How to Audit Your Amazon PPC Agency

Why Amazon PPC Agency Audits Fail Before They Start

One of the most common reasons why attempts to audit an Amazon PPC agency fail is because the questions that are asked are too vague.

In agency audit discussions, we always talk about these three failure modes:

• Asking about results, instead of actions
• Discussing what an agency claims as proof, instead of what they’re doing
• Starting a conversation without knowing what a good answer looks like

When campaigns are optimized continuously but lack specific data or documented changes, there's no way to know if active management is happening. You need more than a documented list of the bid changes used to fix your advertising cost of sales (ACoS). You also need to have a conversation about why it’s at a certain level.

The 7-Question Amazon PPC Agency Audit

Question 1: "What specific changes were made to my account in the past seven days, and what was the data rationale for each?"

An agency that does daily account management should have documented changes every single day. These changes should be specific and include:

• Changes to bids on certain keywords
• Adding negative keywords after reviewing the Search Term Report
• Fixing budgets based on today’s spend data
• Pausing campaigns for low inventory

Every change that was made should also have a clear reason behind it. If your account manager can't walk you through the reasons why they made adjustments (and where they’ve implemented them) within minutes, they’re not managing the account on a daily basis.

✓ Passing Answer: When the agency immediately responds with:

• Specific campaign names, keywords, and bid amounts before and after each change
• Performance data that triggered each decision
• A written weekly change log as standard practice

✗ Disqualifying Answer: If an agency responds with general answers without providing specific campaigns, keywords, or changes, or indicates that they need to consult their team before answering a question. Any active account manager should know these details immediately.

How Olifant Digital answers it: At Olifant Digital, every account that we manage receives a weekly change log detailing every material change we’ve made in the past seven days. Along with each change, we provide the data rationale and expected outcome.

💡Pro Tip: Rather than asking in general about the current week, choose a specific day. This way, they can't prepare a polished summary in advance and must show what they’ve accomplished on that day.

Question 2: "What is our current TACoS, and how has it trended over the past 90 days, broken down by ASIN?"

TACoS measures the ad spend as a percentage of total revenue, including the organic and paid sales. An agency that reports only ACoS can show you how their dashboard is improving on efficiency, but they won’t show you how the organic revenue is falling and your business becomes more reliant on paid advertising to maintain its sales volume.

Asking for an ASIN breakdown separates surface-level reporting from true account intelligence, because a blended account TACoS number can look acceptable. Meanwhile, it’s masking individual ASINs where organic rank is dropping and ad spend is covering the loss, not building into growth.

✓ Passing Answer: You’ll know that TACoS is part of their weekly reporting standard, when they:

• Give you specific TACoS numbers by ASIN without having to pull any additional data
• Can explain the trend direction by looking at the last 90 days
• Tell you which ASINs are improving and which aren’t

✗ Disqualifying Answer: The reporting model doesn’t have the level of detail needed for active account management when the agency:

• Gives you a blended ACoS number, calls it in target, and never mentions TACoS
• Gives you one account-level number with no ASIN-level breakdown
• Has to take some time to pull data that any team tracking this metric weekly should have ready

How Olifant Digital answers it: For every account that we manage, TACoS per ASIN is the standard delivered on a weekly basis. For example, for Beauty by Earth, we report TACoS across all 100+ ASINs every week. This reporting cadence allows us to make accurate budget decisions. For Onsen Secret, we switched the primary reporting metric from ACoS to TACoS which has helped us uncover a significant organic revenue decline that the previous model kept hidden.

💡Pro Tip: You can use the Business Reports to determine the accuracy of the agency’s answer. To do this, go to the Detail Page Sales, select Traffic by ASIN, and export that data to see the past 90 days alongside your ad spend by ASIN from the Campaign Manager for the same period.

Question 3: "How many negative keywords were added last week, and what triggered each one?"

A powerful, yet neglected, Amazon PPC task is to control negative keywords. Every week you don't review the Search Term Report, you're sending ad spend toward irrelevant search queries that won’t convert. On any account with significant monthly spend, this wasted budget accumulates quickly.

A team that conducts a structured weekly Search Term Report harvest distinguishes itself from a team that merely adds negatives when a brand owner notices wasted spend and asks what prompted each negative keyword addition.

✓ Passing Answer: When an agency:

• Names the specific terms it added as negatives that week
• Explains which Search Term Report data prompted each one
• States the match type and level used

✗ Disqualifying Answer: If the agency's answer to their negative keyword management is something like "we added negatives as needed" or "we manage negatives regularly" with no specifics, spend thresholds, or STR findings from the prior week.

