A practical 12-point audit for any Amazon Ads account: zero-sale search terms, duplicate keywords, budget-capped winners, placement leaks, and more — with the exact thresholds to use.
Most Amazon ad accounts leak 15–30% of spend in ways a one-hour audit can find. Here's the 12-point checklist we run, with the thresholds that separate signal from noise. You need the last 60–90 days of data and the search term report.
1. Zero-sale search terms. Search terms with ≥15 clicks and 0 orders over 60 days. Off-intent ones get negative-exact'd immediately. This single check usually finds the most money.
2. Zero-sale keywords. Same threshold at the keyword level. Before pausing, check 90 days too — attribution lag and slow categories can make 30-day windows lie.
3. High-ACOS keywords with real spend. Keywords spending ≥$10/month at more than 1.5× your break-even ACOS. These usually need bid cuts (start with 20–30%), not pauses — paused keywords lose their history.
4. Duplicate keywords. The same keyword text + match type live in multiple campaigns bids against itself in the same auctions and splits its sales history. Keep the copy that earns; pause the rest.
5. Budget-capped winners. Campaigns at ≥90% budget utilization with ACOS below target are being throttled mid-day while profitable demand still exists. Raising these budgets is the cheapest growth available.
6. Underbid winners. Keywords converting well below target ACOS with modest impressions — they have headroom. Raise bids 15–25% and re-check in two weeks.
7. Unharvested search terms. Terms with ≥2 orders and good ACOS still living only inside auto/broad campaigns. Promote them to exact match with a deliberate bid, and negate at the source. (Full harvesting guide.)
8. Placement imbalances. Pull the placement report. If top-of-search converts at half your average ACOS, you're underweighted there; if product pages bleed, cut that boost. Most accounts have never touched these settings.
9. Auto campaigns with no negatives. An auto campaign that's run 90+ days with an empty negative list has been paying for every bad query Amazon ever guessed. Seed it from the zero-sale terms in check #1.
10. Brand term coverage. Search your own brand name. If competitors own the top slot, you're losing shoppers who searched for you. Defensive exact campaigns on brand terms are cheap insurance.
11. One-campaign-does-everything. A single campaign mixing discovery keywords, proven winners, and brand defense can't be budgeted or bid coherently. Separate by job: discovery / performance / defense.
12. Stale bids. Sort keywords by "last bid change." Bids untouched for 6+ months in a moving auction are wrong by definition — in one direction or the other.
Add up: wasted spend found (checks 1–4) + estimated capped opportunity (checks 5–7). In our experience auditing real accounts, the total routinely lands between 15% and 30% of monthly spend.
Or skip the spreadsheet: AdsMachine's free audit runs the waste and opportunity checks against your last 30 days automatically — connect with Amazon OAuth, get the numbers in minutes, no credit card.
AdsMachine analyzes every campaign, keyword, and search term in your account each night — you just approve the plan. Start with a free audit of your wasted spend.
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