An Amazon PPC audit is a structured review of your advertising to find wasted spend and missed profit. You can do it by hand with the checklist below, or upload your bulk file to our free audit tool and get the same findings in about a minute. Either way, work through these areas in order.
1. Account snapshot
- Total spend, sales, orders, ACoS and ROAS for the period.
- Your break-even ACoS (roughly your gross margin) written down as the benchmark.
- Split of spend across Sponsored Products, Brands and Display.
2. Search term efficiency
- Confirmed wasted spend: terms with enough clicks and zero orders. Add as negative exact.
- Winners: low-ACoS terms with steady orders. Move to exact and scale.
- Harvest: converting terms from auto or broad to graduate into exact campaigns.
Significance matters. Do not negate a term after two or three clicks. Wait until it has enough clicks that a sale would be expected at your conversion rate. Auditing on tiny samples is the fastest way to overstate waste and kill future winners.
3. Bids and targets
- Targets above break-even ACoS: reduce bids toward your target.
- Profitable targets under target with orders: raise bids to capture volume.
- Zero-order targets with real click volume: pause or negate.
4. Budget allocation
- Profitable campaigns hitting their daily cap: raise budgets.
- Above-break-even campaigns with high budgets: trim and reallocate.
- Move spend from losers to capped winners.
5. Placements
- Top of Search, Rest of Search and Product Pages performance.
- Bid multipliers set against each placement, with rank in mind for Top of Search.
6. Campaign structure
- Match-type separation: exact, phrase and broad isolated.
- Duplicate keywords across ad groups, which cause self-competition.
- Portfolio organization and a real negative-keyword strategy.
7. Profit leakage and recovery
- Add up confirmed wasted spend, above-margin overspend and structural waste.
- Estimate the monthly recoverable amount.
- Turn it into a prioritized list: do the highest-certainty fix first.
Our free PPC audit tool runs every check above from a single Amazon bulk file, with a 0 to 10 health score, a profit-leakage report and a one-click export of the changes as an Amazon bulk upload. Your file is processed in your browser and never uploaded.
How often should you audit?
Run a light audit monthly and a deeper one each quarter, plus any time ACoS jumps or sales dip. Markets, competitors and your own catalog shift, so an account that was clean in January can drift by March. If you would rather not run it yourself, our Amazon PPC management service includes ongoing audits.