When your Amazon PPC isn’t scaling or your ACOS is creeping up, it doesn’t mean you need more complexity or a bigger budget. You just need to spend smarter. In this post I'll introduce my "Move the Needle" audit designed to help sellers uncover low-hanging fruit in their campaigns and reallocate wasted spend toward high-performing, high-control segments.

Step 1) Input last 30 days baseline performance into Audit Sheet

👉 Download the audit template here

Let’s start with a classic Pareto analysis: For the first check we’re focusing on the bottom 20% of targets (by order volume) that are eating up your budget with ACOS greater than 2x your goal.

Next, find all your Sponsored Product targets that have 0 orders. These little freeloaders are taking your money and giving you nothing in return.

If you're running multi-ASIN campaigns, this check is for you. We’re hunting down product ads with high ACOS in these campaigns. The goal is to only let your best performing products drive your ads.

Before we move on to the search terms side of things, let's quickly flip the 80/20 rule and look at the top 80% of orders. This is usually where your best performance lives so hopefully we don't find anything out of sorts, but it's worth scanning for outliers.

Now let's go deeper with search term data. Time to filter for terms in research campaigns (auto, broad, phrase) that have had plenty of chances to convert and blew it every time.

If you want to see our bulk negate tool in action check out the video below. This is a great exercise to do about every 2 weeks for most sellers. It might be an unpopular opinion, but I prefer to keep things simple and only negate poor performers (search terms with 0 orders and high spend, clicks, bad performance etc).

For the sake of brevity and my blog writing skills are 3rd grade level at best I'm going to spare you and only cover Sponsored Products in my example. 

On the audit sheet, you should now see the forecasted PPC spend, PPC sales, ACOS, TACOS and Total revenue over the next 30 days.

Showing this basic analysis we have just completed to brand owners more often times than not is pretty eye opening. 

The best way to scale profitably? Launch better campaigns with winning search terms—without throwing more money at the problem.

At this stage of the audit I commonly run into one of two cases when evaluating harvesting opportunities:

Let’s zoom out now.

Review branded vs. non-branded splits to see where your budget is going—and whether it's pulling its weight. For established brands, allocating budget toward branded keyword campaigns and defensive ASIN targeting is not only recommended, it’s often essential. These segments typically convert well and help protect your real estate on the search page from competitors looking to poach traffic. By separating these segments, you can more accurately evaluate performance and adjust strategies. 

Compare your current spend split against the table below. This recommended allocation isn’t set in stone, but it serves as a helpful baseline:

This final section touches on a few additional steps you can take to round out your audit, although I typically only reserve these for very large accounts or when deploying this audit in my own personal PPC operations.

Use Adtactix Hourly and Daily insights to spot patterns and dayparting opportunities. Seller Central won’t show you this but it can be useful info to understand about the brand. 

Analyze your top-performing campaigns.

Run an Ngram breakdown on 1-, 2-, and 3-word phrases. This helps you identify poor-performing themes to negate across your research campaigns and great candidates for broad targeting campaigns.

The Move the Needle audit is designed to be fast, powerful, and practical. It helps you clean house and redirect your ad dollars into campaigns that actually perform.

If you want expert help implementing this system — without giving up control of your ad account — book a call with us to learn about the Scale Assisted Plan.