The Amazon PPC
audit checklist
Twelve checks to run before you raise an ad budget, in the order we run them on client accounts. Each one says where to find the number in Seller Central and what good looks like.
When to run it and
what to download
Run the full checklist monthly, before any budget increase, and whenever you take over an account from someone else. The search term checks in Part 2 are worth doing weekly.
Download these first. Sixty days gives enough data for most catalogues without old campaigns muddying the picture.
- Sponsored Products search term report, last 60 days (Advertising console → Measurement & Reporting → Sponsored ads reports)
- Business Report by child ASIN, same period (Seller Central → Reports → Business Reports)
- Advertised product report, same period
- Bulk operations file covering all campaigns, for structure and negatives
The order matters. Parts 1 and 4 tell you whether the account should be spending more. Parts 2 and 3 tell you how to spend what it already has.
The 12 checks
- Unit session percentage for each advertised ASIN
- Sponsored Products click-through rate
- Paid conversion against organic conversion
- Spend on search terms that have never converted
- Converting terms left in broad and auto campaigns
- Negatives that block your own winners
- Match types and campaign roles
- Placement performance
- Product grouping inside ad groups
- Bids against break-even ACoS
- TACoS over the last three to six months
- Where spend sits against where sales come from
Start with the listing
Most audits open the campaign manager first. Start with the detail page instead. Advertising buys traffic, and the listing decides what that traffic is worth. If the page does not convert, every fix further down this list only makes a losing position cheaper.
This is the reason for our Conversion Gate: we will not scale spend on a listing below 2% Sponsored Products click-through rate and 10% unit session percentage.
Check 01
Unit session percentage for each advertised ASIN
Where: Seller Central → Reports → Business Reports → Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Child Item.
Unit session percentage is units ordered divided by sessions. It is the cleanest read on whether the page persuades. Look at it per child ASIN, because a strong parent average can hide one variation dragging the rest down.
If an ASIN sits well under 10%, pause any plan to raise its budget and go to the page: main image, price against the competitors around it in search, review count and rating, and whether the bullets answer the questions buyers actually ask.
What good looks like: 10% or higher on the ASINs carrying most of your spend.
Check 02
Sponsored Products click-through rate
Where: Advertising console → Sponsored Products → campaigns, or the advertised product report.
CTR measures the listing as a search result: main image, title, price, star rating and badge. A low CTR means shoppers see your ad and pick something else. Raising bids to win more impressions on an ad nobody clicks spends more to learn the same thing.
Read it at the ASIN level and on your exact match targets. Broad and auto campaigns will always pull CTR down a little, and that is expected.
What good looks like: 2% or higher on Sponsored Products, with exact match targets above that.
Check 03
Paid conversion against organic conversion
Where: Compare ad conversion rate (orders ÷ clicks, advertised product report) with unit session percentage from check 1.
This one comparison tells you where the problem lives. If paid traffic converts much worse than the page as a whole, your targeting is sending the wrong shoppers. If paid and organic convert at about the same low rate, the traffic is fine and the page is the problem.
We see the second pattern often. In those accounts, targeting changes alone will not move the result.
What good looks like: Paid conversion close to or above organic, with both clearing the Conversion Gate.
Search term waste
This is where most of the recoverable money sits, and it is the check most sellers skip because the report is long.
Check 04
Spend on search terms that have never converted
Where: Sponsored Products search term report, last 60 days.
Group the report by customer search term and sort by spend. Flag every term with meaningful clicks and zero orders. A workable threshold: if a term has had enough clicks to produce two orders at your listing's normal conversion rate and has produced none, negate it. At a 10% conversion rate that is about 20 clicks.
This is the check our free audit tool runs for you. Upload the report and it returns the wasted spend figure and the list of terms to negate.
What good looks like: No term past your click threshold without an order, and a total for zero-order spend you are comfortable with.
Check 05
Converting terms left in broad and auto campaigns
Where: Same search term report, filtered to terms with two or more orders.
The report that shows waste also shows winners. A search term converting well inside an auto or broad campaign is being bid on indirectly, at whatever the broad target happens to be. Move it into an exact match campaign where you control its bid, and add it as a negative exact in the campaign it came from so the two do not compete.
What good looks like: Every proven converting term has its own exact match target.
Check 06
Negatives that block your own winners
Where: Bulk operations file, negative keyword and negative product targeting rows.
Negatives accumulate. Phrase negatives added in a hurry months ago can quietly block terms that now convert. Cross-check your negative list against the converting terms from check 5. Look for broad phrase negatives such as single words, which block far more than intended.
What good looks like: No negative that matches a term you are paying to target elsewhere.
Campaign structure
Structure decides whether you can act on what checks 4 to 6 tell you. A messy account can be profitable, but you cannot tell why, and you cannot scale it with confidence.
