How Can An Amazon Campaign Audit Help My Business?

June 21, 2023
By The Badger

Campaign auditing is a staple in Amazon advertising. You must audit your campaigns to diagnose areas that need improvements. But, how you carry out your campaign audit could make the difference between creating profitable campaigns and burning through your ad budget.

In this blog post, Michael Erickson Facchin from Ad Badger and Mina Elias from Trivium Group explain how to conduct a proper Amazon campaign audit to improve your Amazon business.

Let’s get auditing!

Everything This Article Covers

Add a header to begin generating the table of contents

How Do I Do My Own Amazon Campaign Audit?

Mina’s approach to Amazon campaign auditing is looking at a campaign from a macro view, then a micro view.

The micro view comprises auditing things like the number of keywords, ad groups, campaigns, et cetera. The macro view covers things like conversion rate, inventory level, and the relationship between ad spend and traffic.

Next, you’ll need to assess critical campaign metrics like ad spend, sessions, cost per session, and total sales to establish a daily or weekly trend. This data will give you a clear overview of a campaign’s performance over time, making it easier to diagnose the problem.

Let’s say your ad spend is flat, and your sessions are decreasing. That means you’re losing organic rank. You spend the same amount of money, but fewer people see your ad. And if your CTR is decreasing, your competition is improving compared to you, and shoppers are leaning more towards the competition.

Once you’ve identified the problem, you can pinpoint the areas needing improvement. For example, you can improve your organic rank so your impressions improve. You can also do competitor analysis to find areas where the competition is outshining you. It could be the pricing, reviews, listing optimization, main image, or campaign structure.

Ad Badger

Amazon PPC Software
Made by Amazon PPC-ers.
Made for Amazon PPC-ers.

Book a call now.

What Timeframes Are Most Valuable In An Amazon Campaign Audit?

When conducting an Amazon campaign audit, it is crucial to recognize that past performance does not guarantee future results.

Relying too heavily on historical data may not provide valuable insights for auditing your campaign today. Instead of looking at past data, you can look at trends to determine how a product reacts to an action. For example, how did the conversions react to campaign scaling? By carefully auditing and adjusting your campaigns, you can effectively optimize for profitability or scale for greater revenue and market reach.

Going back 14 days should give you enough data for an accurate campaign performance audit. Depending on the campaign performance, you can decide to optimize for profit.

This would mean adding keywords that are spending money with no sales as negatives. Alternatively, you can scale the campaign as is. This would involve increasing your ad spend, increasing your campaign budget, spending more on performing keywords, and creating more campaigns. Basically, invest more money in your Amazon campaigns, get more sessions, and see if this translates to more revenue. Of course, this would also have organic rank benefits, adding to increased sales revenue.

Once you audit, it boils down to either optimizing for profit to get rid of stuff that isn’t working or scaling because you can’t squeeze more profit from the campaign as is. Also, your inventory plays a role in your campaign performance because it starts performing worse if you have less than 30 days of stock. This makes sense because a highly converting campaign and low inventory would result in fulfillment issues.

What’s The Most Common Problem Found In Amazon Campaign Audits?

According to Mina, the most common problem found in Amazon campaign audits is having too many keywords. A campaign stuffed with keywords creates too much room for ad spend wastage on non-converting keywords. Avoid keyword dumping.

Bad campaign structures are another common problem in Amazon advertising. Too many ad groups and low budgets create a lousy campaign structure that negatively impacts profitability.

6 Steps to Successfully Complete Your Own Amazon Campaign Audit

An Amazon campaign audit involves six crucial steps to evaluate and optimize performance. If you want to do a walkthrough of your own campaigns, follow these steps.

The Six Steps Every Amazon Campaign Audit Needs:

Housekeeping

The first step when doing an Amazon campaign audit is housekeeping. Here, you’re assessing the ad groups, keywords per campaign, and campaign budget.Keep an eye out for campaigns with too many ad groups, too many keywords per campaign, and low budgets. These are the areas that will need improvements.

