Using Product Journeys to Find Top Products

Rabah here. So today what we're going to be talking about is finding out what are the best products to put your paid media behind. Paid media is expensive and should be primarily used on prospecting. There's definitely some cases in some business economic sense doing some remarketing, but for the most part, you want to be generating new sales with your paid media ads, but you also want to make sure that one, they're high margin products and two people like them and they're a really good representation of your brand.

What you don't want to have happen is when people encounter your brand, especially for the first time, especially with DTC, because there isn't any store or something where people can go into it in a really low passive setting to encounter your brand, understand what it's about. You want to make sure that the flagship products that people are encountering on the first purchase are really going to generate the experience that you're wanting. How do you do this? Well, the answer is use product journeys.

So product journeys are a sankey diagram, the way we show them in Triple Well, which is a little bit fancy and confusing, but we're going to go through it and I'm going to show you how, so let's dive in. So when you go over here to your customer insights, down to product journeys, there's a few things you can look at.

First, there is the products to show I like to do around seven. My colleague, Saunder, he likes to do around eight to 10. Logan does around five to six. You can kind of figure out what you need and it's going to be business specific. So personally, I'm lucky number seven.

The next thing I like to do is exclude products that don't matter. So this client has package protection. That is not a product that I care about. So what I'm going to do here is go up to the exclusion formula, apply that, and now I'm going to reload the products without having that perverting my analysis.

Now when you look at your product journey, there's two things you're going to care about. One, you're going to care about what we call the golden path. So that's going to be the most prominent journey.

The Golden Product Path

And then the second thing you're going to care about is the golden product path. That's going to be first purchase all the way to third purchase. So that's really just the fancy way of saying look for the fat lines. So as you see here, this product Elemental Heel. Let me back up. There's three stages that you're going to see here. So each blue line is a purchase.

So the first blue line is the first purchase, the second blue line is the second purchase, and the third blue line is the third purchase. So the way you would read this is you're going to find the fattest line for the golden path. So the golden path is actually going to be the same as the golden product path, which is fantastic. It's a really good sign to understand if this is a product that you should put pay media behind. So what this is saying here is 43% of people who bought Elemental Hill the first time bought it a second time, that's pretty strong, I'm pretty happy with that.

And then if you look here again, you're going to just follow this hover and you're going to see that 53% of that 43% bought it a third time, which is fantastic.

That's 10% growth in the subsequent cohort. It's really, really awesome. It's exactly what you want to see. And so that is going to be something that you're going to want to put paid media behind. So again, you're going to see this is going to be not only the golden path, but also the golden product path from that first to second and then second to third purchase. Really awesome product.

Analyzing Your Product Journey

So now let's look at another product. Now you can see this has just a much different anatomy or even the gut rebuild nutrients or the biotic clears. So the prominent path here or the golden path would be the 33% to others. So what that means is people are buying this biotic clear 1, and then 33%, one out of three people are buying something else. Not great, not horrible.

But the other thing you need to look at here is you're not really driving any kind of products into other big money making products. So not that this is a bad product, but this isn't something I would put a lot of paid media behind. Now if you're going to do the analysis on the golden product path, 11% of people buy a clear 1a again, and then where we at here? Yeah, nobody buys it a third time. Now I know this brand and I know these products, so there's no reason for really people to buy this a third time.

But again, it's not going to be something that you're going to want to put a ton of paid media behind. The gut rebuild nutrients again is going to be something that 30% buy, not horrible, not great. 17% re-buy out of the first purchase. And then let's find that 42% out of that 17% by a third time.

That's really strong, that's huge growth. So this is something that I would play around with understanding if the margins there and the velocity of product is there, this is a really nice growth in terms of the subsequent cohorts.

Another way to think of it is we want to promote products with paid media that people marry. And so when I say marry, I mean the first purchase is dating. The second purchase here is actually an engagement, and the third purchase is marriage. And so how many people are marrying these products? And you want to find the products people are marrying. Let's look at one more just to kind of nail it home. So ISF is actually not horrible.

So that's 25% and then you're going to see that this is 29%. So not necessarily the golden path. The golden path is going to still be other, but 25%, and then you're going to have a 48% growth. That's huge. That's 23% growth in subsequent cohorts. This is something that I would explore with paid media.

The TL;DR

So ultimately the too long didn't read is you can use product journeys to not only understand the economics of your business, but understand the best products to put paid media behind. You want to understand and identify the golden path, which is the most prominent journey, and then the golden product path, which is the first purchase to the third purchase, and using that in combination with the margin of the product.

So you really want to be high gross margin products, and again, high selling products. Those are the two requisites. And then use that to narrow down a list and then take that list and then cross reference it with your product journeys. And those are going to be the most economical products to promote with paid media. I hope you enjoyed this video and we'll see you in the next one.