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How do you launch a product on bol with keywords, a listing and ads?

Lars Hurkmans·Co-founder·24 June 2026·Temps de lecture 13 minutes

Launching a product on bol comes down to three things that are connected: keywords, ranking and advertising. You find relevant keywords with the Keyword Guide, compare your findability with competitors, build your listing with the AI Listing Builder and advertise in three phases: launch aggressively until you have reviews, grow organically and optimise on your ACoS.

This article follows the approach of PurelyGoods, the private label of brothers Floris and Jelle Boeijer. They have been selling on bol for about three years and also run a second brand, Lacera. At PurelyGoods, Floris handles the marketing, the content, the listing optimisation, the email campaigns, the advertising and the webshop. Below he walks through, step by step, how he launches a new product on bol in MarktMentor. The example product is a black sleep mask, a new variant within a sleep mask family that PurelyGoods already sells. We have written out his method so you can follow the steps yourself.

Which three things decide whether your product launch on bol succeeds?

A product launch on bol stands or falls on three things that are connected: the keywords you want to be found on, your ranking on those keywords, and your ads. According to Floris, those three together produce a good listing and a product that pays off.

You cannot look at them separately. Your keywords decide where you want to be visible. Your ranking shows whether that is already working organically. Your ads buy the visibility you still lack organically, and help you build sales so your organic position can rise. The rest of this approach follows that order: first the keywords, then the comparison with the competition, then the listing, and finally advertising in phases.

How do you find the right keywords with the Keyword Guide?

You start with the first keyword that comes to mind, here sleep mask, and use the Keyword Guide to find related search terms, sorted by search volume from high to low. Sleep mask has the largest volume. Eye mask and eye mask sleep are relevant, because they are synonyms. Eye patch you deliberately skip, because it gives a different search result, and sleep trainer is something else entirely.

The category column helps you filter. Sleep mask keywords mainly fall under relaxation, eye mask too, eye patch under health products and baby items under yet another category. That quickly shows you which terms really belong to your product. Bol itself also works with synonyms within the platform, something that comes back later in the Listing Builder.

For search volume, PurelyGoods does not use a hard limit, but roughly 50 to 100 searches per month as a guideline. Still, Floris also includes smaller terms. Cotton sleep mask has a volume of only 58, but whoever searches for that specifically often has a high purchase intent. That is the strength of long-tail keywords: less volume, more intent. Collect as many relevant keywords as possible at the start and let the data speak afterwards.

So only relevant keywords, and that is not optional. Bol weighs the click-through rate (the share of people who click on your product after seeing it) heavily. If you advertise a sleep mask on a term like sleep trainer, few people click, your click-through rate drops, and with it your organic ranking on your other keywords gets worse. The number of competitors on a keyword, whether it is 2000 or 300, matters less as long as you are going to advertise anyway. If you want to go deeper into building your keyword base, read how to improve your findability on bol with a keyword strategy.

You save the relevant keywords. Under My Store, Optimise, Keyword Lists you create a project, for example sleep masks, and within it a list per EAN. From the Keyword Guide you add the terms you want to follow: sleep mask, eye mask, sleep mask for women and for men, and English search terms with volume. That way you can periodically monitor how those keywords develop without searching again every time. After the launch you keep looking back, although over a period of about three months usually little changes: sleep mask remains the keyword.

How do you compare your findability with that of your competitors?

You compare your findability by putting your own EAN next to a number of competitors in the Product Database and checking per keyword where you rank too low and where you get no impressions. You search on the category name, sleep masks, take a year as the period, and see the best-selling products in the category.

In the Keyword Guide comparison you read off that overview. Keywords shaded red are the terms on which you rank too low or that you are not yet using. The column last organic position shows dots in red, grey or green that indicate whether your position is lower than that of the competitors, with the average difference next to it. The impressions column shows where you do and do not get views. If you rank low somewhere and get no impressions, you focus on that first. Eye mask, for example, was relevant for PurelyGoods, a synonym of sleep mask with a lot of volume, but they ranked low on it. That means advertising on eye mask and making the keyword come back in the product description.

Per competitor you can request the visibility insights. You then see on which keywords that product is found, sorted by impressions, with the impact for each term: what percentage of that product's search traffic comes from that one keyword. The Sponsored Products column shows the average winning bid for a keyword and the number of days it has been sponsored. The average winning bid is the average price you pay per click to win the ad auction; you pay the bid of the number two.

