That’s exactly why we created the 10-Step Campaign Audit Template, available for free in Canva. It’s the same framework we use at AdLabs to evaluate account performance and identify immediate areas for optimization.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the 10 essential steps to audit your campaigns — from analyzing total sales performance to uncovering wasted ad spend, rebalancing budgets, and scaling what’s working.

Whether you’re an Amazon agency, a brand owner, or an independent seller, this system will help you evaluate performance with precision, build a repeatable audit process, and ultimately, drive more efficient growth.

1️⃣ Total Sales Performance

There are two key areas to evaluate when analyzing total sales performance:

1️⃣ Product Level Performance
2️⃣ Catalog Budget Distribution

Product Level Performance

Most advertisers look only at top-level metrics — Total Sales, Ad Spend, and TACoS — but that only tells part of the story. The real insights live at the SKU or Parent ASIN level.

When you drill down by product, you can identify under-performers that drain spend or hidden winners that deserve more budget.

How to analyze product-level performance:

Download the Detail Pages Sales and Traffic by Child Item report in Seller Central → Business Reports.
For vendors, download the Retail Analytics Sales report by ASIN in Vendor Central.
From the Amazon Ads console, pull a Sponsored Products Advertised Product Report for the same timeframe.
Combine the reports using a VLOOKUP (or Pivot Table) to see each ASIN’s total sales vs. ad spend and ad sales.

From there, identify:

ASINs with high total ACOS (over target) → scale back spend.
ASINs under-advertised but generating sales → increase support.
ASINs with no ads but meaningful sales → new advertising opportunities.

You’re looking for a balance between ad spend contribution and total sales contribution across your catalog.

Catalog Budget Distribution

When auditing performance, analyze how your ad spend is distributed across ASINs. Many accounts suffer from imbalanced budget allocation — a single ASIN absorbs most of the budget, while others are ignored.

Ideally, your ad spend share should align with each product’s sales contribution. This ensures your top-performing ASINs get proper support and underperformers don’t waste spend.

Identify ASINs that are:

Overspending relative to sales share → optimize bids or budgets.
Underspending despite strong sales share → allocate more ad investment.

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2️⃣ Campaign Placements

This is one of the most common inefficiencies we uncover — and one of the fastest to fix.

Analyzing placement performance can reveal major optimization opportunities almost overnight.

Here's What to Look For:

Compare Conversion Rates (CVR) and ACOS across placements (Top of Search, Product Pages, Rest of Search).
Top of Search usually delivers the highest CVR and best ROAS.

If you find that Product Pages are consuming too much spend with low CVR or high ACOS, reduce bid multipliers there. Redirect that spend toward higher-performing placements.

Goal: Achieve a balanced ACOS across all three placements. For example, if your target ACOS is 30%, you should be close to that on every placement.

If Product Pages show an ACOS far higher than target, that’s immediate wasted spend you can start to recapture.

3️⃣ Bid Management

When it comes to Amazon PPC, everything boils down to math.

We classify every keyword into one of four segments:

High ACOS: Exceeding your target ACOS
High Spend, Non-Converting: High spend with no sales
Low ACOS: Under target ACOS (opportunities to scale up)
Low Visibility: Keywords with low click volume compared to average clicks per conversion (aCTC)

By categorizing your keywords this way, you can quickly see where your spend is going — and where inefficiencies lie.

Focus on reducing spend in High ACOS and Non-Converting segments while scaling bids on Low ACOS performers.

🔹 Pro Tip: Evaluate bids in tandem with placement data. Tools like AdLabs simplify this by helping you visualize placement-level bid efficiency at scale.

4️⃣ Search Term Reports

Search Term Reports are goldmines of insight — but only if you know what to look for.

Use them to:

Evaluate tactic allocations (Brand vs. Non-Brand).
Identify brand spend leaks coming through non-brand campaigns.
Find irrelevant or non-performing terms to negate.
Harvest top-performing terms into exact targeting.

Tactic Allocations

Check how much spend is coming through brand vs. non-brand terms.

Over-indexing on brand terms can inflate results without driving incremental growth.

Branded Spend Leak

Sometimes brand keywords sneak into non-brand campaigns.

These distort performance metrics — isolate and clean them up.

Irrelevant Search Terms

Look for high-spend, low-conversion search terms. Negate them to cut wasted spend immediately.

