Is your Amazon PPC healthy? A 15-minute self-audit

How to use this audit

Most Amazon sellers know something is off with their PPC before they can name what it is. Spend is going somewhere — but where? ACoS feels high — but high compared to what? A campaign that looked fine last month has quietly become a problem. The data is all there in the console; the work is in knowing what to look for.

This audit gives you a framework for that. Five questions. Each one targets a specific category of problem that shows up in almost every account. You can work through all five in about 15 minutes with nothing more than your Amazon Advertising console open in another tab.

No install required — each question includes the manual method you can run right now. Where bddr.ai helps, we'll show you the comparison, but the audit itself doesn't depend on it. Think of this as the work you'd do anyway, laid out in a clear order.

To keep things concrete, we'll follow a reference account throughout: four campaigns, $1,200/mo in total ad spend, selling a mid-range kitchen product. It's a realistic size for a solo seller or small brand. The numbers won't match yours exactly, but the patterns will.

Work through each question honestly. At the end, you'll have a clear picture of where your account's health stands — and what to do next.

1. Where is your money going?

The first question in any PPC audit is the most uncomfortable: are there keywords in your account spending real money without producing a single sale?

These are called bleeders — keywords that have accumulated enough clicks to cost you meaningfully, but have a conversion rate of exactly zero. In our reference account spending $1,200/mo across four campaigns, it's common to find two or three of these in every campaign sweep. A broad-match keyword like "kitchen storage solutions" might have eaten $47 in clicks last month while generating nothing. An auto-target segment called "close match" might be running up a $6/day tab with no orders attributed.

The money isn't gone in a catastrophic way — it went somewhere, and Amazon got paid. But it didn't come back to you as revenue, and it's still flowing. Left alone for another month, that $47 becomes $94. The campaign's overall ACoS looks worse, and you can't tell why without digging in.

Here's the work to find them without any additional tools:

Once you've identified your bleeders, the action is yours to take. Lower the bid significantly (50% or more) to reduce traffic while giving the keyword a cheaper chance to prove itself — or pause it outright if it's accumulated 25+ clicks with zero orders. bddr.ai shows you where the problem is; you decide what to do about it.

Your answer to Question 1: Did you find any keywords with meaningful spend and zero orders? If yes, mark this as a problem area. Keep reading.

2. Are you bidding against yourself?

Here's a problem that's easy to create and almost invisible once it exists: the same keyword appearing in more than one of your campaigns simultaneously.

When this happens, your campaigns compete against each other in Amazon's auction. You're not bidding against a competitor — you're bidding against yourself. The practical result is that you pay more per click than you should, and neither campaign gets a clean read on how that keyword actually performs. The spend splits across two campaigns, the attribution gets muddy, and the winner of each auction is whichever of your own campaigns happened to bid higher that day.

In a four-campaign account, this pattern is common at the seams. An auto campaign discovers a search term that converts — say, "stainless steel spice rack" — and you harvest it into a manual exact campaign. Six months later, you launch a new manual campaign for a product variation and add the same keyword again without checking. Now three campaigns are running the same exact-match target. The overlap is impossible to see from inside any individual campaign.

Cross-campaign duplicate detection is available on bddr.ai's Free tier — we want to be clear about that because it's the kind of structural problem that deserves visibility regardless of what you're paying for.

The fix for a duplicate is simple: look at which campaign version has the better performance history, and pause the keyword in the others. This concentrates your spend, gives you clean attribution, and stops you from paying a self-inflicted premium on your own keywords.

Your answer to Question 2: Did you find any keywords appearing in more than one campaign? If yes, this is costing you on every auction where both versions compete.

3. Are your winners getting oxygen?

Not all PPC problems are about waste. Some are about missed opportunity — and this one is easy to overlook because the keyword looks fine on the surface.

An untapped keyword has good ACoS — it's converting when it gets clicks, often at or below your target. But it has very few impressions. It's barely showing up in search results, which means it's barely generating clicks, which means it's barely driving sales. The keyword is doing its job; it's just not getting the chance to do it very often.

In our reference account, imagine a keyword like "wall-mounted spice organizer" sitting at 22% ACoS against a 28% target — solid performance. But it's generating only 40 impressions per week, yielding maybe 2–3 clicks. That's not a bad keyword. That's an underfunded keyword. The bid is probably too low to win the auctions it should be winning. A modest bid increase — say, from $0.65 to $0.90 — might unlock 3–5x the impression volume and proportionally more sales, still at healthy ACoS.

The manual method to find these:

• Within each campaign's Targeting tab, filter or sort by Impressions ascending. Look for keywords that have a reasonable ACoS (green or yellow territory) but very low impression counts — under 100/week for an active campaign is often a signal.
• Cross-reference against your bid: is the bid competitive given your product category? Amazon's suggested bid range in the console gives you a reference point.
• These are candidates for a measured bid increase — not a dramatic jump, but enough to test whether more impressions convert at a similar rate.

With bddr.ai on the Free plan, blue Untapped badges appear on these keywords automatically. The badge tells you the keyword is converting well but impression-starved — the framing is "this one could scale with a higher bid," not "this one is a problem." It's a growth signal, not an alarm.

The decision to raise a bid is still yours. You're weighing the potential volume gain against the risk that performance degrades at higher spend. A 10–20% bid increase is a reasonable test; monitor it over two weeks before going further.

Your answer to Question 3: Did you find any keywords with good ACoS but suspiciously low impressions? If yes, you may have growth sitting idle in your account.

