Product Group

A Product Group is a set of ASINs inside a Product Line that share one meaningful keyword set — the products a shopper would find with the same searches.

The shared keyword set is what defines the group. How the members differ from each other does not matter, and in practice they differ in every way a product can: colour, size, capacity, material, style, quantity or count, pack size, flavour, scent, and any combination of those. Two variants that a shopper searches for identically belong together even when almost nothing else about them matches.

What it changes

A Product Group is not a folder. It changes what a decision is allowed to count as evidence.

When a rule or a Decision Brief reads at Product Group scope, the search-term evidence from every ASIN in the group is combined into one context. A query that ran three times against one ASIN and forty times across the group is judged on forty observations, not three.

Read as one context, never sibling by sibling

This is the part that surprises people. Vendlen does not compare the members of a Product Group against each other and pick a winner. The remaining ASINs are always aggregated into a single context and read as one body of evidence.

That design choice is deliberate. Sibling-by-sibling comparison invites conclusions that are really just noise from different sample sizes.

Where it matters most

A query blocked on one ASIN. You negated a search term against one product because it was not converting there. Read at Individual ASIN scope, that term has no traffic and nothing to say. Read across the Product Group, it may still be earning orders on the other products — which is a different decision entirely. This is the case that unnegation exists for.

Variants of one product. Whether they differ by colour, size, material, style, quantity or anything else, variants of the same product usually share demand. Group scope gives denser evidence than any one of them can produce alone.

Thin targets. A new or low-volume ASIN can borrow the group’s evidence to reach a conclusion it could not reach on its own.

Where it does not

If an ASIN genuinely has its own keyword set and its own shopper, group evidence is the wrong evidence. That is what Individual ASIN scope is for. See Decision scope.

The change is still local

Widening the evidence does not widen the action. When a negation rule reading at Product Group scope decides a term should be blocked, the negative is still created only in the ad group the rule is assigned to.

Setting one up

See Creating a Product Group for selecting the variants, assigning a Product Line, and overriding its numbers.