Amazon Account Audit: What to Check Before Hiring an Agency

Before you hand over your Seller Central login to any agency, you need to know exactly where your account stands. Not a rough idea. Not a vibe. A real, structured look at every lever that drives revenue on Amazon.

We have audited hundreds of Amazon accounts at Marknology. The same problems show up again and again. Bloated PPC campaigns burning cash. Listings with no keyword strategy. Suppressed ASINs nobody noticed. Inventory ratios tanking organic rank. The brands that grow fastest are the ones who found these issues before they compounded.

This guide walks you through what an Amazon account audit actually covers, what the red flags look like, and what you should do the moment you find them.

What Is an Amazon Account Audit?

An Amazon account audit is a systematic review of every performance layer in your Seller Central account. It is not a quick scroll through your campaign manager. A real audit produces a documented analysis of where you are losing revenue, where you are leaving money on the table, and what the priority order of fixes looks like.

Think of it like a financial audit, but for your Amazon business. You are looking at the numbers, the structure, and the processes behind them.

The 7 Areas Every Audit Should Cover

A thorough Amazon seller audit covers these seven areas without exception:

1. Listing quality (titles, bullets, images, A+ Content)
2. PPC campaign health (structure, ACoS, TACoS, wasted spend)
3. Keyword rankings (organic vs. paid, share of voice)
4. Account health (policy violations, IP complaints, returns)
5. Pricing and Buy Box analysis
6. Inventory and fulfillment efficiency
7. Competitor gap analysis

Skip any one of these and you have an incomplete picture. Agencies that give you a 10-minute "audit" focused only on your ad spend are selling you a funnel, not an analysis.

DIY Audit vs. Professional Audit: What You Miss

You can absolutely run a partial audit yourself. Amazon gives you the data. The problem is knowing what to look for, what benchmarks to compare against, and how to prioritize the findings.

A brand owner running their own audit typically catches surface-level issues: obvious listing gaps, a campaign or two with terrible ACoS, a product with suppressed images. What they miss is the structural layer underneath. Campaign architecture that looks functional but is actually cannibalizing organic rank. Keyword strategy that has never been refreshed against current search volume. Inventory settings that are quietly inflating storage fees every month.

A professional Amazon agency audit brings benchmark data from hundreds of comparable accounts, not just yours. That context is what turns findings into a ranked action plan rather than a list of problems with no clear starting point. full-service Amazon agency can help you achieve these goals.

The Complete Amazon Audit Checklist

Here is exactly what we look at when we run an audit. Use this as your baseline whether you are doing it yourself or evaluating what an agency is actually reviewing.

Listing Quality Score (Titles, Bullets, Images, A+ Content)

Your listing is your storefront. A weak listing destroys conversion rate and suppresses organic rank simultaneously, which means you pay more in ads to get fewer sales.

Check these specifically:

• Title: Is your primary keyword in the first 80 characters? Are you hitting the character limit? Is the title readable to a human, not just stuffed with terms?
• Bullets: Are benefits leading, not just features? Are high-volume secondary keywords present naturally?
• Images: Do you have all 7 image slots filled? Is your main image compliant? Are you using lifestyle and infographic images that reduce return rates?
• A+ Content: If you are Brand Registered, do you have A+ Content live? Are you using comparison modules to cross-sell your catalog? Premium A+ (A++ or brand story) is available to qualifying brands and typically lifts conversion by 3-10%.
• Backend keywords: Are all 250 bytes utilized without repetition?

We grade every listing on a 0-100 scale. Anything below 70 gets immediate attention. Most accounts we audit have 40-60% of their catalog scoring below that threshold.

PPC Campaign Health (ACoS, TACoS, Wasted Spend, Campaign Structure)

The Amazon PPC audit is usually where we find the most immediate money. Wasted spend is the most obvious metric, but structure matters just as much.

Key benchmarks we flag:

• ACoS above 30% on established products with no downward trend is a structural problem, not a spend problem
• TACoS above 15% suggests your organic sales are not growing proportionally to ad investment
• Wasted spend ratio: If more than 20% of your ad spend is going to search terms you have not negated, your campaigns are not being managed actively
• Campaign structure: Are auto and manual campaigns separated? Are you running single keyword ad groups (SKAGs) or similar tight structures for top performers? Are branded and non-branded terms separated so you can see true performance?
• Dayparting: Are bids adjusted for time-of-day performance patterns?
• Bid strategy alignment: Are you using the right bid strategy (fixed, down only, up and down) for each campaign objective?

