Fountain pens, pen brands, Japanese notebook brands and the travel journals already running. These four break even below a 2% conversion rate, which is under what the account already achieves on its worst channel. Three of them are resale.
Bobo's other journals and notebooks first, then tote bags, cards, generic notebooks, washi and art supplies. These break even somewhere between 2% and 5%, so they work at Search conversion rates and fail at PMax rates. Worth real money, but only with a defined read.
Stickers, planners, writing accessories, pins and patches, art prints and magnets. They need 5% to 25% conversion rates to break even. Together they draw over 1.5 million searches a month, and that demand is unreachable at these prices.
The entire Shopping feed is two product IDs. Everything running is a colour variant of the $36 journal or the $90 Starter Kit. The $68 Wanderlust Double Pack and the $32 National Parks Edition sit in the same collection, are in stock, and have never been advertised. The Double Pack is the highest priced item in the range. No decision required, no setup, no new budget.
A $55 fountain pen at 40% margin returns $39 of gross profit per order. A $6 sticker sheet at 70% margin returns $7.47. The margin advantage on Bobo's own products is real, but it cannot rescue a low price, and a low price is what most of the own brand catalog has. Its median product sells for $8. That single fact decides most of this report.
One question per category. Take the price, apply the margin, apply the 1.78x basket the account actually runs, and you get gross profit per order. Divide the click cost by that and you get the conversion rate the category has to hit just to break even. The account converts between 2.06% on PMax and 5.04% on Search, so that band is the whole verdict.
| Category | US searches / mo | Price | Margin | Profit / order | CPC | Breakeven CVR | Verdict |
|---|
The catalog does not share one curve. Journals are a Christmas gift, notebooks are an August school purchase, and pens sell steadily with a mild December lift. Every category bottoms out in June.
Travel journals run 2.65x a normal month in December. The hero is bought as a gift, not for a trip, so the season is Christmas rather than summer.
The portfolio bottoms at 0.78x in June. Flat monthly budget overspends the trough and underspends the peak.
These are the terms that spike hardest in each month against their own annual average, not the biggest terms overall. Ranking by raw volume returns the same five words twelve times and tells you nothing. Ranking by spike shows the year as customers move through it. The dot on each term is its advertising verdict from the table above, so a spike in a category we would never buy reads as one to ignore rather than one we missed.
One important limit. This view rewards volatility, so a product with steady demand all year never appears in it. That is not an absence of demand, it is the opposite, and every one of the fourteen steadiest terms in the data is missing from the grid below. The section after it is the other half of the picture.
Dotted journal 2.27x, Hobonichi Weeks 2.20x, washi for journaling 2.13x. New year resolutions. This is when to launch the Journals and notebooks test, not a quiet month to trial it in.
Teacher gifts 2.60x and thank you cards 1.55x. Teacher appreciation and graduation. Bobo sells $26 note card sets into a month we have never planned for.
"Beginner fountain pen" spikes in January, February and March. People are given a pen at Christmas, or resolve to start, and then go looking. That is a different message from brand terms and wants its own copy.
Secret santa 7.30x, stocking stuffers 6.51x, gifts under 20 6.41x. These are not product searches. They are budget and occasion searches, and they are how a $6 to $20 catalog gets found in the one month its price is an advantage.
A category with an index near 1.00 every month is not a weak category. It is a predictable one, and predictable is easier to budget than seasonal. Two of the three categories we recommend advertising sit at opposite ends of this, which changes how each should be paced.
A 1.44x swing from best month to worst, and the individual brands are flatter still. Blackwing is perfectly flat, an index of 1.00 across all twelve months on 22,200 searches. Pilot Pen 1.23x, Lamy 1.49x, Caran d'Ache 1.49x. Run these on a level budget and leave them alone.
A 4.11x swing, the spikiest category in the catalog. Hobonichi runs on an annual release cycle with a September launch and a December peak. Same Advertise verdict as pen brands, completely different pacing. Concentrate the spend, do not level it.
Stickers are the steadiest category on the page at 1.25x, and still the worst economics in the catalog at a 24.88% breakeven. Steadiness is a pacing input, not a verdict. Read this section against the table, never instead of it.
Budget should not be one shape. Level for pen brands and fountain pens. Concentrated Oct to Dec for travel journals and Japanese notebooks. The account currently runs a flat daily budget across everything, which overspends both troughs and underspends both peaks.
The verdicts above are projections built from the account's own behaviour, not measurements of categories Bobo has never advertised. That distinction matters when deciding how much to commit.
Every volume in this report is what people type into Google. It says a market exists and how big it is. It does not say those people will buy from Bobo, at Bobo's prices, against Amazon and the brands themselves. Demand is the first filter, not the last.
The 2.06% to 5.04% band comes from one product, a $36 travel journal. We apply it to every category because it is the only honest evidence we have. A $55 fountain pen may convert quite differently. This is why the top rows say test rather than scale.
CPCs come from Google's own planner, not from a live auction. Actual costs are set on the day by who else is bidding. Volumes are also rounded into bands by Google, so small month to month moves are not signal. All figures are United States only.
The account currently returns 2.16x against a 3.0 target, and that gap comes from click prices against a $64 basket, not from a narrow catalog. Opening new categories is worth doing on its own merits. It should not be expected to close that gap, and we would rather say so now than imply otherwise.
It looked like a strong category until we broke it apart. 84% of its demand was a single keyword, "national parks passport", and that search wants the official Park Service stamp book rather than a $32 journal. The term for what Bobo actually sells draws 390 a month. The National Parks Edition is a travel journal and is counted in that line.
It showed 74,000 searches at a $0.37 click, which was too good to be true. Midori is also a liqueur brand, so the volume is not all stationery. We removed it rather than let it flatter the Japanese notebook figures.
Each of these changes the plan rather than refining it, and none of them can be answered from the data we hold.
We assumed 70% own brand and 40% resale. It is the only unmeasured number in the table and it decides the top three rows. If resale margin is nearer 30%, fountain pens, pen brands and Japanese notebooks all move from Advertise to Test, and the plan becomes a much smaller own brand plan. Blocks the whole resale recommendation
Our strongest recommendations involve bidding on TWSBI, Lamy, Kaweco, Sailor, Blackwing and Hobonichi. Many stationery makers restrict resellers from bidding on their brand terms, or set minimum advertised prices, as a condition of the wholesale agreement. We have no visibility into your supplier terms. If those clauses exist, the cheap clicks that make these categories attractive are not available to us. Could invalidate the three resale categories entirely
Across the ten brands we recommend, only 65% of products are currently in stock. Traveler's Company is at 41% and MD Paper at 50%. Shopping campaigns stop serving an out of stock item and lose the learning that went into it, so a thin shelf turns paid demand into wasted spend. We would rather advertise six reliably stocked products than thirty intermittent ones. Determines which brands we start with