export the results. 3. Assess the page in one or two minutes. Is this market crowded or open? 4. If it looks reasonable, add it to your sheet. You are not deciding, you are collecting. The one-minute disqualifier: if the search returns more than four listings with over 5,000 reviews, skip it and move on. Do not spend ten minutes hoping. One data caution. Reviews are not always merged across variations. A listing that appears to have 80 reviews may be a variation of a parent with 8,000. Check the parent before getting excited. Method 1 — Filtered product database search The highest-volume method: query a product database by criteria and let it return candidates. | Filter | Setting | |---|---| | Category / subcategory | only ones that fit your brand | | Review count | min 50, max 200 | | Fulfilment | FBA | | Parent-level revenue | min $25,000/month | Adjust to your situation — a larger brand with more capital can tolerate higher review counts; a smaller or less competitive category should start lower. Add a keyword filter that matches your brand. If you sell liquid vitamins, filter titles for drops. If you sell paper goods, filter for paper. This turns a generic list into a relevant one. Work in narrow bands rather than one wide search. A broad query returns 500+ results, and you will skim, repeat yourself and miss things. Instead, tighten until fewer than 500 results come back, review all of them, then step the band up. For example: 40–50 reviews at $25–30k, then 50–60 reviews at $25–30k, then 60–70. Each pass is small enough to actually read. What sells alongside your products Method 2 — Frequently Bought Together Go to your own listings and look at what Amazon shows as frequently bought together. These are, by definition, products your customers already buy alongside yours. That is a stronger relevance signal than anything a filter can produce, because it comes from real purchasing behaviour rather than category taxonomy. Your own account answers this better than any external tool. See Find Your Next Bundle and ASIN Purchase and Upsell Analysis, which show what actually gets bought with what across your catalogue. Method 3 — Competitors' storefronts Search the main keyword for each of your best products, take the top-performing listings, and open each seller's storefront to see what else they sell. This is efficient because those sellers have already done relevance filtering for you — they sell to the same customers you do. Visit 10–15 storefronts per one of your best-selling products. It is repetitive, and it consistently produces candidates the databases miss. Method 4 — New Releases Amazon's New Releases pages for your subcategories show products that launched recently and are already selling. That combination — recent, and moving — is exactly the profile you want: a market open enough that a new entrant got traction. Same filter as always: high sales, low reviews. Method 5 — What you already know You have been selling in this space for a while and you have seen adjacent products, heard customer requests, and had ideas you never chased. Write them all down and check each one. Search the main keyword, look at the page, add anything that is not obviously too competitive. This method costs nothing and is skipped constantly. Method 6 — Outlier keyword browsing Search a broad keyword related to your brand and go down the rabbit hole. Sell yoga mats, and you search yoga or pilates and scroll — page after page — looking at what else exists in that world. Collect your brand-adjacent keywords first, then work through them one at a time. It feels unstructured. It surfaces things structured search will not, because you are browsing the way a customer would. Social platforms are a variant of the same idea. Watching what is gaining traction off Amazon before it arrives on Amazon is genuinely high-reward, because competition is near zero when you are early. It is also riskier, because off-Amazon popularity does not always transfer. Then fill in the manual data Collecting candidates is the fast half. The slow half is filling in, for each one, the things no export gives you: expected selling price; estimated landed cost; FBA fee; whether you can offer better value at 35%+ margin; search volume and its growth; how many of the top 10 are Amazon, FBM, overseas-direct, or strong sellers; whether it is a variations market; Subscribe & Save eligibility; reorder frequency; seasonality; brand fit; patents; whether it is a recent fad; and whether the category has restrictions. This is tedious and it is the point. It is what turns a list of impressions into something you can rank. Search volume and its direction are two of those columns you can answer from real data rather than estimate — see Understanding Search Query Performance. Common mistakes Stopping at twenty ideas. Fifty is the floor. Falling for unmerged variation reviews. Spending ten minutes on an obviously crowded market instead of skipping in one. Only using method 1, and getting a list that any other seller running the same filters would also have. Skipping the manual columns, which leaves you choosing on gut feel after all that work. Related - Before You Add a Product — whether you should be doing this at all yet. - Scoring Product Opportunities — turning the list into a ranking. - Outlier and Trending Keywords — the same instinct applied to advertising.

Scoring Product Opportunities

Fifty product ideas is an unrankable list. Everything looks plausible at a glance, and choosing by instinct means choosing the one you happened to look at when you were feeling optimistic. Scoring fixes that. Every market gets the same data points, each contributes a weighted score, and the list sorts itself. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and thirty seconds on what a score is actually for, the margin column that overrides everything else, and the four reasons to promote a lower-scoring idea. What scoring is for It is not a verdict. A score does not tell you a product will work. It tells you which markets are worth spending an hour on, out of fifty you cannot possibly analyse deeply. Scores are relative to your own list. There is no universal "good score", because markets vary enormously between categories. A 62 might be your best idea or your worst. The question is always: how does this rank against the other forty-nine? The data that comes from the export Search the market's main keyword on Amazon, export the results, and the mechanical columns fill themselves: revenue per listing, review counts, price points, seller types, fulfilment method. This is where the "high revenue, low reviews" signal becomes numeric rather than an impression. The data you fill in yourself The manual columns are the ones that decide the score, and they are why this takes real time. Economics Expected selling price — what the market supports, from the current listings. Estimated landed COGS — product plus freight. FBA fulfilment fee — driven by size and weight, and often the difference between a viable product and a dead one. Can you afford a better offer at 35%+ margin? The single most important column. If the answer is no, nothing else on the row matters. Demand Search volume over the past 360 days. Search volume growth over the past 180 days. Direction matters as much as size — a smaller growing market beats a larger shrinking one. Competition, in the top 10 How many Amazon-owned listings. More than five is usually disqualifying. How many FBM listings. Merchant-fulfilled competitors are generally easier to beat on delivery. How many overseas manufacturer-direct sellers. They compete on price in ways you often cannot. How many strong sellers, and how many distinct sellers. A market split across ten sellers is more open than one split across three. Product characteristics Differentiation potential — can you offer something meaningfully better? Is it a variations market? Variations capture more keywords on one listing and give you upsell paths. Subscribe & Save eligibility and reorder frequency — repeat purchase changes the lifetime value of every customer you win. Seasonality — evergreen demand is far kinder to cash flow and inventory planning. Brand fit, 1–10 — would your existing customers expect to see this from you? Risks Existing patents. Trendy in the last 4–8 months — a spike you might be arriving at the end of. Restricted or problematic categories — compliance burden that can stop a launch entirely. Weighting Each column is capped according to how much it matters. Margin potential and competition carry more weight than, say, variation options, because they are more often the thing that kills a product. The output is a single comparable number per market. Take the top 15 — and override deliberately Sort by score, mark the top 15, and move them to the next stage. Then allow yourself to promote a lower-scoring idea, if you have a specific reason. The score is a summary, and summaries miss things. Legitimate reasons to override: You have a genuine differentiator nobody in that market offers. You have an inactive listing with existing reviews you could relaunch as a variation — a real head start the score cannot see. You can source it unusually cheaply, changing the margin maths. You can engineer the size or weight down to cut FBA fees where competitors have not. Fee advantages are durable competitive advantages, and they are routinely ignored. What is not a legitimate reason: liking the product. That is the exact bias the scoring exists to remove. Search volume and share, per term Validating demand from real data Two of the score's most important columns — search volume and its direction — are usually estimated from third-party tools. For markets adjacent to what you already sell, you can do better than an estimate. Search Query Performance reports actual search volume per term and how much of it converts, which makes "is this market growing?" a data question rather than a guess. See Understanding Search Query Performance and SQP Is Weekly: Reading Week Cohorts for how to read the trend without misreading the cohorts. Common mistakes Looking for an absolute score. There isn't one. Skipping the margin column because sourcing costs are unknown. Estimate it — a rough number beats a blank. Ignoring FBA fees until after you have committed. Treating the score as the decision rather than as a filter that decides where to spend the next fifteen hours. Related - Six Ways to Find Product Candidates — generating the list this ranks. - Narrowing Fifteen Ideas to Seven — the deep pass on the survivors. - Before You Add a Product — what a good market looks like.

