How to Do an Amazon Account Audit: Marknology's Step-by-Step Approach
Most Amazon sellers don't know exactly what they have.
Not really.
They know their hero SKUs. They know roughly how much they're spending on ads. But ask them for a complete list of every ASIN they're running, every UPC still connected, every category each product currently sits in, and most will pause.
That gap is where the Amazon account audit starts.
Brooklyn Morgans, COO of Marknology and co-host of the Business Therapy podcast, joined the Startup Hustle show to walk through how the team approaches an Amazon audit. Not a surface-level checklist. The actual phased methodology Marknology uses when a brand comes in and wants to understand what's working, what's broken, and what order to fix things.
Here's what that looks like.
Phase one: build the catalog map
Before you touch a listing, before you look at PPC, before you do anything, you need a complete ground-level view of where everything stands.
Brooklyn's first move is to get a full list of the brand's catalog. Every SKU, every ASIN, every UPC code, every category, every review count. Brooklyn walks clients through 30 to 40 different catalog factors on every audit. The specific factors aren't the point. The discipline is.
"I found that a lot of brands don't have a list of all of their SKUs. All of their ASINs, UPC codes, how many reviews each has, what category it's currently in. The first thing is getting a complete ground roadmap of where everything is at."
This sounds basic. It isn't. Most brands have variation orphans, ASINs still tied to discontinued UPCs, products that drifted into the wrong category during one of Amazon's periodic category restructures. Carbonated water used to be shelved under sparkling water. When Amazon reorganized, not every ASIN followed correctly. If no one checked, the brand is now in the wrong neighborhood for every organic search.
The catalog map exists to surface those issues before anything else happens.
Phase two: category and listing health
Once the map is built, Brooklyn and her team go through it SKU by SKU.
Is this in the right category? It sounds obvious. It isn't. You can't answer it by looking at the category name and nodding. You have to run a category analysis, check where competitors are listed, look at the subcategories Amazon is currently indexing, and verify the fit.
Beyond category, the team checks the basics: is the brand name correct, is the right UPC still connected to the product, are there unauthorized third-party sellers on the listing. This layer has to be right before anything else matters.
"You need to make sure that at least the foundation of that listing is correct. It's in the right space and it's created correctly."
Tools like SmartScout, Helium 10, and others come in at this phase, not to rank the listing but to verify it. The question at this stage is structural: is this listing capable of working, or is it sitting on a broken foundation?
Phase three: content and conversion
With the foundation confirmed, the audit moves to listing content.
Main image, secondary images, title, bullets, A+ content. Each gets evaluated not just for quality but for conversion intent. Who is this actually written for? What does the customer believe when they land on this page, and does the content meet them there?
This is also where the 80/20 rule becomes operational. The catalog map from phase one includes sales data. By this point, it's clear which products generate most of the revenue. The audit doesn't treat every SKU equally. Resources go where the return is.
Phase four: advertising review
PPC comes last. Not first.
This is probably the biggest structural difference between Marknology's audit approach and what most brands do on their own. Advertising is almost always the first thing a brand looks at when performance drops. It's the most visible lever. But if the listing is in the wrong category, if the title isn't indexed for the right keywords, if the main image isn't converting, running more ads against a broken listing makes the problem worse, not better.
"That's why the audit is so important. You need to go in phases."
The advertising review looks at campaign structure, keyword coverage, match type distribution, ACoS by segment, and whether the spend allocation reflects where the real revenue opportunity is. But it does that only after the listing itself is confirmed to be working.
This sequencing matters more than most brands realize. A product sitting in the wrong subcategory will have suppressed organic rank for keywords it should own, which distorts every metric in the ad account. The campaign looks like it's underperforming when the problem is upstream. Treating it as a bid problem delays the fix and burns budget in the process.
Common mistakes found in Amazon catalog audits
Most Amazon account audits surface the same categories of problems. The specifics vary by brand, but these failure types appear consistently.
Category misclassification. A product is listed in a parent category when a more specific subcategory exists and would generate better BSR placement and more targeted organic traffic. Bra extenders listed under Lingerie instead of the Bra Extenders node. Supplements sitting in a broad Health category instead of the precise subcategory where buyers actually search. The listing isn't wrong, it's just in the wrong neighborhood. Fixing it requires Amazon casework, but the payoff in organic traffic is direct.
Orphaned variation structure. Child ASINs that were supposed to be grouped under a parent SKU exist as standalone listings. This splits review counts, dilutes sales velocity signals, and fragments the listing's authority. A product with 400 total reviews across 4 orphaned variants competes like a product with 100 reviews instead of one with 400. The fix is variation consolidation, which is among the highest-leverage structural corrections in a catalog.
UPC and product identifier mismatches. When ASINs are created without proper UPC linkage, or when a UPC is applied for exemption during setup, it creates downstream problems: the product can't be received by UPC at a warehouse, re-sellers can spin up competing listings using the correct UPC code, and the catalog becomes harder to manage as it scales. Identifying these early prevents compounding issues later.
Unauthorized seller piggybacks. Third-party sellers listing on your ASIN without authorization. This creates pricing conflicts, potential counterfeit exposure, and customer experience problems the brand has no control over. An Amazon account audit should flag every ASIN with unauthorized sellers, not just the hero SKUs.
Backend keyword fields repeating title copy. A common setup mistake where whoever built the listing filled the backend search terms with the same keywords already in the title. Amazon indexes the title. Duplicating it in the backend wastes the only field where you can add indexing for terms you can't fit in the visible copy. An audit corrects this and adds incremental indexing coverage that the brand may not have had since launch.
What the Amazon account audit produces
At the end of the process, Brooklyn describes it as building an "answer sheet." A complete picture of what's correct, what's wrong, what needs to be fixed in what order, and where the biggest opportunity is.
Most brands come in thinking they have a PPC problem. The Amazon catalog audit usually surfaces that they have a catalog problem, a listing problem, or a category problem that is causing the PPC to underperform. Fixing the symptoms without diagnosing the cause is how brands stay stuck at the same revenue level.
The phased approach is not complicated. But it is disciplined. And the discipline is the part most brands skip.
The takeaway
If you want to know how your Amazon account is actually performing, start with a catalog map. Not your campaigns dashboard. Not your BSR trend. A complete list of every ASIN, every category, every UPC, scored against the factors that matter.
Everything else gets built on top of that.