There is an instructive signal in there. The bestseller in the category turned out not to be advertising at all any more and got its traffic entirely organically. That shows you can scale down advertising once you rank high, and that advertising therefore serves a long-term goal: paying temporarily for visibility in order to rise organically. Then pick a product that ranks slightly lower and check whether it does advertise and on which keywords. That way you see exactly where in the market ads are still being used. Where the organic position ends and the sponsored one begins, we explain in rankings on bol: organic versus combined.

How do you build your listing with the AI Listing Builder?

The AI Listing Builder combines your keywords, your competition and your reviews into a title and description. You can improve an existing listing or build one from scratch. If you choose an existing product via the EAN, the product information and the category come along straight away. For a new product you fill those in yourself, including the brand name.

Then you choose your competitors, via the category sleep masks or via specific keywords, up to a maximum of twenty. Include the bestsellers in particular, because their listings are often already well optimised. You add columns to pick a good mix: the positions (the number 1 that does not advertise is a nice end point), the impressions, the days sponsored, the average price (choose competitors with a comparable price level), the reviews, and the SEO relevance, in other words how many keywords appear in the title and description. You use that last column to benchmark your own listing length. Deliberately choose a mix: competitors that rank strongly organically without sponsoring, competitors that do advertise but get good traffic, and products with both higher and lower review scores.

Next you add keywords. You get a list per category with a related column, the long-tail keywords within a broader term. With a plus you add what fits: sleep mask women, sleep mask men, cotton, sleep mask airplane, and sleep mask side sleeper as a USP. What does not fit you leave out, so no sleep mask bluetooth if your product has no bluetooth. By adding the long-tail you automatically cover the broader keyword too. At the top you see the potential reach: the total search volume on which you become visible, including synonyms. Via the competitors tab you add more keywords that they use, with a column that shows how many of them use a term.

Then comes the review analysis. The reviews of the chosen products are analysed live by an AI model into an overview of strong and weaker points. In your listing you then emphasise what the competitors do less well and what customers find important. We work out the same method in finding your distinctive edge through reviews.

Finally you decide the writing style and the text itself. You choose a tone, professional or persuasive, you imitate the style of a competitor, or you use your own existing listing as a basis, your brand voice. The listing is optimised for bol and for Google: the most important information sits in the first 500 characters, which Google uses to index, and what bol finds important, such as addressing the customer directly, is built in. For the title you optimise for mobile, because about 60 percent of traffic on bol is mobile. Keep the title short and compact and put the most important information in the first 60 to 70 characters. You configure which keywords get priority in the title, for example sleep mask, possibly men or women, side sleeper and the material; the rest goes into the description. You benchmark the description length against the competition, on average around 3200 characters, where bol does not punish a description that is too long or too short harshly. You set the reading level to basic or standard for a broad audience; too simple can come across as unprofessional and you only use jargon for a niche or technical product. Once the text has been generated, you check the content, make the headings H2 and put the distinctive words in bold. On the right you see which chosen keywords have been used and how often, highlighted in the listing, plus the potential reach again, for example 7500 based on the last 30 days. Read more about the individual elements of a strong listing in optimising your product listing on bol.

How do you advertise when launching a new product?

In the launch phase you build visibility by advertising somewhat more aggressively until a set number of reviews, with a more generous ACoS and your budget mainly on keywords and the product page. A new product goes through three life phases: launch, organic growth and optimisation. You put the listing live on bol and create a new campaign.

During the launch it is allowed to cost something. PurelyGoods advertises more aggressively until a set number of reviews, for example 5, allows an ACoS of, say, 40 percent, and sets aside about three weeks to 30 days for it. The daily budget in the example is 40 euros, which at an average winning bid of around 1.30 euros comes down to roughly 25 to 30 clicks per day. These amounts are PurelyGoods' own practice and serve as an example, not as a standard or a promise. How you estimate those advertising costs in advance, we calculate in what advertising costs during a launch.

You divide the budget per placement type. Bol lets you advertise on keywords, categories and product pages, plus automatic campaigns. Important detail: up to 50 percent of sales can come through the product page, the block with similar products below a listing. That spot is often forgotten and is sometimes more important than the keywords. So divide your budget mainly across keywords and product pages and less across categories. In the PurelyGoods example that is about 20 euros on keywords, 8 to 16 euros on the product page, 8 euros on the category and the rest on the automatic campaign.

