Launch Facts:
- Market: USA
- Total Investment : $55K (one-time costs, inventory, ppc, bleeding, etc.)
- Time into Launch: 4 months till date
- Gross Profit Margin: 30%
- PPC ACOS 30 Days: 41%
- PPC TACOS 30 days: 11%
- Total reviews: 400+
- Total Ordered Units: 8,371
- Total Sales: $203,298.17
- Total Profit: $7,334.2 (should’ve been $14K easily, details of this lesson below)
- Net ROI (in these 4 months): 13.33%
Screenshots :
Launch Strategy :
This launch was primarily based on PPC. The goal of such launches is to minimize the bleeding budget by utilizing the investment made in ordering inventory to generate sales and make the revenues pay the expenses (like PPC) by itself.
This entire launch can be broken down into 3 important stages:
A. COMPETITIVE RESEARCH
We spent about 3 months in finalizing the product and its pack-size. We chose a pack that was among the top selling yet having relatively low number of sellers. It also provided the maximum value to the customers for the price they were paying, a very important factor to consider.
B. PRE-LAUNCH PREPARATION
We had top notch photos, content, EBC, and keyword research ready. Having enrolled in Brand Registry already, we also applied for 25 vine reviews from day one of the listing going live. You want to have Brand Registry and content/media of your listing ready way before your launch date (i.e, the inventory reaching FBA).
Also check regularly if all the nodes of Brand Registry (like A+ content, Brand Analytics, Vine Reviews, Sponsored Brands Video, etc) are assigned to your account. Because even after being enrolled in brand registry, sometimes these features are not enabled and you have to manually request to get them added. As it takes up to a week to get them enabled, you can lose valuable launch period if you don’t time it right.
C. The PPC Strategy
– Structure
We did micro level campaigns. 1 keyword + 1 match-type per campaign. Starting with 20-25 top most relevant keywords (mid-long tail keywords). So the campaign structure went like,
- Keyword 1 – Exact
- Keyword 1 – Phrase
- Keyword 1 – Broad
and so on.
We didn’t do all match types for all keywords, since broad and phrase match types don’t perform well with very long tail keywords.
– Bidding
Slightly above recommended bid to begin with. As it’s hard for a new campaign and product to get traffic/ad-rank, your bids need to be higher to get impressions and clicks.
– Optimization
Each week we mine search terms from our existing campaigns, and any new potential keyword we find, we make similar campaigns.
A $6500(+) LESSON WE LEARNED:
Did you notice above when I mentioned our total profit should’ve been $14K so far easily? Here’s the reason: Flimsy product packaging. And by flimsy I mean it wasn’t sturdy, and was prone to deformation.
This wasn’t the first launch we did, yet we didn’t do our best work in packaging this product. prone to deformation. The result was instead of having $8k+ profit this month (as we did last month), we are going to have about $2.5K profit. The remaining is going into additional FBA fees that Amazon is charging us now after they have rescanned our products. Our mistake was letting the supplier do the packaging how he wanted. Now that we’ve called our samples and brainstormed along with team, we’ve shown supplier how the same product can be packaged for better stability and reduced volume.
CONCLUSION:
Take enough time to gauge your market and competition. There’s no space for mistakes in working on your price, pack-size and packaging. Do not shy away from investing in good quality content and media for your product. We choose the top 10-20 most relevant and converting keywords to use in our listing and PPC campaigns, so it’s important to painstakingly do your keyword research.
All these factors combined, along with the grace of Almighty, is the reason behind the apparent success of this launch. PL is a long term business. We usually do not expect full ROI for an entire year. And we do expect many more challenges along our journey. But I’m sure we’ll work it out, as we always have, as a team here at Brandock. And of course, I’ll keep sharing any key findings/lessons we get along our journey.