4. Search terms — harvested or buried?

Your campaigns generate search term data every day — the actual phrases shoppers typed before clicking your ad. This data is gold. A search term that converts consistently is a candidate to promote to its own exact-match keyword, where you can bid on it precisely and track its performance separately. A search term that burns clicks without converting is a candidate for a negative keyword, so you stop paying for it.

Most sellers know this in theory. In practice, the search terms report is a long CSV, the cross-referencing is tedious, and it doesn't get done as often as it should. In our reference account spending $1,200/mo, there might be dozens of converting search terms buried in auto campaigns and broad-match ad groups that have never been promoted. Each one is a keyword you're winning on by accident, paying broad-match prices, when you could be targeting it exactly at a sharper bid.

Here's the manual approach to find candidates:

A note on scope: on the Free plan, bddr.ai shows you which search terms are candidates — it surfaces the analysis. Acting on the candidates (adding keywords, setting negatives) still happens in Amazon's console, either manually or via bulk upload. The Pro plan adds one-click harvesting that does this directly from the targeting page.

Either way, the insight comes first. The work follows from the insight.

Your answer to Question 4: When did you last review your search terms report? If it's been more than two weeks, there are almost certainly candidates you haven't acted on.

5. Do you know what you changed?

Here's a situation that happens to almost every active advertiser at some point: you open your campaigns on a Monday and something is different. ACoS is up. Spend is higher than expected. A campaign that was humming along now looks wrong. You spend 20 minutes trying to remember what you changed last week — and you can't reconstruct it cleanly.

Amazon's native change history exists but is limited and requires navigating to a specific campaign to see it. If you're managing four campaigns and making a handful of changes per week — bid adjustments, pausing a bleeder, adding a negative — the history isn't centralized anywhere. You're relying on your own memory, or on notes you may or may not have kept.

The manual fallback is low-tech: keep a running change log in a notes app or spreadsheet. Date, campaign, what you changed, why. This is actually useful discipline even if you never use another tool — it forces you to make deliberate changes with stated reasoning, and gives you something to consult when results shift. The cost is the habit; the benefit is the clarity.

bddr.ai's Free plan keeps a 7-day rolling audit history automatically — every bid change, every pause, every keyword action you take while bddr.ai is active gets logged with a timestamp and the before/after values. No note-taking required. When something changes in your account, you can look back at what you did.

Pro extends this to 90 days, which covers the full attribution window for most seasonal patterns — if you made a change in February that's affecting your March numbers, you have the record. Power extends to 365 days, which covers year-over-year seasonal comparisons.

The audit trail doesn't fix anything on its own. But it's the difference between debugging with evidence and debugging with guesswork. For a solo seller making changes across four campaigns, seven days of history on the Free plan is usually enough to answer the "what did I change?" question when it comes up.

Your answer to Question 5: If something changed in your account today, could you reconstruct what you did in the last two weeks? If not, this is a blind spot worth closing.

What your answers mean

If you worked through all five questions honestly, you now have a clearer picture of where your account stands. Here's how to read the results:

You found problems in one or two areas. That's a healthy account with specific issues to address. Bleeders and duplicates are the most actionable — they're costing you money right now, and the fix is straightforward. Start there. Review untapped keywords next, since those represent recoverable growth. Search term hygiene and audit trail discipline are maintenance habits; build them in gradually.

You found problems in three or four areas. This is common in accounts that haven't had a structured review in a few months. The account isn't failing — it's accumulated some debt. Pick the highest-spend issue first and work through them one per week. At $1,200/mo across four campaigns, even a 15% efficiency improvement from closing your bleeders and deduplicating keywords could recover $150–180/mo in wasted spend.

You found problems in all five areas. This is an account that's been running without regular maintenance, and it's completely normal. The good news is that all five of these problems are visible and fixable. You don't need to solve them simultaneously — the bleeders are the most urgent, followed by duplicates, then the growth items. Give yourself four weeks and work through the list methodically.

A consistent note across all three scenarios: the problems bddr.ai identifies are things you fix. The tool shows you where to look; the decisions and actions are yours. That's not a limitation — that's the point. You understand your business, your margins, and your risk tolerance better than any algorithm does. The audit gives you the information. You do something useful with it.

If you find yourself in the second or third scenario and want to move faster on the bulk actions — pausing multiple bleeders at once, running Quick Optimize across all four campaigns, doing a full search term harvest — that's where a Pro plan ($29/mo) earns its keep. But the Free plan covers everything in this audit and everything you'd need to act on the findings one-by-one. There's no gating on the visibility itself.

Run this audit instantly

You just did the slow version of this audit — walking through each question conceptually, with the manual steps alongside. That's a useful exercise once. But the next time you want to answer these five questions, you shouldn't have to spend 90 minutes in a spreadsheet to do it.

Install bddr.ai free, open any campaign page in your Amazon Advertising console, and the first four questions answer themselves: Bleeder badges, Dup badges, Untapped badges, and search term candidates are all surfaced automatically. The fifth — your audit trail — starts building the moment you make your first change.

The Free plan is permanent, not a trial. It covers all four campaigns in our reference account, all five questions in this audit, and the 7-day audit history. No credit card, no onboarding call, no API credentials to set up. Install and navigate to your campaigns.

Install bddr.ai free — run the audit in 5 minutes

Or continue reading: the Free plan guide covers your weekly routine once you have bddr.ai installed. If you want to understand how bddr.ai reads your account data without API access, how it works explains the architecture.