On a recent audit for a health and wellness brand, we found $14,000/month in wasted spend on irrelevant search terms across auto campaigns that had never been negated in 18 months. That money went straight back into profitable keywords within 60 days.

Keyword Rankings (Organic vs. Paid, Share of Voice)

Rankings tell you the story your sales data does not. A brand can be flat in revenue while gaining organic rank, which means momentum is building. Or it can be losing rank on its top keywords while ad spend holds revenue steady, which is a ticking clock.

What to pull:

• Organic rank for your top 20-30 revenue-driving keywords
• Rank trend over 90 days (improving, flat, declining)
• Share of voice on your category's most important search terms
• Keyword gap vs. top 3 competitors: what are they ranking for that you are not targeting?
• Rank correlation to inventory levels (rank often drops when you go out of stock, and does not automatically recover when you restock)

Tools like Helium 10, DataDive, and Amazon's own Brand Analytics give you most of what you need here. The analysis is in how you interpret the trends, not just the snapshot.

Account Health (Policy Violations, IP Complaints, Returns)

Account health is the area brands ignore until it becomes a crisis. A single IP complaint can suppress a listing. Multiple policy violations can escalate to account suspension. Return rate spikes signal product quality or listing accuracy issues before they become a bigger problem.

Check your Account Health dashboard for:

• Any active policy violations, even minor ones
• IP complaints (even resolved ones indicate a competitor is targeting you)
• Return rate by ASIN vs. category average
• Order defect rate (keep this well below Amazon's 1% threshold)
• Late shipment rate and valid tracking rate for FBM orders
• Any A-to-Z claims patterns

If a previous agency managed your account, specifically look for any actions they took on your behalf that might have left compliance issues behind. We see this more than we should.

Pricing and Buy Box Analysis

Losing the Buy Box is losing the sale. For most product categories, 80-85% of purchases happen through the Buy Box. If you are not winning it consistently, you are funding your own traffic to hand sales to someone else.

Audit focus areas:

• Buy Box win percentage by ASIN over the last 30-90 days
• Are you losing the Buy Box to resellers, other sellers, or Amazon itself?
• Price parity: is your Amazon price competitive with your own website and other channels?
• MAP policy enforcement: are unauthorized sellers undercutting you?
• Dynamic repricing: if you have resellers, do you have a repricing strategy?

Inventory and Fulfillment Efficiency

Inventory is directly tied to organic rank, ad performance, and profitability. This is the area most agencies underweight during an audit because it requires understanding your supply chain, not just your Amazon data.

What we look at:

• IPI score: Below 400 puts your storage limits at risk. Below 450 and you should be taking action.
• Days of supply: Are you running lean enough to avoid long-term storage fees without risking stockouts?
• Stranded inventory: Any units sitting in FBA that are not live for sale? This is pure cash tied up doing nothing.
• Restock lead times vs. velocity: Is your reorder cadence aligned with actual sales velocity, or are you guessing?
• FBA vs. FBM mix: For seasonal or slow-moving items, is FBM a better margin play?
• Storage fee exposure: Any ASINs sitting in long-term storage at risk of the aged inventory surcharge?

Competitor Gap Analysis

Your competitors are the benchmark that matters more than any internal metric. An ACoS of 25% looks fine until you realize your main competitor is running at 14% with better organic placement, which means they can outspend you indefinitely and win.

A competitor gap analysis looks at:

• Price positioning vs. top 5 competitors
• Review count and rating gap (and velocity: how fast are they accumulating reviews?)
• Keyword coverage: what high-volume terms are they ranking for that you are not?
• A+ Content and listing quality comparison
• Sponsored placement share: are they dominating the top of search on your category keywords?
• New product launches in your category that could displace you

See how we approach this work in our case studies.

Red Flags That Mean You Need an Audit Now

You do not need to wait for a scheduled review. Some signals mean you need to stop and do this today.

Declining Sales With Increasing Ad Spend

This is the most dangerous pattern on Amazon and it accelerates fast. If your total sales are dropping while your ad spend is flat or rising, you are in a cycle where ads are propping up revenue that should be coming from organic sales. The underlying problem grows while the symptoms stay masked.

Common causes: keyword rank erosion on your top terms, review rating slip, new competitor entry, or listing quality degradation. An audit tells you which one it is so you can address the root, not just pour more ad spend into a leaking bucket.

