Less than 10% of your catalog ever sells

📦 Vishnu’s 1PD Ops Summit session is up, and this one is worth the full watch if you run catalog campaigns.

The opening number: a brand doing 150 crores has 14,000 SKUs, and around 600 to 700 of them ever sell. Inside that 600, a handful carry almost all the revenue. We checked across 150 to 200 brands and the pattern held nearly everywhere. Less than 10 percent of the catalog moves.

Everyone recognised the symptom. The algorithm finds your black shirt, sells it again and again, and the founder asks why the rest of the stock is still sitting in the warehouse.

The algorithm is not broken. One catalog campaign, feed connected, no structure and no context. It found the easiest thing to sell and it sold it.

Two parts of the session I would point you to:

Baselines, from 11:33. He asked the room how they decide a campaign is working. CTR, CPL, ROAS over 7 to 14 days. His answer was that comparing last 7 days to the previous 7 is not a baseline, and it is why campaigns get killed in week three. The real version is a 90-day moving average built per category, with purchase line share, order penetration and revenue share sitting on top of it.

The category index, from 16:44. Five categories from a top Indian luggage brand, organic demand against captured intent. Category A had the highest demand in the catalog and captured only 67 percent of it. That gap is a conversion rate or PDP trust problem, not an ads problem, and no budget fixes it. Which is where the diagnosis set comes in at 24:20: high CTR, high intent, zero purchases. Those SKUs belong on the PDP team’s desk, not in Ads Manager.

The Q&A is worth staying for, particularly 45:20 on scaling secondary categories without panicking about CAC, and 52:48 on RTO and net profit as the real North Star.

Watch the full session: https://youtu.be/O1-ZbcNnvMg

Question for the group: how much of your catalog actually moved last quarter? And has anyone here already split a single catalog campaign into category-level ones? Curious what happened to your blended ROAS in the first month.

#CatalogCampaigns #MetaAds #1PDOps #Ecommerce #PerformanceMarketing