Amazon PPC Audit Checklist: 20 Checks Before We Change a Bid

Key takeaways: An Amazon PPC audit is a fixed list of checks run in a fixed order, before any change is made. Ours has 20 items across six areas: account setup, structure, targeting, bids and placements, budgets, and the listings the ads send traffic to. The output is a ranked list of what is costing the most, not a list of everything that is imperfect.

A PPC audit is the set of checks that tells you where an account is losing money and in what order to fix it. We run the same 20 checks on every account before we change a single bid, because the most visible problem is rarely the most expensive one. The list below is the one we use, with what each check looks for and the evidence that decides it.

Before you start: what to pull

Every check draws on a small set of exports, all for the last 60 days unless stated: the search term report, the placement report, the campaign and ad group reports, the advertised product report, the Business Reports page for unit session percentage per ASIN, and the inventory dashboard. Pull them once, then work through the list.

The 20 checks

Account setup (checks 1–3)

1. Attribution and ad-type mix. Which ad types are running and what share of spend each takes. An account with 40% of spend in Sponsored Display before Sponsored Products is efficient has its priorities inverted.

2. Brand Registry and eligibility. Whether the brand is enrolled, and whether every advertised ASIN is Buy Box eligible and in stock. Ads on ineligible ASINs quietly stop serving.

3. Portfolio and naming. Whether portfolios exist with budget caps, and whether campaign names tell you the product, purpose and match type without opening them.

Structure (checks 4–7)

4. One job per campaign. Do campaigns mix match types, or mix discovery with proven terms? Mixed campaigns cannot be bid or budgeted correctly.

5. ASINs per ad group. Ad groups with many unrelated ASINs make the search term report unreadable per product.

6. Duplicate targets. The same keyword, same match type, in more than one campaign. The account is bidding against itself.

7. Cross-campaign negatives. Whether promoted terms have been negated in the campaigns they came from. The absence of these negatives is the most common structural leak we find. See Amazon PPC Campaign Structure That Scales With Your Catalog for the pattern.

Targeting (checks 8–11)

8. Zero-order spend share. In the search term report, what percentage of spend sits on terms with no orders. Above a fifth of spend is a clear problem.

9. Negative keyword coverage. Are there negatives at all? Are they recent? A campaign that has run for a year with six negatives has not been maintained.

10. Harvest backlog. Terms with two or more orders in broad or auto that have never been promoted to exact. This is unclaimed efficiency.

11. Brand term leakage. Whether branded searches are showing in non-brand campaigns at non-brand bids.

Bids and placements (checks 12–15)

12. Bid logic. Whether bids vary by keyword performance or sit at a handful of round numbers across the account. Uniform bids mean nobody has set them from data.

13. Placement report by campaign. Where top-of-search cost per order is far worse than other placements, and whether the modifier reflects that.

14. Bidding strategy consistency. Down and up on campaigns with high placement modifiers can double the effective bid without anyone noticing.

15. Launch-era settings on mature products. High modifiers and high bids left over from a launch that finished a year ago.

Budgets (checks 16–17)

16. Out-of-budget campaigns and their ACoS. Which campaigns cap out, and whether they deserve more budget or lower bids.

17. Discovery spend share. Whether auto and broad campaigns take more than about a quarter of spend.

Listings and inventory (checks 18–20)

18. Conversion rate per advertised ASIN. Unit session percentage against the category. Ads cannot fix a page that does not convert; they only make it more expensive.

19. Days of cover. Whether any advertised ASIN is within a few weeks of stock-out at the current run rate. Scaling into a stock-out is the audit finding that stops everything else.

20. Reporting. Whether there is a weekly record of what changed and why. Without it, nothing in the account can be traced back to a decision.

How we rank the findings

The order is deliberate. Inventory and eligibility come first because they can make every other finding irrelevant overnight. Conversion rate comes second because a bid change on a page that does not convert changes spend without changing the ratio. Wasted spend and structure come third because they are the quickest savings once the page can close the sale. Bids come last, which is the opposite of where most people start.

Each finding in the plan carries an estimate of what it costs today, so the plan starts where the money is. That is the scorecard described in A6 · Audit, diagnose, plan — your account health scorecard, and the seven advertising audits behind these checks are in B12 · How we audit your advertising account.

What an audit should not do

It should not produce a list of two hundred observations with no ranking. It should not recommend rebuilding the account from scratch when the structure is broadly sound. And it should not change anything. The audit is a diagnosis; the changes come after, in an order that has been agreed and can be measured.

B12How we audit your advertising accountseven audits that show where money is wasted, which placements convert and how much we expect to save — before we change anything.

A6Audit, diagnose, plan — your account health scorecarda 1–5 score on six levers and a 30/60/90-day plan that starts where it will make the biggest difference.