Before you move on to the next phase, you set transition rules. These can look at the number of sales or reviews, and at a minimum percentage of organic sales, for example 20 to 30 percent over 14 days. That way you only move on when you have really built organic relevance and are not running on ads alone. The auction behind all this, and why a strong listing makes your ads cheaper, we explain in how bol's advertising system works.

How do you grow organically after that?

In the organic growth phase you play the game between organic and advertised, and that is the phase you spend the longest in. Per keyword and per category page, the strategy looks at your position: if you rank high, you advertise less; if you rank low, you advertise more. That happens automatically and daily according to the rules you have set.

That way all kinds of scenarios are covered. If you are at position 120, for example, but building momentum, you keep advertising to keep climbing. If you are at the top, you scale down. In this phase you lower the budget and the maximum ACoS, towards 30 percent, and you use transition rules on your organic share. PurelyGoods sits around 50 percent organic store-wide, which gives an impression of what they steer on, not of a target value that applies to every store.

The idea stays the same as during the launch: you pay for visibility to build sales and therefore an organic position, and once that position is there, you scale down advertising. The difference between your organic and your combined position decides whether advertising on a keyword is still needed. We work out that distinction in rankings on bol: why you should not rely on one source.

How do you optimise on your ACoS?

In the last phase, optimisation, you only advertise where it is needed and at the right price, steered by your ACoS. Your ACoS is the share of your revenue that goes to ads; if you measure it across all your sales together, it is also called TACoS. The maths is simple. If you work with 20 percent net profit and set your ACoS to 20 percent, you keep nothing at the bottom line. That is why Floris works with 10 to 12 percent instead, with a maximum ACoS of, for example, 28 percent. Those are the values PurelyGoods itself uses, not a standard.

You scale the budget down further, for example to 20 to 30 euros per day. You choose the keywords you still advertise on and set up dayparting: advertising more or less per hour of the day and per day of the week, based on the sales patterns of your product category. At the weekend or at night you often sell less, so you advertise less then too. In the advanced settings you choose which phases dayparting applies to and how far you fall back on the benchmark of the category or the product. Finally you choose the active placements, so keywords, category page and product page, and switch the campaign on.

The whole process from launch to optimisation takes about 20 to 30 days. Building organic relevance takes time, but with sales momentum you build reviews and relevance faster. In bol's own advertising environment you essentially set one bid against the auction; the phasing, the daily adjustment per position and the dayparting are not in there. This method gives you more control over that. How you underpin your bid and your ACoS, you read in determining your bidding strategy for Sponsored Products.

Can you steer on reviews for every product?

Not in every category can you steer on reviews. For the sleep mask you can, so PurelyGoods uses the launch phase to advertise more aggressively and bring in sales and reviews faster. For some health products bol does not allow reviews, because it does not want to make a promise about them. Think of mouth tape or nasal strips.

That has consequences for the competition. If customers cannot weigh up reviews, they often choose the cheapest listing, and cheap products end up at the top. Unless you have built a brand name that people trust. For a product where reviews are possible, such as the sleep mask, the launch phase is exactly the moment to get sales going and so build reviews. Reviews are social proof that helps your conversion: how you ask for them honestly and within the rules is in how you get more reviews on bol.

In short

• The triangle. Keywords, ranking and advertising are connected. Your keywords decide where you want to be visible, your ranking whether that works organically, and your ads buy the rest.
• Keywords. Find relevant terms with the Keyword Guide, sorted by search volume, and use the category column. Include long-tail with high intent, even below the guideline of 50 to 100 volume. Never advertise on a less relevant keyword, because that lowers your click-through rate and your organic position.
• Comparing the competition. Put your EAN next to competitors in the Product Database, read the Keyword Guide comparison and the visibility insights, and use the average winning bid and the days sponsored to see where ads are and are not being used.
• AI Listing Builder. Choose up to twenty competitors, add the fitting long-tail, have the reviews analysed for your USPs, and optimise your title for mobile (around 60 characters) and your description length against the competition (around 3200 characters).
• Advertising in three phases. Launch with a more generous ACoS until you have reviews, grow organically through the game between organic and advertised, and optimise on your ACoS with dayparting and a scaled-down budget.
• All amounts and percentages are PurelyGoods' own practice and serve as an example, not as results to expect.

If you want to know which other skills you need to keep this up, read what you need to be able to do to succeed on bol.

Read more:

• Launching a product on bol: what does advertising really cost?
• Improving your findability on bol with a keyword strategy
• Optimising your product listing on bol
• Finding your distinctive edge through reviews
• Determining your bidding strategy for Sponsored Products