Check 07
Match types and campaign roles
Where: Bulk operations file, campaigns tab.
Each campaign should have one job. Auto and broad campaigns find new terms. Exact match campaigns spend on proven ones. When one campaign mixes match types and products, budget flows to whatever is cheapest to click, and the report cannot tell you which target earned the sale.
Check daily budgets too. A campaign that runs out of budget by mid-afternoon misses every shopper for the rest of the day, including the ones most likely to buy.
What good looks like: Discovery and performance campaigns separated, and your best campaigns in budget all day.
Check 08
Placement performance
Where: Campaign manager → campaign → Placements, or the placement report.
Top of search, rest of search and product pages convert very differently. Many accounts run with no placement adjustments at all. If top of search converts at twice the rate of product pages, a bid adjustment there is often the cheapest improvement in the account.
What good looks like: Placement modifiers set from your own data, reviewed monthly.
Check 09
Product grouping inside ad groups
Where: Bulk operations file, product ad rows.
When several unrelated products share an ad group, Amazon chooses which one to show, and it does not always choose your best converter. Group products that share keywords and similar prices. Keep a separate ad group for any product with a very different conversion rate so its numbers do not blend into the rest.
What good looks like: Each ad group holds products that a shopper would see as close substitutes.
The money
The last three checks decide whether the account is profitable and whether advertising is growing the business or just reporting sales it would have had anyway.
Check 10
Bids against break-even ACoS
Where: Your own unit economics, and the targeting report.
Break-even ACoS is your margin before advertising: selling price minus product cost, Amazon fees and shipping, divided by selling price. A product that sells for $40 and costs $26 all in has a break-even ACoS of 35%. Any target running above that loses money on every sale it makes, unless you are deliberately buying rank on a launch.
Work this out per ASIN. It is rarely the same across a catalogue, and a single account-wide ACoS goal hides the products being run at a loss.
What good looks like: A known break-even ACoS for each ASIN, and targets above it only by decision.
Check 11
TACoS over the last three to six months
Where: Ad spend from the Advertising console divided by total sales from the Business Report, month by month.
TACoS, total advertising cost of sale, is ad spend divided by all sales, paid and organic. It is the number we govern accounts by, because it shows what ACoS cannot. If ACoS is falling while TACoS rises, advertising is taking credit for sales you would have made organically. If TACoS falls while total sales hold or grow, the ads are building organic rank and the business is getting healthier.
What good looks like: Flat or falling TACoS while total sales grow.
Check 12
Where spend sits against where sales come from
Where: Advertised product report, sorted by spend.
List your ASINs by share of ad spend and share of total sales. In many accounts a few products drive most of the revenue, and spend has drifted toward something else: a new launch, a product with a low cost per click, or a product someone stopped looking at. Bring the two lists back in line, or write down why they differ.
What good looks like: Ad spend weighted toward the products that make the money, with exceptions you chose on purpose.
What to fix first
Fix in this order. Listing problems from Part 1 come first, because they cap the return on everything else. Then search term waste from Part 2, because it is fast and the savings show up within a week. Structure and money checks follow, and they compound over months.
If Part 1 came back clean and the account still is not profitable, the problem is almost always in checks 4, 10 and 11. If Part 1 came back poor, hold budgets where they are until the listing clears the Conversion Gate.
Common questions
How often should I audit my Amazon PPC account?
Search terms weekly, the full checklist monthly, and always before you raise budgets. The weekly search term pass is where most of the money is. The monthly audit catches slower problems such as a falling conversion rate or TACoS creeping up while ACoS looks fine.
What is a good ACoS on Amazon?
There is no universal number. A good ACoS is one below your break-even ACoS, which is your margin before ad spend. A product with a 35% margin can run a 25% ACoS profitably; a product with a 20% margin cannot. Judge the account on TACoS over time, because it shows whether advertising is growing the whole business or just buying sales you would have made anyway.
What reports do I need for an Amazon PPC audit?
Four: the Sponsored Products search term report (last 60 days), the Business Report by child ASIN, the advertised product report, and a bulk operations file for campaign structure. The placement report is useful for check 8. All of them download from Seller Central and the Advertising console.
Should I use an audit template, a tool, or hire an agency?
A template works if you have the time to go through thousands of rows by hand. Our free audit tool automates check 4 in about a minute. An agency audit makes sense when the checklist shows problems on the listing itself, because those take creative and catalogue work to fix, and no amount of bid adjustment will solve them.
Skip the spreadsheet for check 4. It costs nothing.
Upload your search term report and the tool returns the spend going to terms that have never converted, with the list to negate.
- No account, no card, no signup wall
- We never ask for Seller Central credentials
- About a minute from upload to result
Want the other eleven checks done for you? Book an audit.
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