Product Optimization Playbook — User Guide

Who this guide is for

Anyone who uses the Product Optimization Playbook through the Ui. You do not need to know any programming or marketing jargon. This guide walks through every field, button, and result you will encounter, in plain language.

What this guide covers

What the playbook does, what each input field is for, how to run an analysis from start to finish, what each section of the results means, and how to download your PDF.

What this guide does NOT cover

• The Merchandising pipeline, which is a separate tool for processing whole spreadsheets of products. See merchandising-pipeline.
• Writing or editing pipeline configuration files. See configuration-guide.

Table of Contents#

1. What the Product Optimization Playbook does
2. The Playbook page, at a glance
3. Filling in the form, field by field
4. Step-by-step: generating your first playbook
5. Reading the results

1. What the Product Optimization Playbook does#

The Product Optimization Playbook is a tool for generating a detailed marketing brief one product page at a time. You give it your current product title, description, and a few details about your product. It then looks at competing pages on the web for the same kind of product and produces a written analysis of what those competitors are doing, what they have in common, and how your page compares. The end result is a downloadable PDF you can use as a checklist for rewriting or improving your product page.

Use the playbook when you want a focused, page-level look at a single product — for example, a flagship item, a slow seller, or a brand-new listing you want to launch with the best possible copy. If you instead need to process a whole spreadsheet of products at once, use the Merchandising pipeline (see merchandising-pipeline).

You will get back, for the product you submit:

• A written analysis of competitor titles, plus the key things their titles tend to include.
• A written analysis of competitor descriptions, plus the key things their descriptions tend to include.
• A list of the keywords competitors use most often.
• A side-by-side comparison of how many words your description has versus the average competitor description.
• A PDF version of all of the above that you can download and share.

2. The Playbook page, at a glance#

The playbook lives on a single page:

The page is laid out top to bottom in three regions:

1. Product Information form — where you type in your product title, description, key features, target keyword, and domain. This is the only part you have to fill in.
2. Playbook Progress card — appears underneath the form after you click Generate Playbook. It shows the task ID and a list of the four steps the analysis goes through, with a check mark next to each one as it finishes.
3. Analysis Results card — appears underneath the progress card once the analysis is finished. It contains the written analyses, the keyword list, the word count comparison, and the Download PDF button.

At the very bottom of the page there is also a small blue Tips for Great Product Pages card with a few general reminders (focus on benefits, use clear language, include specific details, and so on). It is just there as a reference — you do not interact with it.

3. Filling in the form, field by field#

The form is a single card titled Product Information. Two fields are required (marked with a red asterisk). The rest are optional, but the more you fill in, the better the analysis.

Current Product Title (required)#

The product title or heading exactly as it currently appears on your product page.

• Type: Single line of text.
• Example: Premium Wireless Headphones with Active Noise Cancellation
• Why it matters: The playbook compares your title to the titles competitors use for similar products, so the more your entry matches what is actually on your page, the more useful the analysis.

Current Product Description (required)#

The product description from your page, copied in as-is.

• Type: Multi-line text box (about six lines tall, but it scrolls).
• What to put in: The description you currently have on the page — paragraphs, sentences, whatever it is. Do not summarize or edit it; the playbook needs to see what is really there to compare it fairly.
• Why it matters: The word count comparison and the description analysis are both based on what you paste in here.

Current Key Features (optional)#

A bullet list of the most important features of your product — one per line.

• Type: Multi-line text box, shown in a fixed-width font as a hint that it expects one item per line.
• How to fill it in: Type one feature per line, no bullets or dashes — the form takes care of treating each line as its own feature. For example: 40-hour battery life Active noise cancellation Premium comfort design Universal compatibility
• Optional but recommended. Leaving it blank still works; filling it in gives the analysis more to work with.

Main Target Product Keyword (optional)#

The keyword (or short list of keywords) you want this product page to rank for in search engines.

• Type: Single line of text.

• One or more keywords: You can enter just one keyword, or several at once separated by commas. For example: ergonomic office chair, standing desk, lumbar support chair.

• The Pull Traffic button: To the right of this field there is a Pull Traffic button. Once you have typed at least one keyword, click it and the playbook will look up real search data for each of your keywords and show it in a small table directly underneath the field. The table has four columns:

  Column	What it tells you
  Keyword	The keyword you entered.
  Search Volume	Roughly how many times per month people search for this keyword. Higher numbers mean more potential traffic. A dash (—) means no data was available.
  Competition	How crowded that keyword is, shown as a coloured pill: HIGH (red) means a lot of pages are already competing for it, MEDIUM (yellow) is in between, and LOW (green) means relatively few competitors.
  Index	A number version of the same competition score, useful if you want to sort or compare keywords more precisely.