Narrowing Fifteen Ideas to Seven

Scoring got you from fifty ideas to fifteen using data that exports cheaply. This stage is the opposite: an hour or more per product, by hand, minimum fifteen hours total. That sounds excessive until you consider what is downstream — a purchase order, months of cash tied up, and a listing you will live with for years. Fifteen hours to avoid the wrong one is inexpensive. The purpose is to find out which opportunities are genuinely good, and which only looked good on surface data. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and thirty-five seconds on the seven criteria, why opening competitor storefronts changes your read, and why no differentiation idea is itself the finding. Seven criteria Work through all seven for each of the fifteen. 1. COGS and the leaders' margins Highest impact of the seven. About 5–10 minutes. Estimate what the top one or two sellers pay for their product, and what margin they are running. Take their selling price, estimate landed cost from sourcing marketplace listings, and work backwards. Good: the market leaders appear to be making healthy margins — 35%+. If they can, you probably can, and there is room to price competitively and still profit. Bad: the leaders look like they are running thin. If the incumbent with scale and supplier relationships is scraping by, a new entrant will do worse. 2. Brand fit About a minute, and it is a judgement rather than a calculation. Would your existing customers expect to see this in your store? Does it match your theme and audience? Could you cross-sell it to the buyers you already have? Good: it fits naturally, so you get spillover traffic and cross-sell opportunities from day one. Bad: it is unrelated, and you are effectively launching a new brand with none of the advantages of your existing one. 3. Seasonality 3–5 minutes. Look at demand across the last 12–24 months. Good: steady year-round. Easier to forecast, easier to fund, easier to keep in stock. Bad: sharp spikes and troughs. Seasonal products punish inventory mistakes twice — you stock out in the peak and hold dead stock afterwards. 4. Who the top competitors actually are 5–10 minutes, and the most revealing of the seven. Open the top 5–10 listings and look at each seller's storefront. How many products do they carry? How good are their images and A+ content? Are they big brands, Amazon itself, overseas manufacturers, or small FBA sellers? Good: the top spots are held by small or mid-sized sellers with narrow catalogues and mediocre listings. Those are beatable with better execution. Bad: well-known brands, Amazon 1P, or high-revenue manufacturer-direct sellers. Revenue means resources, and resources mean they can outspend you for as long as it takes. 5. Other marketplaces 3–5 minutes. Check the same product in the UK, Germany, Canada. Good: real demand across several marketplaces, which gives you somewhere to go after a successful launch. Bad: demand only in one market, capping the product's ceiling before you start. 6. Variation options 2–3 minutes. Do competitors offer sizes, colours, styles, bundles? Good: the market supports variations. One listing can capture far more keywords, and you get natural upsell paths. Bad: a single-SKU item with no natural variants. 7. Differentiation ideas 5–10 minutes, and the one that requires actual thought. Study the top listings and ask what you could offer that they do not — design, features, a bonus item, better packaging, a smarter bundle. Good: you have a specific, concrete idea. Not "better quality" — something you could describe to a supplier. Bad: you cannot think of anything. If the product is generic and you have no angle, you are entering a price war with someone who has better unit economics than you. Cutting to seven Start at both ends. Remove the obvious failures, protect the obvious winners, then spend your remaining judgement on the middle. The number is a guide, not a quota. If nine still look genuinely strong, carry nine. If only five survive honestly, carry five — do not promote something you already know you will not launch just to reach a target. Cut on the criteria that are hardest to change. Margin structure and competitor strength are facts about the market. Weak differentiation is sometimes solvable with thought; a category dominated by Amazon is not solvable at all. Category performance, side by side Reading the demand side properly Two of these criteria — seasonality and cross-market demand — are demand questions, and they are usually answered from third-party estimates. Where the market is adjacent to something you already sell, use your own data instead. Real search volume by week shows seasonality directly rather than as a smoothed estimate: see SQP Is Weekly: Reading Week Cohorts. And if you already sell in several marketplaces, Marketplaces and Currency shows how demand differs between them for products like yours. Common mistakes Rushing it. An hour per product is the point; twenty minutes each produces the same answer you already had. Judging competitors by their listing alone rather than opening the storefront. A weak-looking listing from a seller with 400 products is a different opponent from the same listing run by someone with four. Falling in love with a product and reverse-engineering justifications through all seven criteria. Ignoring "no differentiation idea" as a finding. It is the strongest signal in the list. Related - Scoring Product Opportunities — how the fifteen were chosen. - Designing the Offer — turning the surviving seven into something specific. - Before You Add a Product — the market rules this stage applies in depth.

Designing the Offer

You have seven markets that survived scoring and fifteen hours of analysis. From here the question changes. It is no longer "is this a good market?" — you have answered that. It is "what exactly will I sell, and what will it actually cost me?" Worth being blunt about the mindset: you are unlikely to find better markets than the seven in front of you. The job now is to make one of them work. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and twenty-nine seconds on the three offer types and when each works, why a fee advantage is permanent, and where differentiation ideas actually come from. What an offer is Your offer is the whole package a customer gets for their money — material, size, weight, colour, quantity, design, function — measured against the price you charge. It is not the product. It is the product relative to the alternatives on the same search results page. There are three ways to construct one. 1. Better value for money — the default Give more than competitors at a similar price. More quantity, a larger size, better materials, a bonus item. If everyone sells a 10-pack at $8.99–$9.99, you sell a 12-pack at $9.99. This is the recommended approach and the lowest risk, for a simple reason: you are not asking the customer to believe anything. The comparison is immediate and obvious on the results page. The critical qualifier: more of what they actually want. A bigger pack of something people buy one of is not better value, it is dead stock. And this is not "sell it cheaper." Undercutting starts a fight you will lose to whoever has better unit economics. Better value means a better deal at a healthy margin — 35%+. 2. Premium A higher-quality version at a higher price. Genuinely riskier, and the reason is structural: you cannot know in advance whether customers will pay more when cheaper alternatives sit inches away on the same page. And there is a ranking problem. If your price is 50–100% above the category average, winning organic rank becomes much harder — conversion rate drives rank, and a premium price suppresses conversion rate until the brand is established enough to justify it. Premium works. It works later, usually. 3. Differentiated Something genuinely different: a bonus item, a design improvement, better packaging, a smarter bundle, added functionality. The rule that governs all of it: only differentiate if you can do it while holding a 35%+ margin at a competitive price. A differentiator that destroys your margin is a hobby. Examples of the shape this takes: Packaging that becomes part of the product. Everyone ships product X in a box people throw away; you make the box its storage. A different customer. Everyone in the category sells to men; you design for women. Smaller dimensions. A more compact package means lower FBA fees, which means you can price more competitively at the same margin. That last one deserves emphasis. Any structural advantage on referral or FBA fees is a permanent competitive advantage — it applies to every unit you will ever sell, and most sellers never think about it. If you can engineer size or weight down a band, that is worth more than most feature ideas. Where offer ideas come from Not from staring at the product. Competitor reviews, specifically the 1–3 star ones. This is the richest source available. People describe exactly what disappointed them, in their own words. Every recurring complaint is a differentiation brief. Ask an AI model. Describe the product and market and ask for differentiation angles — and feed it competitor reviews, which improves the answers substantially. Short-form video platforms. What people love, hate, or wish existed. Comment sections are unusually honest about unmet needs. Visual and design platforms. Colour, packaging and design trends the category has not adopted yet. Handmade and craft marketplaces. Niche versions of mainstream products, often with creative angles or bundles that could work at scale. Then get real numbers from suppliers An offer is a hypothesis until a supplier quotes it. 1. Find 25–30 suppliers who make the exact product. 2. Contact all of them. Introduce yourself, explain you are adding to an existing line, and include your two best competitor listings — pick ones rated 4.5+, so you are anchoring on quality rather than price. 3. Ask for quotes on both their standard offer and yours, at several order quantities. You need three things: manufacturing cost, dimensions and weight (which set your FBA fee), and estimated freight. 4. Calculate the full landed cost, then add FBA and referral fees. Now you know your actual gross margin at a competitive price — which is the number this entire stage exists to produce. 5. Narrow to the best 5–10 on price, communication quality and responsiveness. Do not order samples yet. This stage is only to learn the real margin. Samples come after you have chosen. And talk to suppliers about differentiation. They have made this product for years and know what is cheap to change and what is not. They will frequently improve your idea more than further thinking on your own would. Product performance, once it is live Choosing your one to three With offer, differentiation, pricing and real margin known for all seven, compare them directly: Highest gross margin — it funds everything else, including the advertising you will need. Strongest differentiation, especially one that solves a complaint you found in reviews. That drives conversion rate, which drives rank. Most advantages stacked. The winner is rarely best at one thing; it is the one with a better offer and a price advantage and a fee advantage. Then move forward with one to three products. Order samples from the leading suppliers, expect two or three rounds of feedback before it is right, and only then place a purchase order. What comes next Sourcing decided, the work becomes keyword research, listing construction and a launch plan — where your advertising decisions start again from the beginning. See Restructure Your Campaigns Before You Optimise for the campaign structure a new product needs, and Setting Target TACoS per Product for what a launch should be allowed to cost. Common mistakes Competing on price rather than value. You will lose to better unit economics. Differentiating past your margin. Going premium too early, before you have the brand or reviews to support it. Skipping the 1–3 star reviews, which is where the answers already are. Ordering samples before knowing your landed margin, and getting attached to a product that cannot make money. Related - Narrowing Fifteen Ideas to Seven — how these seven survived. - Before You Add a Product — the margin rules this stage enforces. - Setting Target TACoS per Product — what a launch is allowed to cost. - What a Relaunch Is, and When to Run One — what happens once the product is live. - Preparing a Launch: CTR and CVR Tactics — preparing the listing once the product is chosen.

