Amazon PPC Audit Checklist (2026): 25 Checks to Run Before You Touch a Single Bid

Most Amazon PPC accounts we open for the first time have the same shape: one auto campaign from 2024 still running, bids that were set from Amazon's suggestions and never revisited, no negatives, and an ACoS number nobody has compared with the margin. The temptation is to start moving bids on day one. Do not. Bids are the last thing to change, because until you know the structure, the budgets and the listings, a bid change just moves the same problem to a different keyword.

This is the 25-check audit we run on every Amazon.in account before we touch anything, grouped into eight areas. Each check says what to look at, what it usually finds and what a finding is worth in rupees. It assumes you know the basics from our Amazon ads guide for Indian sellers. Amazon's own library pages are the source for how the tools behave; rupee figures are from the accounts we manage and are marked as illustrations, not benchmarks. Checked 25 September 2026.

What do you need before starting the audit?

Three downloads, all from the advertising console: the search term report for the last 60 days, the placement report for the same period, and the campaign report by day for the last 90 days. Add one sheet from your own books: margin after Amazon fees for every advertised ASIN, which gives you the break-even ACoS. Amazon's guide is explicit that ACoS must be lower than your profit margin to make money; our Amazon seller fees guide covers how to get to that margin. Without the margin sheet, an audit can tell you where spend goes but not whether it is wrong.

The 25-point checklist

What does each area of the audit tell you?

Account (checks 1 to 3)

Boring but decisive. If the ad account sits in someone else's login, the audit findings cannot be acted on until access is fixed. The GST check is money left on the table: an account spending Rs 1,00,000 a month is invoiced Rs 18,000 of GST that a registered seller can claim as input credit.

Structure (checks 4 to 7)

Structure decides whether the reports mean anything. With twenty ASINs in one ad group, a search term that converted might have converted for any of them, so you cannot move it into an exact campaign for the right product. Duplicate targets are subtler: the same keyword in three campaigns means Amazon picks one to serve and the other two show no data, which looks like they "do not work". Our campaign structure guide has a template.

Keywords (checks 8 to 11)

The search term report is the most valuable file in the audit. Sort by spend, filter to zero orders, and you will usually find the single largest saving in the account. On a Rs 60,000 a month account it is common to find Rs 8,000 to Rs 15,000 going to terms that have never produced an order in 60 days. Those become negative keywords. Then sort by orders and check which converting terms are still only served through auto or broad, where you do not control the bid.

Bids (checks 12 to 14)

Amazon's dynamic bidding guide states that up-and-down bidding can raise a bid by up to 100%. On a discovery campaign, where you do not yet know which clicks convert, that is paying double for uncertainty. The bid-vs-margin check is the audit's core arithmetic: maximum affordable CPC equals price x break-even ACoS x conversion rate. For a Rs 899 product with a 35% break-even ACoS and 7% conversion, that is Rs 22. Any keyword averaging Rs 30 a click is losing money on every order it produces, however good its ACoS looks in isolation.

Budgets (checks 15 to 17)

Amazon's budget guide says that once a campaign spends its daily budget, ads are not eligible to show until the budget resets at midnight. If your profit campaign is out of budget by 2 pm every day, you are buying the morning and giving the evening to a competitor. Amazon's daily budget policy also allows spend up to 100% above the average daily budget on any one day, averaged over the month, which is why check 16 compares monthly totals rather than daily ones.

Placements (checks 18 and 19)

The placement report often shows the opposite of what people assume. Top of search converts best for brand and exact terms; product pages convert best for many generic terms, at a third of the CPC. A placement adjustment stacked with up-and-down bidding multiplies the base bid twice; that is the Rs 12 becoming Rs 72 in check 19.

Listings (checks 20 to 22)

An ad can only show for the featured offer, in stock, on an unsuppressed listing. Amazon's own guidance on the featured offer lists price, delivery, account health and stock as the deciding factors. A listing that lost the Buy Box to a reseller in week two of the month wasted the spend that followed. Conversion rate is the check that most often reframes the whole audit: at 3% conversion no bid is profitable, and the fix is images, price and reviews, not PPC.

Reporting (checks 23 to 25)

TACoS over six months tells you whether ads are building organic rank or replacing it. And a routine matters more than any single finding: an account with a weekly search term review and a fortnightly bid review stays clean; one without it is back to the same state in a quarter. That routine is what our ads management clients are paying for.

What is a finding worth in rupees?

An illustration from the shape of accounts we see, not a promise. A brand spending Rs 80,000 a month at a 38% ACoS on products with a 30% break-even is losing money on ads. A typical first-pass audit finds: Rs 10,000 of monthly spend on non-converting terms (check 8), a Rs 6,000 a month top-of-search adjustment that the placement report does not justify (check 18), and Rs 5,000 on two ASINs that were out of stock for ten days (check 20). Removing those three, with no bid changes, takes spend to Rs 59,000 and, since none of it produced orders, ACoS to about 28%. Now, and only now, bids are worth adjusting.

FAQ

How often should you audit an Amazon PPC account? A full 25-point audit quarterly, a search term review weekly, and bids fortnightly. Structure rarely needs changing more than twice a year.

What is the first thing to look at in an Amazon ads audit? The search term report sorted by spend with zero orders, against the break-even ACoS for each ASIN. That pairing finds most of the wasted spend in an hour.

Is a high ACoS always bad? No. A launch or a brand-defence campaign can run above break-even on purpose. It is bad when it is unintentional or when TACoS is rising with it.

Why do my campaigns run out of budget by noon? The daily budget is smaller than the clicks available at your bid. Either raise the budget on campaigns that convert or lower bids so the same money buys more of the day.

Can I audit ads if I do not know my margins? Partly. You can find waste and structure problems, but you cannot say which keywords are profitable. Build the margin sheet first.

Does Blooprint do this audit for free? Yes. We run the checklist on your account, send the findings and tell you what to fix first, whether or not you hire us. Book the free audit.

Getting the audit done

Twenty-five checks is a morning's work if you have the reports and the margin sheet, and a week if you do not. If you would rather have an Amazon Ads Advanced Partner run it, act on the findings and then manage bids, negatives and budgets every week, see our marketplace ads management service. The audit is free and comes with the findings in writing; you can take them to anyone.