Audit principle: establish data quality and account constraints before diagnosing performance. A recommendation based on incomplete attribution, the wrong marketplace, or an expired budget assumption can do more harm than no recommendation.
Before you begin
Record the marketplace, advertiser profile, currency, account objective, reporting window, attribution status, monthly budget, target ACOS or ROAS, and any campaigns in a protected launch period. Do not combine markets or currencies into one unlabelled total.
- 01
Confirm the date range and allow for attribution delay.
- 02
Reconcile spend, attributed sales, orders, ACOS, ROAS, CPC, CTR, and conversion rate.
- 03
Separate marketplace, profile, currency, and campaign-type performance.
- 04
Compare daily and monthly spend with approved account limits.
- 05
Identify profitable campaigns repeatedly running out of budget.
- 06
Flag projected monthly overspend before raising any budget.
- 07
Review campaigns with spend but no attributed orders.
- 08
Find high-click search terms with insufficient conversion evidence.
- 09
Separate brand, generic, competitor, and product-targeting traffic.
- 10
Check whether broad or automatic discovery terms should graduate to exact targeting.
- 11
Check whether harvested terms were negated in discovery campaigns where appropriate.
- 12
Find duplicated keywords or product targets competing across structures.
- 13
Compare bids with conversion rate, order value, margin, and target ACOS.
- 14
Review placement modifiers separately from base bids.
- 15
Look for abrupt bid changes and repeated edits within short windows.
- 16
Confirm launch campaigns are not judged by mature-campaign thresholds.
- 17
Review inactive, rejected, or non-serving ads and targets.
- 18
Check advertised ASIN eligibility, inventory, price, and Buy Box conditions where data is available.
- 19
Verify every automated action has a reason, old value, new value, and result.
- 20
Confirm campaign, budget, keyword, and action-level permissions still match the owner’s intent.
- 21
Write the three highest-impact actions with evidence, confidence, risk, and an owner.
How to prioritize the findings
Rank each opportunity using expected impact, confidence, urgency, and risk. Budget overspend or a broken connection may be urgent even if the revenue opportunity is smaller. A high-impact bid change based on two clicks has low confidence and should wait for more evidence.
What a useful audit delivers
The final output should not be a long list of red flags. Produce a concise account summary, a prioritized queue of actions, the data supporting each action, the person responsible, the approval requirement, and a date for reassessment.