How Olifant Digital answers this question: For every account that we manage, we run negative harvests on a weekly basis. We monitor it using the Search Term Report, documenting every addition in a weekly change log.

Question 4: "Which of our ASINs are in the 'scale' tier right now, and which are in the 'fix-or-cut' tier?"

A professionally managed Amazon PPC account won’t treat each ASIN the same. Instead, the action will depend on how each ASIN is performing.

For example, is the ASIN in the Amazon flywheel with a declining TACoS but an improving organic rank? Or are the ACoS rising and the conversion rate flat?

If an agency’s account management approach doesn’t include a triage model, it indicates the account is being maintained and not actively managed. This also shows the budget is spent according to existing structures instead of where each product is in its performance cycle.

✓ Passing Answer: The agency can:

• Identify the ASINs in each tier
• Reference the performance data that put them there
• Describe its plans for those in the “fix” or “cut” categories

✗ Disqualifying Answer: It usually means the account is being managed as a whole (rather than as individual products with different requirements) when the agency:

• Talks about overall account performance without distinguishing one ASIN from another
• Says everything is being optimized to one ACoS target
• Can’t name any structured way of sorting ASINs by performance and priority
• How Olifant Digital answers it: For every account that we manage, we place each ASIN into one of the following four performance-based tiers, which get reviewed:
• Scaling is for products that are working and can take more budget.
• Hold is for products that are profitable and stable but don’t justify more spending at the moment.
• Investigate is for products that have a particular problem we’re actively fixing.
• Pause is for products that are absorbing disproportionate spend relative to their returns.

We divide where each ASIN sits by using its:

• TACoS trend
• ACoS break-even
• Conversion rate against the category median
• Available inventory

We review those placements every week so the budget always follows the performance.

Question 5: "What is the listing conversion rate for our top 5 ASINs, and how does it compare to the category median?"

The two root causes for high ACoS on an Amazon account require very different responses. Either the bidding strategy needs to be adjusted or the listing itself isn’t converting traffic at a competitive rate.

If there’s a significant monthly spend, the fee means an agency managing an account should’ve measured the listing conversion rate for key ASINs against the category benchmark. This comparison will determine whether the next intervention should be a campaign-level change or listing audit.

If you misdiagnose this, it’s a costly mistake.

✓ Passing Answer: A passing answer is when the agency gives you actual conversion rate numbers for your top ASINs from the Business Reports and compares it to the category median or a valid benchmark. Then, it either flags listing issues that need to be resolved before scaling or confirms that the listings are converting well enough to scale.

✗ Disqualifying Answer: An insufficient answer is if the agency:

• Says conversion rates are reasonable without giving you real numbers
• Only quotes Campaign Manager data and not Business Reports
• Views every high ACoS as a bidding problem to be solved with bid changes

How Olifant Digital answers it: Before we commit to any campaign-scale decision, we audit conversion rates from the Business Reports. A conversion rate that’s below the category median is a listing problem that needs a listing solution rather than a bidding problem which requires a bidding solution. Scaling ad spend on poor-converting listings only creates waste rather than growth.

💡Pro Tip: When you’re asking for conversion rate, use the Business Reports figure, not the Campaign Manager’s. The Campaign Manager only covers paid clicks, while the Business Reports includes all traffic, including organic. Comparing the two shows whether a conversion issue is specific to paid or linked to the overall listing.

Question 6: "Who specifically manages our account, and who manages it when they’re on leave?"

A PPC specialist learns your keyword history, seasonal patterns, campaign structure, and commercial goals over months of managing your account. This knowledge can’t easily be passed to a replacement in a quick handover.

Without the ability to document it, the knowledge walks out the door with the previous specialist and you pay for the gap every time a new account manager has to start from scratch to build that understanding.

✓ Passing Answer: When the agency can tell you:

• Who manages your account
• How experienced the account manager is
• The named backup of equal seniority who already has access to the account
• The account history is kept in a written change log (not one person’s memory)

✗ Disqualifying Answer: An inefficient answer is when the agency just promises you’ll always be covered without saying who manages the account or supports them.

How Olifant Digital answers it: The account manager you meet on the discovery call is the same person managing your account a year into the engagement. As for experience level, every specialist on our managed accounts has at least seven years of experience. This means that anyone covering an account during a leave period works at the same level as the primary account manager.

Plus, there’s a weekly change log that holds the full account history. If coverage is needed, no one needs to depend on memory.

Question 7: "If you left tomorrow, what documentation exists so a new account manager could understand our account in under two hours?"

This question tells you whether the agency has documented everything it has learned about your account or if that information is only in the head of the account manager.