What a Relaunch Is, and When to Run One

Every keyword on Amazon is a shopping centre, and your organic rank is your unit's position in it. Top 10 is the entrance — the traffic walks past you. Rank 10–30 is further inside. Page two is a back corridor. Below that is the car park. The difference from a real shopping centre is that you cannot buy the entrance. Amazon gives it to whichever product shoppers behave best toward. A relaunch is the process of deliberately becoming that product for a chosen keyword. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and twenty-four seconds on why organic rank is the goal, the three metrics behind it, and the budget mistake that sinks most launches. Why organic rank is the goal Organic sales are free. Every position you climb produces sales you do not pay for, permanently, until someone displaces you. That is why relaunching is treated as the second half of an advertising system rather than a separate activity. The first half makes your existing spend efficient. This half spends deliberately to buy a position that then pays you back. Three things must be true first Do not start a relaunch until: Your offer, product and gross margin are as good as you can make them. You are about to spend heavily to show this listing to more people. If the offer is not competitive, you are buying traffic that will bounce. Your inventory is solid — 98%+ in stock. A stockout mid-launch destroys the velocity you paid for and the rank it bought. Your advertising is already optimised weekly. See The Nine-Report PPC Routine. If any of those is missing, fixing it will make you more money than relaunching will. They are foundations, and this is a building. Organic rank, tracked over time What Amazon is actually measuring Amazon has never published the algorithm, but consistent testing across many sellers points to three metrics: Conversion rate (CVR) — of the people who clicked your product from that keyword, how many bought? (orders ÷ clicks) Click-through rate (CTR) — of the people who saw your product for that keyword, how many clicked? (clicks ÷ impressions) Sales velocity — how many of that keyword's total purchases were yours, and are you selling more units than competitors? The logic follows directly. If your product has the best CVR and CTR and drives the most sales for a keyword, Amazon has no reason to rank anything else above you. So the entire process is: prove you convert well, then buy enough velocity to be undeniable. The five steps | Step | What happens | |---|---| | 1 | Find keywords where your CVR or CTR already beats the average | | 2 | Group them by root keyword, and prioritise | | 3 | Improve CTR and CVR further, then build the campaigns | | 4 | Drive velocity, monitoring CVR the whole way | | 5 | Once ranked, move to the next group | Step 1 is the gate. You are not choosing keywords you want to rank for; you are finding keywords where the data already says you deserve to. That distinction is what makes the process data-driven rather than hopeful. One keyword group at a time Start with one or two products, and one keyword group each. This is where most sellers go wrong. They take a limited budget and split it across many keywords, which means they never win any of them. To rank, you must be among the products driving the most sales for that keyword. That is a relative measure. Half the required spend on one keyword achieves nothing; it does not get you halfway. And relaunching is expensive. It is genuinely high-risk, high-reward: you spend heavily on advertising to drive velocity until rank arrives, and only then do organic sales start carrying the product and free the budget for the next group. If the upfront spend is uncomfortable, start slower and look for early indicators before committing more. But do not spread it thin. Is your product worthy? The uncomfortable question, and the process exists to answer it honestly. Look at the five products currently at the top of your target keyword. If you offered exactly what they offer at three times the price, why would shoppers choose you? They would not, and no amount of advertising changes that. So the data decides whether you push. If your CVR and CTR for a keyword are already at or above average, you are worthy and pushing will work. If they are not, you improve the listing first — or you pick a different keyword. Nothing here guarantees a win. What it does is stop you spending heavily on keywords where you were never going to rank, and concentrate spend where the evidence says you can. Two starting positions A product with data — existing advertising history and Search Query Performance figures — can go straight into step 1. A product with little or no data needs a preliminary phase to generate some before the same process applies. A listing nobody has clicked cannot tell you whether it converts. Where the data lives Every gate in this process is a data check: is my CVR above the keyword average, is my impression share rising, has organic rank moved. Historically that means Search Query Performance exports, advertising reports and rank checks, reconciled by hand each week. In TrackIQ those are three screens over one date range. See Understanding Search Query Performance for the CVR and CTR benchmarks, Placements: Top of Search for impression share, and the organic rank views for whether any of it is working. Related - Keyword Research from Search Query Performance — step 1, finding keywords you deserve to win. - Profit Campaigns and Ranking Campaigns — why a launch campaign is judged differently. - Setting Target TACoS per Product — what a launch is allowed to cost. - Why Inventory Is the Second Pillar — the stock precondition a launch assumes.