AdLabs also offers an n-Gram analysis feature to help you spot non-converting phrases across your search terms.

You can learn more about that here.

Harvesting Opportunities

Find high-converting search terms buried in Auto or Broad campaigns and move them into Exact Match to maximize control and scalability.

5️⃣ Tactic Allocations

Your targeting mix can make or break your growth.

Analyze spend distribution across:

Brand Defense (protecting your brand name)
Non-Brand Keywords (new customer acquisition)
Competitor Targeting (stealing market share)

We generally recommend:

90–95% of spend → Non-Brand + Competitor targeting
5–10% of spend → Brand Defense

Non-Brand and Competitor campaigns drive incremental growth, while Brand Defense maintains presence but adds limited new customer value.

🔹 Use Top-of-Search Impression Share as a KPI for Brand Defense. Aim for 90%+ on key branded terms.

6️⃣ Campaign Structure

Your campaign structure is the backbone of your account.

Disorganization here leads to poor control, inconsistent data, and scaling issues.

Audit your campaigns for:

Consistent naming conventions (e.g., [Product][TargetType][MatchType])
Segmentation of goals (research, scaling, brand defense)
Clear control mechanisms across campaigns/ad groups

Want a shortcut? Check out our free Campaign Naming Generator to instantly clean up your structure.

You can learn more about what campaign structure you should use and more info on the topic here.

7️⃣ Targeting Mix (Auto vs: Broad vs: Exact)

Your match-type mix reveals how well you’re balancing discovery vs. control.

Auto, Broad & Phrase → Great for keyword discovery.
Phrase & Exact → Ideal for scaling proven performers.

For mature accounts, aim for 50%+ of spend on Exact Match. If you’re below that, audit Auto/Broad campaigns to identify conversion-driving search terms that can be harvested into Exact.

Depending on where you are within an individual product or account, whether you’re just launching or optimizing for profit, you may favor more research tactics to identify top keywords and begin scaling, so at times it can make sense to have a higher allocation to research-oriented match types.

8️⃣ Budget Management

Strong performance doesn’t matter if your best campaigns are capping out at 11AM.

Audit steps:

Sort campaigns by spend in Budgets tab of the Amazon Ads UI.
Make sure ACOS is also added to the table.
Look for campaigns hitting target ACOS but going out of budget early.

Opening up budgets on high-performing campaigns ensures you capture more profitable traffic without changing bids.

This simple step can unlock immediate sales growth with minimal risk.

9️⃣ Ad Type Utilization

Amazon offers multiple ad types — Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Sponsored TV.

Each ad format plays a unique role in the customer journey.

If your brand has strong creatives (videos, imagery, Storefront), consider expanding beyond Sponsored Products with the following allocation targets:

Sponsored Products: 85–95% of budget
Sponsored Brands: 5–15%
Sponsored Display: 0–10%

Ensure every creative features strong visuals, headlines, and you’re occupying all possible product & image slots when applicable. Avoid generic headlines or underutilized ad formats.

🔟 Dayparting Opportunities

Dayparting lets you control when your ads show — increasing bids during high-performance hours and reducing during low-performance times.

Instead of just following total sales volume, we recommend optimizing by RPC (Revenue Per Click). This focuses on profitability, scaling bids when CVR is higher, and reducing when CVR falls.

Using hourly performance data, identify peak hours with high RPC and increase bids then, while throttling spend during low-efficiency times.

Create a copy of the Dayparting Calculator linked up below, and watch this free training tutorial to get an in-depth overview of how to effectively use dayparting, uncover hidden opportunities in your hourly data, and set up your dayparting schedules to maximize performance impact.

Create a Copy of the FREE Dayparting Calculator

📈 Get the Google Sheet Dayparting Calculator Here

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Auditing your Amazon PPC account doesn’t have to be complicated.

With a structured framework and the right tools, you can systematically uncover inefficiencies, optimize performance, and scale what works.

Start by downloading the 10-Step Amazon PPC Audit Template, apply these steps, and you’ll have a clear roadmap to improve performance immediately.

Then check out Episode #56 of That Amazon Ads Podcast for an in-depth walkthrough of this system — available now on YouTube.

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Andrew Bailiff

Co-Founder & CMO at AdLabs

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The 10-Step Guide to Auditing Your Amazon PPC Account: Get the Free Template 👇