  The button shows a spinner while it is loading and is disabled if you have not typed a keyword yet (or while a playbook is already being generated). You do not have to use Pull Traffic — it is a research helper. If you skip it, the playbook still runs.

Domain (optional)#

The domain name where this product page lives or will live (for example, example.com or mystore.com). The analysis uses this to help identify which competitors are direct competitors versus your own pages.

• Type: Single line of text.
• Format: Just the domain — no https://, no path, no trailing slash.

The Generate Playbook button#

The big button at the bottom of the form. Click it to start an analysis.

• When it is enabled: Only after you have filled in both the Current Product Title and the Current Product Description. Until those two are in place, the button is greyed out.
• While the analysis is running: The button label changes to Analysing... with a spinning icon, and the form becomes read-only so you cannot change anything mid-run.

The Clear All button#

A secondary button next to Generate Playbook that wipes everything you have typed in (title, description, key features, target keyword, domain, and any pulled traffic data) so you can start over with a fresh form.

• When it appears: Only when you have typed something in, no analysis is currently running, and you have not yet submitted a task. After you click Generate Playbook, this button is replaced by the Start New Analysis button on the results card (see section 5).

4. Step-by-step: generating your first playbook#

This is the full end-to-end workflow.

1. Go to the Playbook page (/playbook).

2. In Current Product Title, type the title exactly as it appears on your existing product page.

3. In Current Product Description, paste the description from your existing product page.

4. (Optional) In Current Key Features, type your product's main features, one per line.

5. (Optional) In Main Target Product Keyword, type the keyword (or comma-separated keywords) you want the page to target. Click Pull Traffic if you want to see the search volume and competition data first; the table will appear below the field once the data loads.

6. (Optional) In Domain, type the domain where the page lives.

7. Click Generate Playbook. A green toast pops up at the bottom of the screen confirming the task has been created, with the Task ID included.

8. The Playbook Progress card appears underneath the form. It shows the task ID and a list of four steps that the analysis works through in order:

   Step	What is happening
   Scraping competitor data...	Looking up competitor product pages on the web.
   Analyzing titles...	Reading the competitor titles and finding patterns.
   Analyzing descriptions...	Reading the competitor descriptions and finding patterns.
   Generating PDF...	Putting everything into a downloadable PDF.

   As each step finishes, a green check mark appears next to it. The step that is currently running shows a small blue spinner. Steps that have not started yet show as a blank grey circle. The card refreshes itself every few seconds, so you can leave the page open and watch progress live.

9. If something goes wrong during the run, the current step turns red, an error message appears in a red box at the bottom of the progress card, and a Start Over button appears so you can clear the form and try again.

10. When all four steps have finished, a green toast appears saying Playbook analysis completed! and the Analysis Results card appears underneath the progress card.

11. Click Download PDF in the results card to save the PDF to your computer. (See section 5 for what the rest of the results card contains.)

12. To run another analysis on a different product, click Start New Analysis to clear the form.

5. Reading the results#

When the analysis finishes, the Analysis Results card appears underneath the progress card. At the top of the card you will see a short note like Based on 8 competitors analyzed, telling you how many competitor pages the playbook actually managed to look at for this run.

Below that, the results are broken into the following sections, in order:

Title Analysis#

A short written summary of what competitor product titles tend to look like for your kind of product — how long they are, what kinds of words appear in them, what features or selling points they tend to lead with, and how yours compares.

Title Key Items#

A more concrete list version of the title analysis: the specific elements (such as brand, model number, key feature, intended use, size, colour) that competitor titles tend to include. Use this as a checklist when you rewrite your own title.

Description Analysis#

A short written summary of what competitor product descriptions tend to look like — their structure, the kinds of information they cover, how they open and close, and how yours compares in style and content.

Description Key Items#

A list of the specific points or sections that competitor descriptions tend to include (for example: a short pitch up front, a list of features, technical specifications, care instructions, compatibility notes). Use this as a checklist when you rewrite your own description.

Keyword Frequencies#

A list of the keywords and phrases that show up most often across the competitor pages, roughly in order of how common they are. This tells you which terms shoppers are likely to recognize and which terms search engines are seeing the most for products like yours.

Word Count Comparison#

Two side-by-side number boxes:

Compare the two numbers. If your number is much smaller than the competitor average, your description is shorter than the typical competing page and you may want to add more detail. If it is much larger, your description is longer than typical and you might consider tightening it. If they are close, your length is in line with what shoppers see elsewhere.

Download PDF#

A button at the bottom of the results card. Click it to save the analysis as a PDF on your computer. The file is named playbook-{task-id}.pdf so you can tell different runs apart later.

Start New Analysis#

A button next to Download PDF. Click it to clear the form and the results so you can run another analysis on a different product. (The PDF you already downloaded is unaffected — it stays on your computer.)