The Amazon Advertising Audit Checklist

The following is a series of questions to help you to judge the Amazon advertising performance more clearly.

They’re not in any specific order. Your task is to select those areas of inquiry that will aid you in achieving your goals for the campaign.

1. Is ACos above target?

Based on the time of the campaign or ad group, the ACoS will need to meet the targets or be moving towards the goal.

Actions/Areas to Analyse:

Stop bids for high-quality keywords, products, or ads groups (start with the lowest bid and work your way up; do not pause an ad group without first determining if the products or keywords within the group are meeting or are moving toward the ACoS goal)

The trend is important do not stop any action until you can tell if you’re performance is trending towards your target ACoS. If you are on the right track then you might be able to allow the campaigns time to improve their effectiveness.

Check out SellerApp’s Amazon PPC audit tool to perform campaign audits.

2: Are Campaigns Targeting Your Expected Keywords?

Automatic targeting should result in bids for terms derived from the search results. But this isn’t always the case. The expected keywords might not be present and you could be missing profitable and relevant traffic.

Actions/Areas to Analyse:

Review the Search Terms Report. Does it match the keywords you wish or would like that the product will appear for?

If your desired keywords don’t appear, consider creating new ad groups that employ targeted strategies that are manually created.

3: How Competitive are Brand and Product Ad Spaces?

Adspend must be either incremental or defensive.

This occurs when other companies have bid on the same brand or product keywords or when a seller has an ad for the same product, but with another ASIN!

Actions/Areas to Analyse:

What are the other brands/sellers bidding for the brand’s name?

If there is no other bidder, look into pausing ads. These advertisements aren’t an incremental or defensive move.

If other buyers are bidding for the brand term, what can you do to safeguard sales? Is the price competitive? is your advertisement in the no. one slot? If not, you should consider raising the bid price or daily budget.

If the total number of people who search for the search terms for product names is not high, then adjusting the price or investing in other initiatives may not yield an ROI.

4: Are Products Being Advertised Against Irrelevant Keywords?

The product’s ad appears against a term that isn’t pertinent to the product

Actions/Areas to Analyse:

Introduce new negative keywords to the ad group or the campaign. It is important to remember Negative keywords can be defined in the context of the campaign OR at the level of an ad group.

To add negative keywords to the campaign level, head to Campaign

Manager>Campaign>Negative Keywords

To include negative keywords at the level of head of the ad group in the Campaign

Manager>Campaign>Ad Group>Negative Targeting

Make sure you tighten the match type for negative matches. It is possible that you initially selected broad and phrase match types to make the net wider (this is a good early-stage strategy).

Naturally, phrases that are broad and match type can cause some waste while they search for new keywords.

If search terms that are not relevant appear in your search term report and you want to reduce the match type to phrases and precise or precise will improve the situation.

5: Are Ad Groups Duplicating Keywords?

Multiple ad groups are bidding on the same keyword, using identical products. It could be legitimate to target one keyword using multiple products.

Actions/Areas to Analyse:

Include new negative keywords in any of your campaigns, or groups.

Stop ads that duplicate the keyword targeting of other advertising groups.

6: Are Ad Groups or Campaigns Under-Spending?

The ad group or campaign spending is always under the budget limit you set.

Actions/Areas to Analyse:

Are there any deliverability (losing the purchase box, out of stock, etc.) issues? If you’re losing your buy-box due to price competition, then you need to outdo or beat your competition.

Do you think you finding that the CPC prices are too high? And is the current ACoS justification for a CPC bid increase? If you’re able to meet both of these requirements, then increase the bids, and keep an eye on growth in sales.

Does the budget not meet the requirements for the volume of searches? This is often the case with branding campaigns. 

There’s only a certain amount of demand and you may have in the beginning over-estimated traffic for your brand. If this happens, consider shifting your budget to other campaigns.

Remember that you need to set your brand’s daily expenditure at a rate that is at least a little higher than the actual daily spending. This is done in the event there is a surge in demand for brands.

7: Are all Relevant Products Included in Ad Groups

It is possible to sell multiple items that could be promoted using the same search terms. This is typically the situation with brand-specific ad campaigns or even product variations.

The ad group or campaign could take advantage of all 4 advertising spaces for sponsored products to increase traffic. This improves customer choices and increases the likelihood of a product being discovered.

Actions/Areas to Analyse:

You can add more products to an ad group. To access this option, navigate to the ad group, and then click the yellow icon within the charts and performance table.

After that, you’ll be able to see the pop-up that displays the selection of products.

8: Are Campaign Bids Weighted to More Profitable Placements?

Sponsored product advertisements will be displayed in 3 ad space

• Search results at the top (first page)
• Product page
• Rest of the search

The general rule is that ‘Top of search generally performs better than other search results.

Actions/Areas to Analyse:

You can weigh bids in favor of the more efficient advertisement with a higher percentage of bid adjustments. This is only available to campaigns.

What is considered to be better performing’ is contingent upon the extent to which you’re optimizing your strategy for higher sales or a lower level of ACoS.

This signals Amazon’s algorithm to focus a greater percentage of its budget on higher-performing advertising placements.

9: Are all Products or Keywords Delivering Impressions?

Ad groups with a high volume of search terms for customers (not keywords) or products could be ineffective against search terms that perform poorly or products.

Like many other advertising platforms, Amazon trains the ad algorithm to make more spending in lucrative areas. In general, this is an excellent thing, but in the initial stages of a campaign, when you’re in learning mode, you’ll want to provide each product or search term the chance to produce results.

Actions/Areas to Analyse:

Divide the ad group into multiple groups of ads to target under-served products or keywords for search.

Or, don’t alter the format, but do reduce the number of negative keywords to minimize wastage and free up the budget for the remainder of the ads group.

10: Which Products Perform Better Within a Campaign or Ad Group?

The budget for an advertising campaign should be adjusted for the best return. Certain products are bound to appeal to a wider audience.

Actions/Areas to Analyse:

Are more efficient products more relevant to specific keywords?

Are there differences in the rate of conversion between different products? Could we improve the listing’s content by adding copy with more relevance to terms that are driving traffic?

There are times when you can’t control the reason why certain products perform poorly compared to other ads in the group. It could be because one product is more expensive or generally more popular.

In these cases, think about restructuring campaigns and/or advertising groups to allocate spending on more profitable products. This could involve splitting into different campaigns or advertising groups.

11: Is Driving Traffic to our Brand Store Increasing Basket Size?

Introducing new customers to the brand store and a complete range of products can increase the size of your basket. Advertising sponsored by brands is the sole method to bring customers to the store through paid advertising. 

To be able to run Sponsored Brand advertisements, you must be registered on the Brand Registry.

Actions/Areas to Analyse:

Are you able to find a bigger than average basket size in advertisements that direct customers to the store of the brand?

What is the size of this basket compared to ads for the same keywords?

Does the performance of the basket’s size alter based on the keywords group (brand generic, brand competitor, brand)?