A well-managed account will have a change log. It should easily be followed across 12 months, covering:

• All the structural decisions
• Every keyword promoted from an auto campaign to an exact match campaign
• The date keyword changes happened
• Every seasonal pattern that was spotted and acted on
• The reasoning behind each change.

An account run without discipline has very little of this information. This means the new account manager or agency coming in has to piece the whole history together from the campaign data alone.

✓ Passing Answer: The agency can prove there’s a written change log that covers every major decision made during the engagement. It should be detailed enough so that a new account manager can read it and understand the entire account history in a couple of hours.

There’s also onboarding documentation that covers the:

• ASIN’s triage state
• Goals for each product
• Reasoning behind the keyword structure

✗ Disqualifying Answer: Indicators that institutional knowledge is stored in people, not documents are when then agency says:

• It would take weeks to get a new account manager up to speed.
• The campaign data in the platform is the documentation.
• The outgoing account manager personally briefs the replacement during handover.

How Olifant Digital answers it: This is an easy question to answer, as we keep a weekly change log on each account. Every major decision is recorded with the reasoning and expected outcome. As such, the full history is always available to read. This is part of the reason why we have a 98% client retention rate. When someone on the team changes, the account doesn’t miss a beat because the knowledge was never in one person’s head.

How to Score Your Audit: What the Answers Mean

After asking all seven questions, use the following scoring guide to see what the answer pattern means for your renewal decision:

7 specific answers with documentation

The agency is running your account at a professional standard. Judge them based on results going forward.

5 to 6 specific answers; 1 to 2 vague or pending

The agency has most pieces in place. Pinpoint exactly where the gaps are and include them in the contract as deliverables before you renew.

3 to 4 specific answers; 3 to 4 vague or deflected

There are actual gaps present. You’re likely receiving the account managed at a level below what you’re paying for. Figure out if the agency can fill those holes in writing or if it’s time to move on.

Fewer than 3 specific answers

The agency isn’t handling the account at the level the fee implies. Alternatives should be considered now, before the cost of switching agencies becomes too high to justify.

The one fair exception is for newer engagements. If your agency has been managing your account for under 90 days, it may really need more time to build the ASIN-level TACoS baseline and triage-tier assignments that the second and fourth question require. These are built on data that build over time, rather than just process.

On the other hand, questions 1, 3, 6, and 7 should deliver specific answers immediately, no matter how new the engagement is. A vague answer to any of these four at any point in the relationship indicates a problem with the way the agency operates, not a lack of time.

💡Pro Tip: Do this audit 60 days before renewal. This allows you to formalize specific gaps as contractual deliverables or start evaluating alternatives. An audit undertaken when you’re pressed for time is likely to generate an agency response aimed at renewing the contract rather than fixing the gaps.

What Olifant Digital Clients Get by Default

At Olifant Digital, we can answer every question in this audit for any given client on any day. This is because the documentation, weekly reporting, and daily management that produce the right answers underpin our approach. It’s also not something we provide upon request only.

After all, vague answers to these questions don’t lead to results like a 46% revenue growth in 44 days for Spade to Fork or a $114,000 in monthly revenue for MatchaBar.

If your current agency scored less than five on this audit, get a free marketing plan from Olifant Digital. We'll pull the data and show you exactly where your account stands versus where it should be. We also offer a 60-day money-back guarantee if we don't improve your Amazon results.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Do I Know If My Amazon PPC Agency Is Doing a Good Job?

The most reliable way to tell if your Amazon PPC agency is doing a good job is to ask what specific changes the team made to your account in the last seven days. Also ask what data triggered each of those changes. If an agency replies with generic comments about ongoing optimization or that they need to talk to the team first, they aren’t at the daily management standard that effective Amazon PPC requires.

What Should an Amazon PPC Agency Report Every Week?

A professional Amazon PPC agency will produce a performance data report (with TACoS by ASIN as well as ACoS, total ad spend, and revenue numbers) and a change log each week. Performance data without a change log tells you what happened, but it doesn’t tell you what the team did about it. A change log without performance context documents actions without outcomes. Both together represent the minimum accountability standard for any account with significant monthly ad spend.

How Often Should Amazon PPC Campaigns Be Optimized?

Amazon PPC campaigns should be reviewed and adjusted on a daily basis for any account that has meaningful monthly spend. Daily optimization catches problems that weekly optimization misses. The gap between daily and weekly optimization is real and preventable.

What Are the Signs I Should Switch Amazon PPC Agencies?

Specific indicators include: no change log provided when requested; TACoS not tracked at the ASIN level; negative keywords managed reactively instead of a weekly harvest; no structured triage framework for underperforming products; account manager transitions handled via personal briefings; and conversion rate analysis using the Campaign Manager data instead of the Business Reports.

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