Flat Revenue for 3 or More Months

Flat is not stable. Amazon is a competitive marketplace. If your revenue is not growing, you are almost certainly losing market share to someone who is. Flat revenue with growing ad spend is a red flag (see above). Flat revenue with flat ad spend usually means your catalog has hit a ceiling that listing optimization or new product expansion can break through.

ACoS Above 30% With No Improvement Trend

ACoS benchmarks vary by category and margin. A 30% ACoS might be acceptable for a launch or for a high-margin product. But if you have been running campaigns for 6 or more months, your ACoS has been above 30% the whole time, and there is no downward trend, that is a structural PPC problem. It is not going to fix itself. The campaign architecture needs a rebuild, not an adjustment.

Previous Agency Left a Mess

This is one of the most common situations we walk into. The previous agency built campaigns with poor structure, keyword cannibalization, overlapping match types, and no negative keyword lists. They might have altered your listings without documentation. They could have made pricing changes that violated MAP. They may have left inventory recommendations that caused a stockout pattern.

If you are switching agencies or taking back account management, run a full audit before you do anything else. Inheriting someone else's decisions without understanding them means you will spend months troubleshooting problems you did not create. Our team at Marknology treats every new client engagement as an audit-first process for exactly this reason.

What Happens After the Audit

An audit without a prioritized action plan is just a list of problems. The goal is a roadmap.

The 30-60-90 Day Fix Framework

We organize every audit output into a 30-60-90 day framework. Not everything can or should be fixed at once. Doing too much simultaneously makes it impossible to attribute what actually moved the needle.

• Days 1-30: Stop the bleeding. Negative keyword cleanup, listing suppressions resolved, stranded inventory cleared, obvious wasted spend eliminated. These are actions with no downside and immediate impact.
• Days 31-60: Structural rebuilds. Campaign restructure if needed, listing optimization with new copy and updated images, backend keyword refresh, pricing alignment.
• Days 61-90: Growth plays. New keyword expansion into adjacent terms, A+ Content upgrades, competitor gap targeting in PPC, and review strategy if the rating gap is a factor.

Quick Wins vs. Strategic Plays

Quick wins are changes that take less than a week to implement and show results within 30 days. Negating wasted spend, fixing a suppressed listing, and adding missing backend keywords are quick wins. They build momentum and fund the harder work. Amazon listing optimization can help you achieve these goals.

Strategic plays take longer but have larger impact. A full catalog listing rewrite, a PPC campaign architecture rebuild, or an inventory forecasting system are not fast, but they create compounding returns. The 30-60-90 framework sequences them correctly so you are not waiting 90 days to see any improvement.

How Marknology Runs Audits: Our Actual Process

When a brand comes to us for an audit, here is exactly what happens:

1. Access review: We request read-only access to Seller Central, your advertising console, and any third-party tools (Helium 10, DataDive, etc.) you are using.
2. Data pull: We pull 90 days of advertising data, keyword rank history, Account Health metrics, inventory performance, and sales by ASIN.
3. Listing audit: Every active ASIN is scored against our listing quality framework. We flag which ones are pulling down conversion rate.
4. PPC deep dive: We analyze campaign structure, search term reports, spend allocation, and bid strategy for every active campaign.
5. Competitor benchmark: We pull share of voice data and keyword gap analysis against your top 3-5 competitors.
6. Findings presentation: We deliver a written report and walk through the findings on a call. You get a prioritized action list, not a 40-page PDF you have to decipher yourself.
7. Decision point: You decide whether you want to implement the recommendations yourself or have us run the execution.

The whole process takes 5-7 business days for a catalog of up to 50 ASINs. Larger catalogs take longer. We do not rush it because the quality of the audit determines the quality of what comes after it.

Learn more about how we work with brands on our Amazon Brand Management Hub.

Get Your Free Amazon Audit

We have run audits for hundreds of brands across nearly every Amazon category. Our client retention rate is 93%, which means the work we find in the audit, we actually fix.

If your account has been flat, your ad spend keeps climbing, or you are taking over from a previous agency and need to know what you inherited, start with the audit.

There is no cost and no commitment. You will get a real analysis of your account from a team that manages accounts at scale, not a templated report generated by a free tool.

Get your free Amazon audit. Talk to our team today.

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Frequently Asked Questions