Keyword Research from Search Query Performance

A relaunch begins with a question that sounds backwards: which keywords do I already deserve to rank for? Not which you want. Not which have the most volume. Which ones does the data say shoppers already respond well to your product on — because those are the ones where pushing velocity will actually move rank. Search Query Performance answers this, because it reports both the keyword's averages and your product's performance against them. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and nineteen seconds on the columns that size a keyword, the two comparisons that decide everything, and what one above and one below is telling you. Why SQP is the right report Most keyword tools estimate. SQP is Amazon reporting what actually happened: how many people searched a term, how many clicked, how many bought, and how much of that was yours. That gives you the comparison the whole relaunch depends on — your product against the keyword's average, on the same term, over the same period. Search Query Performance, your share against the market The columns that matter Work from the top 100 keywords your product received organic impressions for. Sizing the keyword Search Frequency Rank (SFR) — a rank, so lower means more searched. SFR 8,000 is a much bigger keyword than SFR 400,000. Total purchases — how many units the keyword produced across all sellers last month. This is the prize. A keyword with high search volume but few purchases is a browsing term, not a buying one. Purchase rate — purchases divided by searches, which separates intent from curiosity. A term like black wooden standing desk has high purchase intent: people searching it are buying one. A term like office gift for my husband has low purchase intent: lots of searches, little conversion, because the shopper does not yet know what they want. Prioritise purchase rate over raw volume. A smaller keyword where people buy beats a larger one where they browse. The two comparisons that decide everything KW CVR is the keyword's average conversion rate. ASIN CVR is yours. KW CTR is the keyword's average click-through rate. ASIN CTR is yours. | Comparison | Reading | |---|---| | Your CVR above keyword average | strong signal — shoppers who reach you buy | | Your CVR below average | weak — the listing or offer is losing them | | Your CTR above average | strong — your image, title and price earn the click | | Your CTR below average | weak — you are being scrolled past | Both above average is a green light. Amazon is telling you that when shoppers encounter your product for this term, they respond better than they do to the average competitor. Push velocity and rank should follow. Both below average is a red light — not a keyword to launch on, but a listing to fix first. One above and one below is a diagnosis. High CTR with low CVR means the listing sells the click and then loses the sale — a price, review or content problem. Low CTR with high CVR means the product converts well but is not being noticed — a main image, title or price-presentation problem. That second case is the more encouraging one, because CTR is usually easier to fix than CVR. Your current position Organic rank for each keyword tells you how far you have to travel. A keyword where you already sit at 15 is a very different project from one where you are at 90. The second view: advertising data Alongside the organic picture, look at how the same keywords performed in your Sponsored Products campaigns over the last 60–65 days. This matters because advertising data is often richer than organic data for a term you rank poorly on — you may have almost no organic impressions but plenty of paid clicks. If your paid CVR on a keyword is strong, that is evidence your product converts even though your organic position is currently too low to show it. See Search Terms and Aggregated Search Terms and SQP and Keywords: Finding Unbid Queries. Scoring the opportunity With both views assembled, rate the launch opportunity out of ten before committing budget. What makes a strong opportunity: several keywords with meaningful purchase counts, where your CVR and CTR both beat the average, and where your current organic rank leaves real room to climb. What makes a weak one: your metrics trail the average across the board. That is not a launch, it is a listing project. Do that first. A note on reading SQP SQP is weekly, and the weeks are cohorts rather than a running total. Comparing the wrong periods produces conclusions that are simply wrong. See SQP Is Weekly: Reading Week Cohorts, and Why SQP Data Is Sparse for why small keywords sometimes show nothing at all. Doing it without the spreadsheet The manual version means exporting SQP, exporting rank, exporting advertising data, and joining them per keyword in a sheet — then repeating it every time you want a current view. In TrackIQ that join already exists. Keyword-level SQP metrics, your ASIN's performance against the keyword average, and organic rank sit together over a date range you set. See Understanding Search Query Performance and SQP Recommended Actions. Related - Grouping and Prioritising Keywords — step 2, turning the list into a plan. - What a Relaunch Is, and When to Run One — why these two comparisons decide everything. - Understanding Search Query Performance — the report itself. - Assembling the Relaunch Keyword Sheet — the five sources that build the comparison.

Grouping and Prioritising Keywords

You now have a list of keywords where your product already beats the category average. The next question is which to attack first — and the answer is not "all of them". Keywords are not independent. Ranking for one lifts related ones, which means the right unit of work is a group, not a keyword. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and fifteen seconds on why the sales signal transfers across related terms, how to build a root-and-long-tail group, and how each group won frees the budget. Why groups beat individual keywords Amazon promotes products it believes are best, and that judgement generalises across closely related terms. If your standing desk converts well and sells heavily for standing desk, your rank improves not only there but for standing desk for office and wooden standing desk too. The sales signal transfers. So every sale from any keyword in a group helps every other keyword in that group. Targeting a coherent group concentrates the benefit; targeting scattered unrelated keywords spreads it until none of it registers. Building the master list Start from the keywords your research marked as worth targeting — the ones where your CVR beats the keyword average. Take them from both views. Some keywords will qualify on organic SQP data, others only on advertising data, and the sets do not fully overlap. Merge them, deduplicated. Then reconsider the near-misses. Look at the keywords you set aside, and specifically at large keywords where your CVR is close to the average rather than clearly below it. These are judgement calls. Their odds are lower, but a big keyword you are nearly competitive on can be worth testing — especially if the launch tactics in the next stage will push you over the line. Add them deliberately, knowing they are the speculative part of the list. Keywords, with rank and performance together Root keywords and long-tail keywords Each group is built from one root and its long tails. Root keyword — one to three words, the general term. High search volume, high sales volume, high competition. Bamboo bed sheets. Long-tail keywords — three or more words containing the root. Lower volume, but usually higher purchase intent and better conversion, because the shopper has told you exactly what they want. | Root | Long-tail | |---|---| | Bamboo bed sheets | king size bamboo bed sheets | | | bamboo bed sheets for women | | | pink bamboo sheets for queen size bed | | Protein snack | chocolate protein snack | | | protein snack big pack | | | 25g protein snacks for the gym | The root is what you are really trying to rank for. The long tails are easier wins that feed the same signal — they convert better, so they help your averages while contributing sales that lift the root. Prioritising the groups Rank your groups and start with one. Two at most. What makes a group a good first target: Your CVR and CTR clearly beat the average on the root and on several long tails. Strongest possible evidence you can win it. The root has real purchase volume. Search volume without purchases is a group that cannot repay the spend. Your current organic rank leaves room. Already at position 8 means limited upside; position 60 with strong conversion metrics is the ideal profile. Purchase intent is high across the group. Prefer groups where the terms describe a product rather than a situation. The long tails are genuinely related. A group of terms that only share a word but not a shopper intent will not transfer signal. One group at a time. Genuinely. This is where most launches fail, and it is worth stating plainly. To rank for a keyword you must be among the products driving the most sales for it. That is a relative threshold, not an absolute one. Splitting a limited budget across five groups means falling short of the threshold in all five. You will have spent the entire budget and moved nothing. The same money on one group can carry it past the threshold and into a rank that then pays for the next group. Half the required velocity does not get you half the rank. It gets you nothing. Then work down the list Once a group reaches the best rank it is going to reach, and holds it, move to the next. That sequencing is the whole long-term plan: group by group, the product accumulates organic positions, each one reducing how much advertising the previous group still needs. Over time the account converts paid velocity into free traffic. Tracking the group From here you need rank on every keyword in the group, checked regularly, plus their CVR and CTR against the averages. TrackIQ's rank tracking and Search Query Performance views cover both over a consistent date range, which matters here because you will be checking the same terms repeatedly for weeks and need the comparison to be like-for-like. See also Triage a Rank Drop for reading rank movement that is not caused by your launch. Common mistakes Grouping by word rather than by intent. Standing desk and standing desk mat share words and not shoppers. Starting with the biggest root keyword regardless of whether your metrics support it. Running four groups because the budget technically allows it. Ignoring long tails because the volume looks trivial. They convert better and they feed the root. Related - Keyword Research from Search Query Performance — producing the list this groups. - Preparing a Launch: CTR and CVR Tactics — what to do before spending anything. - What a Relaunch Is, and When to Run One — why velocity is a relative measure.