Identifying Goals

The second step when doing an Amazon campaign audit is identifying your goals. Depending on the campaign performance, is your goal to scale or optimize for profit? Your goal here will determine your actions because optimizing for profit and scaling have very different procedures.

Portfolio Assessment

The third step of doing an Amazon campaign audit is portfolio assessment.

Portfolio assessment is an important step of an Amazon campaign audit because it allows businesses to evaluate and analyze their advertising efforts’ overall performance and effectiveness on the Amazon platform.

Are you separating one portfolio per parent ASIN? You can separate campaigns per child ASIN, but we don’t recommend it since all the child ASINS send traffic to the same parent ASIN. It’s more efficient to run the ads to a parent ASIN so you can evaluate the ad performance at the parent ASIN level.

Campaign Name Audit

The fourth step of an Amazon campaign audit is the campaign name audit. Your campaign names should make it easy to search and find individual campaigns. For example, if it’s an auto campaign, you should have an identifier in every auto campaign that helps you search and find all auto campaigns.

Typically, a strong Amazon campaign name needs the following:

A product code easier than the ASIN to help you search campaigns by product
Campaign type, e.g., close match, compliment, substitute, broad phrase, exact, e.t.c
Purpose of the campaign, e.g., ranking campaign
Keyword source
Any other identifiers, e.g., auto campaign

Budget Audit

The fifth step when doing an Amazon campaign audit is the budget audit. A campaign with a low budget is probably hurting performance.

Your budget adjustments here depend on whether you’re scaling or optimizing for profit. If you’re scaling, you’ll need to increase the budget for any campaign with a 25% ACOS or less. If you’re optimizing for profit, you must reduce the budget incrementally while keeping everything else the same.

Next, click on the campaigns and see how many ad groups you have there. If your campaign has multiple ad groups, your ad spend is getting split unevenly among different ad groups. You’ll have to pause non-performing ad groups to channel more ad spend to the ad groups that are getting results. You then need to look at the keywords and pause those that haven’t generated sales in 30 days.

Once you’ve cleaned up your ad groups and keywords and achieved a good campaign structure, assessing your bid by placements is time. If you’re scaling, you’ll increase the bid by placements for any campaign performing well. If you’re optimizing for profit, you need to reduce the bids by placements that have a lousy ROAS.

Search Term Audit

The sixth step of an Amazon campaign audit is a search term audit. We recommend downloading the Search Query Performance Report.

If you’re scaling, identify unique search terms with a 1% – 25% ACOS and more than one sale in the last 30 days. Use these keywords to set up new campaigns, up to five keywords in a campaign, and one ad group per campaign. Group these keywords in similar search volumes and use the CPC you were using per search term.

If you’re optimizing for profit, identify any profitable campaign and increase the bid by placements by five cents to boost visibility. Also, lower the bids for anything with a high ACOS and anything costing you money and not making sales.

What Do I Do If A Shopper Clicks All My Ads on Amazon and Only Buys One Thing?

Pro tip: Something to keep in mind, if you’re running different types of ads, one shopper could click all your ad types and cost you more ad spend, yet that counts as one session. This will be a maximum of one conversion, with ad spend across more than one ad type.

If you’re optimizing for profit, you’ll need to identify the ads with a high sponsored rank and lower the bids there. The drop in ad spend shouldn’t cause a drop in revenue. If it does, you can raise the bids back up. If it doesn’t, you save some ad spend.

Test this on all the ad types you’re running.

Get Started With An Amazon Campaign Audit

Amazon campaign audit may be the missing piece needed to get your campaigns firing on all cylinders. After reading this post, you can tell that many moving parts come together to create an effective Amazon campaign audit strategy.

Instead of pulling your hair trying to audit your campaigns, why not let us do the heavy lifting and audit your campaign for you? Our highly skilled team will audit your account and provide a clear roadmap to scale your campaigns. With over 300+ campaign audits per year, you can be assured that we will go through your account with a fine-tooth comb to help your campaigns reach their full potential.