Most Amazon PPC accounts are not badly built — they are badly maintained. Someone set up sensible campaigns eighteen months ago, hit reasonable ACOS targets, and then the account was left to run. New ASINs got added to old campaigns. Search terms that made sense at launch stopped making sense once the catalogue grew. Bids that were correct in Q1 are still sitting there in Q4. None of this shows up as a single alarming metric — it shows up as slow, compounding waste that nobody notices until margin has quietly disappeared.
An audit is how you catch that before it costs you another quarter. This is the exact checklist we run through on every account we take on at StoreStride, and the same one we recommend sellers run on their own accounts even if they never plan to hire an agency.
Why Bother Auditing an Account That "Seems Fine"
ACOS looking stable is not the same as an account being efficient. A campaign can hold a steady 25% ACOS for months while quietly bleeding spend on irrelevant search terms, bidding too aggressively on placements that never convert, or running auto and manual campaigns that compete against each other on the same keywords. Averages hide problems. An audit is what forces you to look underneath the headline number and find where the actual waste is sitting.
It also catches drift. Amazon changes auction dynamics constantly — new competitors enter, seasonal demand shifts, Amazon itself adjusts how it weights placements. A structure that was optimal six months ago is rarely still optimal today without anyone touching it.
How Often Should You Audit?
The right cadence depends on account size and how hands-on the management already is. As a general rule:
| Account Size (Monthly Ad Spend) | Recommended Audit Frequency |
|---|---|
| Under £2,000 | Quarterly, or after any major catalogue change |
| £2,000–£10,000 | Every 6–8 weeks |
| £10,000+ | Monthly, with weekly spot-checks on top campaigns |
On top of the scheduled cadence, run an unscheduled audit any time you see a sudden ACOS spike, a sales drop with no obvious cause, a new product launch, or a change in category competition. Waiting for the next quarterly review to investigate a live problem is how small issues turn into expensive ones.
An audit is not the same as daily bid tweaking. Day-to-day optimisation reacts to individual keyword performance. An audit steps back and questions the structure itself — whether the campaign framework, targeting logic, and budget allocation still make sense for where the account is today.
1. Account Structure & Campaign Organisation
Structure problems are the most common thing we find, and the hardest to fix retroactively, so check these first:
- Are auto and manual campaigns for the same ASIN cannibalising each other on the same search terms?
- Is every live ASIN actually covered by a campaign, or are new products sitting with zero paid visibility?
- Are campaigns organised by a logical structure (single keyword campaigns, tiered match types, or portfolio grouping) rather than an accumulation of ad-hoc campaigns added over time?
- Have any campaigns been left paused for months with budget still allocated to them in planning spreadsheets?
- Are Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display campaigns coordinated, or fighting each other for the same auctions?
2. Bidding & Budget Allocation
- Are any campaigns hitting their daily budget cap consistently and losing impression share as a result?
- Are bids still reasonable relative to current CPC benchmarks in the category, or has the auction moved on without you?
- Is budget concentrated on your best-performing, most profitable ASINs, or spread thin across the whole catalogue regardless of performance?
- If you use Dynamic Bids — Up and Down, is it actually appropriate for each campaign's goal, or was it applied as a blanket default?
- Are placement bid adjustments (Top of Search, Product Pages, Rest of Search) still calibrated to where conversions are actually happening?
3. Search Term Report & Negative Keywords
This is where the most avoidable waste tends to hide. Pull a 60–90 day search term report and check:
- Search terms with meaningful spend and zero sales — these should already have negatives, and if they don't, that is wasted budget every single day this goes unchecked
- Irrelevant or off-category search terms triggering impressions on broad or auto campaigns
- High-converting search terms buried in auto or broad campaigns that deserve to be promoted into their own exact-match campaign
- Negative keyword lists that are actually being applied at the right level (campaign vs. ad group) and not accidentally blocking a converting term
Common finding: accounts that haven't been audited in 3+ months typically have 8–15% of total ad spend sitting on search terms with zero conversions. On a £5,000/month account, that is £400–£750 disappearing every single month with no return.
4. Placements, Targeting & Competitor Activity
Placement Performance
Check ACOS and conversion rate by placement separately. Top of Search often converts best but at a higher CPC — make sure bid adjustments reflect that rather than treating all placements the same.
ASIN & Category Targeting
Review which competitor ASINs you're targeting and whether they're still relevant. Competitor catalogues change, and stale product targeting wastes spend on ASINs that no longer exist or have changed category.
New Competitor Entrants
Search your core keywords manually and see who has entered the page since your last audit. A new well-funded competitor can quietly push your CPCs up without any single metric flagging it.
Share of Voice
Check whether you're still winning Top of Search placement on your brand terms and core category keywords, or whether competitors have started outbidding you there.
5. Creative & Listing Alignment
PPC does not operate in isolation — it feeds traffic to a listing, and if the listing has changed or degraded, your ad spend efficiency will suffer even if every campaign setting is correct. Check:
- Has the main image, title, or price changed since the campaigns were last optimised, in a way that could affect click-through or conversion rate?
- Are Sponsored Brands creative and headline copy still accurate and still your best-performing variant, or has it been running unchanged for months without testing alternatives?
- Has review count or star rating dropped, which would explain a conversion rate decline that looks like a PPC problem but isn't?
- Is the product in stock and in good standing — a stranded or suppressed listing still burning budget on live campaigns is a surprisingly common and completely avoidable waste of spend?
6. Reporting & KPI Sanity Check
- Is ACOS being tracked alongside TACoS, so you can see whether PPC is genuinely driving incremental sales or just capturing sales that would have happened organically?
- Are you measuring performance at the right level — account-wide ACOS can look healthy while individual high-priority ASINs are quietly underperforming?
- Do your reported numbers match what's actually in Seller Central, or is a third-party tool showing stale or mismatched data?
What a good audit actually delivers: a prioritised list of fixes ranked by impact, not just a list of observations. The goal isn't to note that something looks off — it's to know exactly which three or four changes will recover the most wasted spend first.
Not sure what your account is leaking?
StoreStride runs full PPC audits across account structure, bidding, search terms, placements, and listing alignment — then hands you a prioritised action plan. No obligation, no pricing pitch on the call.
Get Free Amazon PPC Audit →Common Questions About Amazon PPC Audits
How long does a proper PPC audit take?
For a single-ASIN account with a simple campaign structure, a thorough manual audit typically takes 2–4 hours. For multi-ASIN catalogues with a mix of Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display running across dozens of campaigns, it can take a full day or more to do properly — which is exactly why most sellers never get round to doing it themselves on a regular schedule.
Can I audit my own account, or do I need an agency?
You can absolutely audit your own account using this checklist and the standard Seller Central reports — search term report, campaign performance report, and placement report. The main value an agency adds is pattern recognition across many accounts, which makes it faster to spot what's actually abnormal versus what's just normal category variance.
What's the single most common issue you find in audits?
Search terms accumulating spend with no sales because negative keywords were never properly maintained after the initial campaign setup. It's the easiest problem to create and the easiest one to fix once you actually look for it.
Should I audit before or after a product launch?
Both. Audit the existing account structure before launch to make sure the new ASIN will slot into a clean framework rather than a messy one, then run a focused audit again 30–45 days after launch once you have enough data to see how the new campaigns are actually performing.