Preparing a Launch: CTR and CVR Tactics

You have chosen a keyword group. Before spending anything on advertising, spend a week making the listing better at converting that specific keyword. The reason is arithmetic. A relaunch works by proving your product converts better than the alternatives. Every point of CTR and CVR you add before you start makes the same advertising budget buy more rank — and every point you leave on the table, you pay for in spend. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and nineteen seconds on the six tactics and what each one moves, and why the listing work has to come before the advertising spend. Six tactics worth testing All six aim at the same three metrics: click-through rate, conversion rate, and the sales velocity they produce. 1. Put the root keyword at the front of your title Affects: CTR and organic relevance. Move the group's root keyword into the first part of your title. Why it works on CTR. A shopper who searched bamboo bed sheets scans results for those words. Seeing their exact search at the start of your title tells them instantly that this is the thing they asked for. They feel understood, which is a stronger motivator than it sounds. Why it works on ranking. The title is the heaviest SEO signal on a listing. Amazon reads it constantly, and a root keyword at the front is an unambiguous relevance statement. A bonus placement: if another keyword in the group has a Search Frequency Rank under 300,000 — meaning it is genuinely well searched — put it at the end of the title too. When you move to the next group, rewrite the title for the new root. The title is not permanent; it is a launch instrument. One caution. Titles affect existing rank and conversion across every keyword, not just your target. Change one at a time and watch what happens. 2. Add a clippable promo code Affects: CTR and CVR. A visible discount badge on the search results page raises click-through measurably — in the region of 10–14%. Small discount for a small nudge; larger discount for a real one. During a launch, the discount is not a margin decision in isolation — it is buying velocity, which buys rank, which pays back afterwards. 3. Run Lightning Deals and Best Deals Affects: CVR and sales velocity, hard. Deals produce concentrated bursts of sales, which is exactly what a ranking push needs. Best Deals have the stronger effect on organic rank and are the main recommendation. They are also the most useful lever later, when you start reducing advertising spend — a deal can carry velocity while paid spend comes down. See Prepare for Prime Day for running these around events. 4. Put the root keyword on the main image Affects: CTR. Where category rules allow it, adding the keyword to the main image makes your listing match the shopper's search visually, before they read anything. Search results are scanned, not read. The image is doing most of the work. 5. Show a strike-through price Affects: CTR and CVR. A visible original price next to the current one frames the offer as a saving rather than a cost. It costs nothing beyond the discount you were already considering. 6. Improve the second and third images Affects: CVR. The main image earns the click; images two and three do most of the convincing. They are the first thing a shopper looks at after arriving, and on mobile they are often all they look at. Use them to answer the objections in your competitors' negative reviews. If the category's one-star reviews complain about sizing, image two should settle sizing. The campaigns a launch runs on Then build the campaigns With the listing improved, prepare the advertising that will drive velocity. Sponsored Products, exact match, targeting the root and the long tails in the group. Top of Search focused. That is where conversion is highest and where the velocity that moves rank happens. Named so you can find it. These are ranking campaigns and will be judged on completely different numbers from your profit campaigns — see Profit Campaigns and Ranking Campaigns. If you cannot tell them apart later, you will optimise them wrongly. For the build itself, see Create a Sponsored Products Campaign. The order matters Do the listing work first, then start spending. Launching campaigns and then improving the listing means paying for traffic at your old conversion rate while you fix things. The tactics above are cheap; advertising is not. Get the conversion rate up, then buy the clicks. What to check before you start Is the root keyword in the title? Is a coupon or deal live? Are images two and three doing real work? Is your CVR for this keyword still above the average? Re-check after the listing changes — you should have improved it, and if you have, the launch just got cheaper. See Understanding Search Query Performance. Related - Running a Launch: Stabilise, Scale, Scale Back — what happens once the campaigns are live. - Grouping and Prioritising Keywords — choosing the group this prepares for. - What a Relaunch Is, and When to Run One — why CTR and CVR decide the cost of the launch.

Running a Launch: Stabilise, Scale, Scale Back

The campaigns are live. From here the launch is a loop between two numbers: is my conversion rate still good, and can I buy more velocity? Each stage has a data point that must be met before you move to the next. That gating is what stops a launch becoming an expensive guess. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and thirty seconds on the three daily stabilisation checks, the impression-share ladder with its conversion gates, and how to withdraw spend without losing the position. How velocity is measured You cannot see your share of a keyword's sales directly. Top of Search Impression Share is the usable proxy. It reports what percentage of the available Top of Search impressions for that keyword you captured. Since impressions are proportional to the keyword's total traffic, a rising share means a rising share of the sales — which is precisely the signal Amazon ranks on. Placements, with impression share beside performance Stage 1: stabilise (first 1–2 weeks) Before pushing anything, get the campaign behaving. Three daily checks. Force the spend to Top of Search Check Placements daily. If more than 20% of spend is going to Rest of Search or Product Pages: Lower the keyword bid by 10%, and raise the Top of Search multiplier by 25%. Repeat daily until 80%+ of spend is at Top of Search. The exception: if conversion on the other placements is genuinely good against the keyword average, leave it. The rule exists because Top of Search usually converts best, not as an end in itself. If the campaign holds several keywords, lower bids only on the ones with CTR under 1% — low CTR is the signature of impressions landing on product pages rather than in search. Repeat every two days until 80%+ of clicks are at Top of Search. Make sure it spends If the campaign is spending under 75% of its budget, raise both the Top of Search multiplier and the keyword bids by 10%. Daily, until it clears 75%. A ranking campaign that will not spend is not a cheap launch; it is no launch. Make sure it does not spend too fast Check at 1–3pm. If the campaign has already exhausted its budget by then, it is dark for the rest of the day — including the evening, when conversion is often strongest. Lower the Top of Search multiplier by 10% daily, or raise the budget, until it survives past 2pm. Stage 2: confirm conversion rate Gate: your CVR for the target keyword must beat the keyword average. If it does, proceed. If it does not, stop — do not buy more traffic for a listing that is converting below par. Go back to the listing tactics, improve, and re-check. This gate recurs at every stage. It is the discipline that separates this from simply spending money. Stage 3: scale to 30–35% impression share Now buy velocity. Raise budgets, Top of Search multipliers and keyword bids together to grow spend and sales. Hold at 30–35% Top of Search impression share for 1–2 weeks. After 7 days at that level, re-check CVR against the keyword average. Still ahead? Continue. Fallen behind? Stop climbing and fix conversion first — more volume at a weak conversion rate teaches Amazon the wrong thing about your product. Stage 4: scale to 45–50% impression share Keep raising budgets and bids. Hold at 45–50% for two weeks. At this level you are taking roughly half the Top of Search impressions for the keyword and driving substantial sales. This is where organic rank should visibly move. Re-check CVR again. Same gate, same response. Checking whether it worked Check organic rank every two days. Check it from more than one location. Amazon results vary by delivery address, so a single check can mislead. Use rank tracking plus a manual look from a couple of different postcodes — a west-coast and an east-coast one, for example. If rank has not moved after 3–4 weeks at high impression share, velocity alone is not going to do it. Add: Coupons. Lightning Deals or Best Deals. A short-term price reduction to lift conversion and sales together. If none of that moves it, the honest conclusion is that the listing is not yet worthy of the position, and the answer is listing work rather than more spend. Once you reach the top 10, hold for 1–3 weeks before changing anything. Rank needs to settle before you test whether it survives without support. Stage 5: scale back without losing the rank After 2–6 weeks at the top, start reducing spend — gradually, because the position is only as durable as the sales that hold it. Step the impression share down. From 50% to 30%, wait one to two weeks, then to 20%. From there, optimise the campaign toward break-even ACoS like any other. Use deals to cover the gap. While a Best Deal runs, cut the ranking campaign's spend hard. The deal supplies the velocity; the campaign does not have to. Cap the budget deliberately. Set it so the campaign exhausts by midday, concentrating spend in the strongest hours. Add a secondary campaign on the same keyword, tuned to break-even ACoS, to pick up traffic once the main campaign runs dry. The combination that works most reliably: reduce advertising spend while running a sequence of Lightning Deals and Best Deals. The deals hold velocity steady while paid support comes out, so rank has time to become self-sustaining on organic sales. Then start the next group Once the position holds on reduced spend, that budget is free. Move it to the next keyword group and repeat. This is the compounding part. Each group you win reduces the advertising the previous one needs, so the same budget buys progressively more rank. Over a year, an account can convert a substantial share of its paid velocity into free organic traffic. Common mistakes Skipping the CVR gate because impression share is climbing nicely. Scaling before the campaign is stable, so you cannot tell what caused what. Reading rank from one location. Cutting spend all at once after reaching the top, and giving the position straight back. Judging the campaign on ACoS. It is a ranking campaign, and it is supposed to look expensive — see Profit Campaigns and Ranking Campaigns. Related - Preparing a Launch: CTR and CVR Tactics — the work that makes this cheaper. - Placement Bid Optimisation — the mechanics of moving spend to Top of Search. - Triage a Rank Drop — when rank moves for reasons that are not your launch. - When You Are Going Out of Stock — recovering rank after a constrained period.

