Before you start
You need two numbers per product: your break-even ACOS (the margin before ads; get it from the break-even calculator) and the target ACOS you chose. Pull the Sponsored Products search term report for the last 30 days, and leave out the last 3 days: their sales are still arriving.
The six checks
- Spend with no orders. Sort search terms by spend, filter to zero orders. Any term past the clicks it should take to sell once is a candidate to negate. A fair threshold: more clicks than 1 ÷ your conversion rate, times two. Negative keywords.
- Terms that sell where you are not bidding. In Auto and Broad campaigns, find search terms with orders that are not yet keywords anywhere. Add the best as Exact in a manual campaign, and negate them in the source campaign so the two do not bid against each other. Match types.
- Bids over break-even. For keywords with enough orders to trust, compare ACOS with break-even. Over it, lower the bid toward the target: current bid × target ACOS ÷ current ACOS.
- Winners held back. Under-target keywords with high spend share may be capped by bid or budget. Raise them in steps.
- Budgets. A campaign that runs out of budget before evening misses the hours it would have sold in. Raise the budget on profitable ones; tighten bids on unprofitable ones instead of starving them.
- Last week's changes. Every bid and negative from two to four weeks ago: did it do what you expected? Undo what made things worse.
Download the checklistA spreadsheet of the six checks, with the filters and rules. Opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets.
Why weekly, and why in this order
Weekly is long enough for a change to show inside a 7-day attribution window and short enough that wasted spend does not pile up. The order is by money: wasted spend stops a loss today, new terms add sales, bid changes fine-tune both.
The sixth check is the one most audits skip and the one that makes the next audit better. A change you never grade is a guess you repeat.
Questions
- How often should I optimize Amazon PPC?
- Weekly for bids, negatives and new terms. Daily changes react to noise inside the attribution window; monthly lets wasted spend run for weeks.
- How many clicks before I negate a search term?
- Enough that a sale was likely. If your conversion rate is 10%, a term with 20 clicks and no order has had two expected orders and delivered none.
- What should a PPC audit look at first?
- Search terms with spend and no orders. They are the fastest money to recover and need no judgment about the right bid.