If you’re paying for Amazon PPC ads, you want to ensure they’re improving your Amazon listing traffic and sales. Throwing away ad money each month won’t do much to help your business, and it will cut into your revenue. Keeping a close eye on your PPC campaign involves performing routine audits to measure their performance and identify necessary areas of improvement. 

Learn the steps to complete an Amazon PPC audit: 

Step 1: Set Performance Goals

Your PPC ad metrics won’t mean anything unless you have goals to measure them against. Everyone’s performance objectives differ.

If you just recently launched your Amazon PPC campaign, your goal may be to initially break even on advertising cost of sales (ACoS). But if you’ve been paying for PPC ads for a while and have conducted audits in the past, your goals may be to outperform the metrics you previously examined. 

Set goals for all the following metrics, which you’ll examine in the next step:

• Cost per click (CPC): The amount you spend on PPC ads based on the number of clicks you receive
• Impressions: The number of times your Amazon PPC ads appear in front of users
• Advertising cost of sale (ACoS): The amount you spend on PPC ads for every dollar you generate from ads
• Click-through rate: The number of users who clicked on your ad divided by the total number of impressions
• Sales: The number of sales you generated from PPC ads
• Return on advertising spend (ROAS): The amount of revenue you earn per dollar you spend on PPC ads

Your goals may be concrete or more generalized. Maybe you just want to beat your performance from a month ago. Or maybe you want to reach a certain ROAS to make your ads worthwhile. 

Step 2: Review Your Performance Metrics

The next step in your Amazon PPC audit is to take an in-depth look at your Amazon advertising metrics. Thankfully, Amazon makes it pretty easy to review data about your ad spend and performance. Just log into your Seller Central account to view data from each PPC campaign. You can also learn more through the Amazon Ads Education Alliance. 

Adjust your time frame to view the metrics from the past month or quarter. Ad performance can ebb and flow over time, but reviewing performance over a longer period can give you a better idea of the ad’s success overall. 

You’ll be able to view the above metrics for each ad you’ve rolled out. Viewing this data in your metrics table will enable you to compare performance across each campaign quickly. You’ll also be able to easily identify whether you met the goals you set in the previous step. 

Step 3: Assess Your Budget

As you review the metrics for each ad campaign, you’ll also be able to view the overall budget you set for each ad. As a reminder, this budget indicates the maximum amount you spend on the PPC ad campaign each day. Once you’ve hit that figure in a day, your campaign will pause unless you increase the budget. 

Quickly review the ROAS for each ad in your campaign. Your ROAS should be at least 1 for every ad, indicating that, on average, you at least break even on your ad spend versus revenue generated. Ideally, your ROAS should be between 3 and 5, while anything higher indicates exceptional performance. 

If you notice any ads with an ROAS of less than 1, pause those ads. You’re currently losing money on them. 

Meanwhile, consider increasing the budget for ads with an ROAS of 3 or higher. These ads provide a worthwhile return on investment, and increasing their budgets could allow you to further capitalize on this success. 

Step 4: Evaluate Your Keywords

Amazon PPC ads use keyword targeting to determine when to display your ads in search results. You may need to adjust your keyword strategy if your ads aren’t performing well. 

Amazon offers automatic and manual keyword targeting.

• With automatic targeting, you would allow Amazon to manage the keywords you target based on the language you use in your product listing and the keywords in similar listings.
• With manual targeting, you’d be responsible for choosing the keywords to target for each campaign. 

Automatic targeting may have served you well when you first launched your PPC campaign, but if you want to achieve an even higher ROAS, you should control at least some of your keyword targeting manually. This process allows you to refine the keywords your ads display for, preventing you from wasting money on irrelevant keyword searches. 

For example, you can specify negative keywords, which are terms you don’t want your ads to show up for. If you sell dresses, you may not want your PPC ads to show up for the search term “dress shirt,” even though Amazon may automatically include this term in your keyword targeting. 

Step 5: Put It All Together

Auditing your PPC campaigns is great, but the value comes from what you do after the audit. Compile all the data you gleaned from your audit and look for trends. Are certain keyword groups performing worse than others? Is your budget too high or too low based on ad performance? Are there ads that aren’t performing well that you might be better off nixing altogether before returning to the drawing board? 

Ideally, you’ll make necessary changes to your PPC ad strategy, and the next time you conduct an audit, your performance will be that much better. 

Work With the Amazon PPC Ad Experts

Conducting an Amazon PPC audit is an excellent first step in optimizing your PPC campaign. But what if your ads just aren’t performing well? 

The most successful sponsored brands work with expert digital marketers to make the most of their Amazon bidding strategies, paid ads, and organic sales tactics. If you need help refining your PPC strategy or want to take a hands-off approach, Click Fluency is here. 

Schedule a strategy call today to learn how we can boost your Amazon sales.