Deciding Your PPC Daily Budget

Before you build a single campaign, decide what you are willing to spend per day on this product. Everything downstream depends on it — how many campaigns you run, how many keywords you can afford to target, and how fast you can buy the data that tells you what is working. A bigger starting budget is genuinely better, because it buys data faster and gives you room to push the campaigns that matter and starve the ones that do not. But there is one hard constraint: your inventory. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and fifty-two seconds on working out whether inventory constrains you, converting cover into a daily budget, and tapering in the right order. First, is inventory a constraint? Compare units on hand against your current daily sales. 10 units a day and 500 in stock — that is 50 days of cover. Inventory is a constraint. 10 units a day and 5,000 in stock — 500 days. It is not. And factor in lead time. Manufacturing domestically with under 30 days of lead time is a different problem from 90 days of ocean freight from Asia — see Inventory Forecasting and Purchase Orders. This single question decides which of the two paths below you are on. Path A: inventory is not a constraint Pick a daily budget per product that you are comfortable with. $100/day or more is the recommendation. Hold it flat for 30 days. Changing the budget weekly makes the result unreadable. Then one of two things has happened: Sales went up. Good — now adjust the budget per product based on what each one returned. Sales stayed flat. That is a conversion problem, not a budget problem. More spend on a listing that does not convert buys more of the same result. Look at price first — see Pricing and Gross Margin. Path B: inventory is a constraint Here you deliberately do not sell as many units as you can. 1,000 units with a 90-day manufacturing lead time means pushing for 30 sales a day empties you in a month — and then you are out of stock, which costs rank, costs the momentum you just paid for, and takes months to recover. See Going Out of Stock. So work backwards from cover, not forwards from ambition. The calculation Maximum sustainable daily sales = units on hand ÷ days of cover you need. 1,000 units ÷ 90 days = 11 units a day. Then convert that into a budget. The daily spend you can afford is the gap between your gross margin before PPC and your target margin, applied across those units: Daily PPC budget = max daily sales × price × (gross margin before PPC − target margin) Your gross margin before PPC comes from your pricing table — see Where Your Margin Actually Goes. If that number comes out below $100/day, use $100 anyway as a minimum for the next 30 days, or until you hit your maximum sustainable daily sales. Below that, campaigns take too long to accumulate readable data. Then taper, in the right order Watch the 4–7 day average, not a single day. 1,500 units, 90-day lead time, calculator says 17 units a day is your ceiling. Start at $100/day. When the 7-day average reaches 15–20 units, start easing off. And do it in this order: 1. If you cut price for the launch, raise it back first — roughly $1 a week. 2. Then reduce the PPC budget. Price first, because a price rise improves margin on every unit while a budget cut only reduces spend. Doing it the other way round leaves you selling at a launch price you no longer need. Sales pace against what your stock can sustain Tracking daily run-rate against remaining cover per product is the check that tells you when to taper — see Monitoring Inventory Against Sales. Doing it by exporting inventory and sales reports and reconciling them by hand is how the taper gets missed until you are already out of stock. The point you are steering toward When sales stabilise at your sustainable ceiling and the budget is coming down, that is the moment the product starts making real money. It is also the moment to place the next inventory order — because the constraint that shaped this entire plan is the thing you are now in a position to remove. Common mistakes Deciding the budget after building the campaigns, so the structure does not fit the money. Ignoring inventory, and buying sales you cannot supply. Starting too small. A thin budget spreads across campaigns so slowly that nothing produces readable data. Changing the budget weekly in the first 30 days, and never learning what it did. Treating flat sales as a budget problem when it is a conversion problem. Cutting spend before raising price on a product you discounted for launch. Waiting until stock is nearly gone to place the reorder. Related - Preparing a Launch — what this budget funds. - Setting Target TACOS per Product — the efficiency target the budget runs against. - Monitoring Inventory Against Sales — the signal that tells you to taper.

Vine: Reviews for a New Product

A new product has no reviews, and no reviews means no conversion. Vine is Amazon's own early-reviewer programme: you give units away, a selected group of reviewers receives them, and some of them post reviews. It is the fastest and cheapest way to get a new listing past zero. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and fifty seconds on why the arithmetic favours Vine so heavily, taking the maximum units, and the margin distortion the giveaways create. Why the arithmetic favours it so heavily The organic review rate is roughly 2–3% of orders. So 30 organic reviews means selling 1,000–1,500 units — which on a new product takes months you do not have, at a conversion rate depressed by the very absence of reviews you are trying to fix. Vine gets you there on 30 units. Not all 30 reviewers post. In practice 70–90% do, so 30 giveaways produces roughly 20–25 reviews. Still a completely different order of magnitude from 1,000 sales. What it costs Amazon charges an enrolment fee per ASIN, banded by how many units you offer: | Units offered | Fee | |---|---| | 1–2 | Free | | 3–10 | $75 | | 11–30 | $200 | Take the maximum. The fee is flat across the 11–30 band, so offering 12 units and offering 30 units cost the same $200. There is no reason to offer fewer. The units themselves are free to the reviewer and you receive no payout for them, so the real cost is the fee plus your landed cost on 30 units. Check the current fees before enrolling — Amazon has changed this structure before and may again. Enrolling 1. Advertising → Vine. 2. Enter the ASIN of the new product. 3. Begin enrollment. 4. Select the number of units to offer. 5. Confirm. Do it per marketplace. Vine runs in each marketplace separately, so a product selling in several can gather reviews in each — which matters, because reviews do not fully carry across. One reporting trap worth knowing Vine orders now appear as ordinary orders with a full promotion applied. Which means your profit margin percentage will look dramatically worse than it is for as long as the giveaways are running. Thirty units at full discount inside a low-volume month is enough to make a healthy product look like it is losing money. Do not react to that number. It is the giveaway, not the product — see Where Your Margin Actually Goes. Margin per product, with the Vine period visible Being able to see the period a distortion belongs to is what stops it becoming a false alarm — see Understanding Business Reports. Reading a single blended margin figure for the month is how a Vine enrolment turns into a panic about pricing. What Vine will and will not do It will get you from zero reviews to twenty-odd, which is the threshold where a listing starts converting like a real product. It will not fix a bad product. Vine reviewers are not selected by you and are frequently critical. A product with genuine defects gets 20 reviews saying so, permanently, at the top of a brand-new listing. So make sure the product is right first — see Fix the Product by Studying Competitors. And make sure the listing sets accurate expectations, because a reviewer disappointed by the difference between the images and the object will say so — see Answer the Complaints in Your Content. Where it fits in a launch Enrol at the start, so reviews accumulate while you are building campaigns rather than after. Do not wait for reviews before starting PPC — but do expect early conversion to be weak until they land, and read your launch data with that in mind. See Preparing a Launch. Common mistakes Offering 10 units instead of 30, and paying $75 for a third of the benefit when $200 buys the lot. Enrolling a product that is not ready, and permanently attaching honest negative reviews to a new listing. Enrolling only in the US, and leaving other marketplaces at zero. Panicking at the margin distortion the giveaways create in reporting. Treating Vine as a substitute for a rating strategy. It gets you to twenty reviews; everything after that is the ordinary work — see Why a Rating Drop Costs More Than It Looks. Related - Preparing a Launch — where enrolment sits in the sequence. - Short-Term Rating Recovery — what to do once reviews exist. - Where Your Margin Actually Goes — reading margin around a giveaway.

The Product Comparison Table

You cannot relaunch everything at once. The product comparison table exists to decide which one or two products get your attention, your budget and your time — and to make that decision on evidence rather than on which product you happen to like. The central question is not "which product is best?" It is "which product has the strongest offer relative to the competitors it is actually up against?" Because a strong offer is what makes a relaunch succeed. A weak offer pushed hard just spends money. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and sixty-one seconds on the four elements of an offer, building the comparison per candidate, and weighting offer and margin above everything else. What "offer" means here Four things, judged against your direct competitors — not in the abstract: Price and value for money — your price against what you actually provide. Main image — quality and appeal, which decides your click-through — see Why the Main Image Decides Your CTR. Review count. Rating. The stronger you are on these four relative to your competitors, the more likely a shopper picks you — and the more likely you can hold a higher position once you get there. Step 1: shortlist your candidates Pick the best products in your catalogue, on three criteria: Higher sales volume is better. More reviews is better. Higher margin is better — minimum 33% gross margin before PPC. Two practical ways to draw the shortlist: the top four products by net margin last month, or the four products with 300+ reviews. Below 33% gross margin before PPC there is not enough room to fund a launch, so those products are not candidates regardless of how appealing they look. Step 2: build one comparison per product One tab per candidate, named after its main keyword. Find 7–10 direct competitors for each — genuinely similar products, not merely the same category. Then record, per competitor and for yourself: | Column | What goes in it | |---|---| | Price | competitor's listed price | | Units / size | how much they give you for it | | Price per unit | price ÷ units | | Reviews | count | | Rating | stars | | 30-day sales | to place yourself in the top 10 | | Search volume trend | 90-day growth for the niche | | Inventory | your units in Amazon + 3PL | Price per unit is the column people skip and the one that decides it. A 4-pack at $10 is $2.50 a unit; a 5-pack at $11 is $2.20 and a better offer, despite the higher shelf price. Search volume trend comes from Product Opportunity Explorer — Seller Central → Growth → Product Opportunity Explorer, searched on the main keyword, then read the search volume growth percentage for the last 90 days. Your position against the competitors you actually compete with Sales, rank, review count, rating and price for you and ten competitors, in one place, is exactly what the comparison view produces — see Tracking Competitor ASINs Alongside Your Own and Category Insights. Assembling it by hand across four candidate products and forty competitors is a day's work that goes stale within a fortnight. Step 3: read the table Bring every candidate's answers onto one summary sheet, then compare across products: | Criterion | How to read it | |---|---| | Price / value for money | lower rank is better — you want the strongest offer | | Reviews | lower rank is better — you want the most reviews | | Sales to grow to | higher is better — more headroom in the niche | | Rating | higher than competitors = best, level = fine, lower = avoid | | Search volume growth | higher is better | | Gross profit margin | higher is better | Mark the winner on each criterion, then pick one or two products. How to weigh them Offer and gross margin matter most. If margin is very high but the offer is weak, the fix may be price. Cutting price strengthens the offer directly, and there is usually room to do it while staying in a healthy 33–42% band — see Pricing and Gross Margin. Being in the top 3 on review count materially raises your chances. Strong search volume growth is a genuine tailwind — the niche is expanding while you push into it. A rating below your competitors is close to disqualifying. Rating is the hardest of the four to move quickly, and launching into a rating deficit means paying for traffic that converts worse than the competition — see Why a Rating Drop Costs More Than It Looks. Then take one or two. Not four. The whole point of the exercise is concentration. Common mistakes Comparing against the category rather than 7–10 genuinely direct competitors. Comparing shelf price instead of price per unit. Choosing the product you like, and using the table to justify it afterwards. Launching into a rating deficit because the other numbers looked good. Ignoring the margin floor, and launching a product with no room to fund advertising. Picking four products and giving none of them enough budget or attention to work. Related - Reviving a Sleeping Product — where this selection step is used. - Designing the Offer — improving the thing you just measured. - Scoring Product Opportunities — the same discipline applied to new products.

The Long-Term Ranking Plan

Once you know how to move a product's organic rank, the question stops being how and becomes what to point it at, month after month. Because organic rank is where the profit is. How many keywords you rank on, and how high, is roughly what determines how much money the business makes. This is the long-term operating pattern that follows from that. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and sixty seconds on how many launches your revenue supports, choosing keyword groups across products rather than within them, and winning your niche in every marketplace first. The prerequisite This is the fourth pillar, and it only works once the first three are running. Margins as high as they will go, with back-end costs optimised and offers that are genuinely strong — see Where Your Margin Actually Goes. Inventory working, with no stockouts — see Monitoring Inventory Against Sales. Advertising running on a defined system — see The Nine-Report PPC Routine. Pushing rank on a product with thin margins, unreliable stock and chaotic campaigns just spends money faster. Plan it monthly, as a portfolio Each month, decide which products to push and which keyword group to push for each. Every listing can take a relaunch phase — including the same product in other marketplaces. How many at once Scale it to revenue: | Annual revenue | Concurrent launches | |---|---| | ~$1m | 1–2 | | ~$10m | 5–7 | | $20m+ | 10 or so | Two to five keyword groups is focused enough for most operations, and cheap enough to sustain. Going wider than your revenue supports is the common error, and it produces several half-funded pushes instead of one that works — see Focus on Two or Three Products. Prioritise across products, not within them Look at every keyword group across every product together. Seven products might produce twenty keyword groups. The question is not which group is best for each product — it is which of the twenty has the best chance of success. Start with the clear winners. Once those are handled, take more risk with the marginal ones. That is a portfolio decision, and it will regularly mean pushing a group on your second-best product ahead of a weaker group on your best. Rank position by keyword, across your products Comparing twenty keyword groups across seven products on likelihood of success requires seeing rank, conversion and keyword volume together — see Reading Organic and Sponsored Rank and Grouping and Prioritising Keywords. A monthly planning meeting that starts with building the comparison rarely gets to the decision. Win your niche everywhere before you go broad Two sequencing rules, and the order matters. First, rank top-of-page for every root keyword in your niche. Second, do it in every marketplace you sell in — Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain. Only then expand to broader discovery keywords. Why the other marketplaces are underrated Competition is materially lower, and — more importantly — the listings competing with you there are largely unattended. Nobody is running a system against you. The scale this reaches is easy to underestimate. It is entirely achievable for the non-US marketplaces combined to approach parity with the US on profit — effectively doubling the business off the same catalogue. Ranking in a secondary marketplace is usually far easier than the equivalent push in the US, and it is the same work you already know how to do. Squeeze your main products before launching more This is the most common and most expensive mistake in the whole framework. Sellers see one or two products succeed and immediately launch five more. Instead: maximise what already works. The bigger a product gets, the stronger its flywheel — sales, rank, reviews and profit each reinforcing the others. Expanding the product line is still necessary, and not optional over a horizon of years. But 20% of your listings drive 80% of your profit, and at least 80% of your attention belongs there. New products are how you grow in three years. Your existing top products are how you grow this year. Common mistakes Pushing rank before margins, inventory and advertising are in order. Running more launches than your revenue can fund. Choosing keyword groups product by product rather than across the portfolio. Going after broad discovery keywords before owning your niche. Ignoring secondary marketplaces, where the same work is easier and the upside is comparable. Launching new products instead of maximising the ones already working. Related - What a Relaunch Is — the mechanic this plan repeats. - Grouping and Prioritising Keywords — producing the groups you choose between. - Focus on Two or Three Products — the same concentration principle, at product level.

Why the Relaunch Process Is Gated

The relaunch process is long, and every step exists for a reason. The thing that makes it work is not any individual tactic — it is that each step is gated on a specific data point. Data looks good → proceed. Data does not → fix the problem, or move to different keywords. Skipping a gate is the single most common reason a relaunch fails, because you end up spending real money pushing a keyword the data had already told you not to. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and seventy-eight seconds on the data point that gates each step, why gating beats tactics, and why a failed gate costs you nothing. What you are actually optimising for Amazon ranks the listings that make its customers happiest, which it reads through three signals: Conversion rate. Click-through rate. Sales velocity. So the relaunch maximises all three on a chosen set of keywords, which raises organic rank, which drives organic sales, which is where the profit is — see What a Relaunch Is. The four steps, and what gates each one Step 1: keyword research Find keywords where your conversion rate, your click-through rate, or both, beat the average for that keyword. The sources are Search Query Performance — which gives you the keyword's own averages — and the search term report from advertising, which gives you yours. See Keyword Research from Search Query Performance. The gate: you are above the keyword average on at least one of the two. Because that is the evidence that shoppers respond to your product on that term. Push sales velocity on a keyword where you already convert well and you climb. Push velocity where you convert badly and you buy expensive traffic that does not stick. Step 2: group and prioritise Group the keywords, then rank the groups by likelihood of success — see Grouping and Prioritising Keywords. The gate: the group you have chosen is genuinely the strongest available, not simply the biggest. Step 3: prepare the launch Improve CTR, conversion and velocity on those specific keywords before you spend — images, content, price, deals — see Preparing a Launch. The gate: the preparation has actually moved the metrics. Launching before this step has landed means paying to send traffic at a listing you already knew could be better. Step 4: launch Run the ranking campaigns and push the chosen keyword group — see Running a Launch. The gate: daily checks on spend, placement and conversion, with defined responses. Then move to the next keyword group, and the next, until you have covered your niche — see The Long-Term Ranking Plan. Your conversion against the keyword average, per keyword Every gate in this process compares one of your metrics against the keyword's own average, which means the whole framework depends on having both numbers per keyword — see Understanding Search Query Performance. Reconstructing that comparison by hand from separate reports is why the gates get skipped: not because people disagree with them, but because checking is expensive. Why gating matters more than the tactics None of the individual tactics here are secret. Better images, better content, targeted campaigns. What makes the process reliable is that it refuses to proceed on bad data. An ungated version of the same work — pick a keyword you like, improve the listing, spend hard — fails most of the time, and it fails expensively, because failure is only visible after the money is spent. A gated version fails at step 1, for free. This works on hard keywords The process is used across hundreds of products in some of the most competitive categories on Amazon — including terms driving hundreds of thousands of searches a month, taken into the top ten, top six, top three. The competitiveness of the keyword is not what decides the outcome. The data at each gate is. Follow the steps exactly Do not skip steps, and do not reorder them. Each gate depends on the previous one having been passed. Preparing a launch for a keyword group you have not validated is preparing for the wrong thing; launching before preparation has landed spends money on a listing that was about to improve. Common mistakes Choosing keywords by search volume rather than by where you beat the average. Skipping step 3 and launching on the current listing. Proceeding through a gate the data failed, because the keyword is attractive. Launching several groups at once, so no gate can be read cleanly. Treating a failed gate as a setback. It is the process working, and it cost you nothing. Related - What a Relaunch Is — the mechanism underneath. - Keyword Research from Search Query Performance — step 1 in detail. - Running a Launch — step 4 in detail.

Assembling the Relaunch Keyword Sheet

Step 1 of a relaunch needs one table: every keyword in your niche, with the keyword's own averages beside your performance on it. No single Amazon report contains that. It has to be assembled from five, and the assembly is most of the work. Here is what each source contributes, and why the sheet needs all of them. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? One hundred and sixty-two seconds on why SQP is the irreplaceable source, what the other four contribute, and what the assembled comparison lets you decide. Pick the ASIN first Work on one child ASIN, not the parent. If the product has variations, take the child with the most sales in the last 30 days — parent-level data blends variants whose keywords may differ, and blurs exactly the comparison you are building. Source 1: Search Query Performance — the keyword's averages Brand Analytics → Search Analytics → Search Query Performance → ASIN view. Enter the ASIN, set the range to the previous month, and generate the download. This is the most important source, because it gives you what nothing else does: the average conversion rate and click-through rate for each keyword, across all sellers. Without that average, "my conversion rate is 12%" means nothing. With it, you know whether 12% is exceptional or poor for that term — see Understanding Search Query Performance. Source 2: organic rank — where you currently sit For each keyword, your current organic position. This tells you which keywords are worth pushing — a term where you already rank 4th has less headroom than one where you rank 30th with strong conversion. See Reading Organic and Sponsored Rank. Source 3: the search term report — your advertising performance Reports → Advertising Reports → Create report. Sponsored Products, report type Search Term, the longest period allowed. This gives you your own conversion and click-through per search term — the numbers you compare against SQP's averages. One formatting note: currency symbols in the export prevent the columns being read as numbers. Find and replace them out before working with the sheet. Source 4: the advertised product report Same place, report type changed to Advertised Product. This attributes performance at the ASIN level rather than the search term level, which is how you separate a keyword problem from a product problem. Source 5: Business Reports — sessions and conversion Sessions and unit session percentage, for overall context. Useful as a sanity check. If your listing-level conversion is weak everywhere, no individual keyword is going to carry the relaunch — that is a listing problem first. See Understanding Business Reports. What the assembled sheet lets you do Per keyword, side by side: The keyword's average conversion rate and CTR. Your conversion rate and CTR. Your organic rank. Search volume. Then the step 1 gate becomes readable: which keywords do you beat the average on, and how much headroom is there — see Why the Relaunch Process Is Gated. That comparison is the entire purpose of the exercise. Everything else in the sheet is supporting context. Your metrics against the keyword's own averages This is the clearest case in the whole training of assembly costing more than analysis — five exports, one sheet, per product, going stale within weeks. See Understanding Search Query Performance and Keyword Research from Search Query Performance. When the comparison is already there, step 1 of a relaunch is a decision rather than a project — which is what makes running relaunches continuously realistic rather than aspirational. Then group With the comparison in front of you, define the keyword groups — see Grouping and Prioritising Keywords. And note that the sheet is per product. Each relaunch candidate needs its own, which is why the assembly cost matters so much at portfolio scale — see The Long-Term Ranking Plan. Common mistakes Using the parent ASIN, and blending variants with different keyword profiles. Pulling SQP for the wrong date range, so your data and the averages cover different periods. Leaving currency symbols in the search term export, and getting text instead of numbers. Skipping organic rank, and pushing keywords with no headroom. Reading your conversion rate without the keyword average — the number alone tells you nothing. Building it once and relaunching against it three months later. Related - Keyword Research from Search Query Performance — what to do with the assembled sheet. - Why the Relaunch Process Is Gated — the gate this sheet exists to answer. - Grouping and Prioritising Keywords — the step that follows.