Amazon advertising costs have climbed sharply — cost-per-click rates are up meaningfully across many categories over the past year, with the most competitive categories seeing the steepest increases. That means whatever margin for error your PPC account had a couple of years ago has gotten thinner, not wider. Sellers who aren't actively auditing their spend are quietly funding their competitors' ad accounts instead of their own.
Here's what a proper PPC audit actually looks for, and why most self-managed accounts are leaking money in the same handful of places.
Where the Money Actually Leaks
Broad match keywords bid too aggressively. Broad match is useful for discovery, but left unmanaged it pulls in search terms only loosely related to what you sell — and every one of those clicks costs money whether or not it converts.
Search term reports nobody reads. Every automatic and broad-match campaign generates a report showing exactly what shoppers typed before clicking your ad. Most of that data goes unreviewed, which means the irrelevant search terms driving wasted clicks never get cut.
No negative keyword hygiene. This is the direct fix for the problem above, and it's the single most common gap we find. Without an active negative keyword list, you keep paying for the same irrelevant clicks month after month.
Everything judged by ACoS alone. Advertising Cost of Sale tells you whether a single campaign is profitable, but it doesn't tell you whether your advertising is actually growing your business. Total Advertising Cost of Sale — spend measured against your total sales, not just ad-attributed sales — is usually the more honest number, and the gap between a 20% TACoS and a 12% TACoS is rarely about budget size. It's about precision in exactly the areas above.
One campaign, every keyword. Dumping branded, generic, and competitor keywords into a single unsegmented campaign makes it nearly impossible to tell which type of traffic is actually working, and even harder to control budget deliberately.
Why High-Intent Keywords Are Usually Worth Paying More For
There's a common instinct to chase the cheapest clicks, but the math frequently runs the other way. A higher-cost click on a high-intent search term often converts well enough to produce a lower, more profitable ACoS than a cheap click on a vague, low-intent term that rarely converts at all. Cheap clicks that don't convert aren't a bargain — they're wasted spend with a low price tag.
This is exactly why keyword-level review matters more than headline CPC numbers. A campaign can look expensive and be profitable, or look cheap and be quietly draining the account.
What's Changing in 2026
Amazon's shift toward AI-assisted shopping — its Rufus assistant answering natural-language product questions — is starting to change how buyer intent gets expressed in search. Sellers who've only ever optimized for exact-match keyword bidding are going to need to think about relevance and conversion quality more broadly, not just keyword lists. Attribution has also shifted: Amazon's ranking system increasingly rewards listings that bring in qualified traffic from outside Amazon too, not just from ads within it.
None of this makes PPC less important. It makes precision matter more than it used to.
What Our PPC Audit Actually Covers
Our audit isn't a generic report generated by software and handed back with a few bolded recommendations. It's a structured review of your actual account: campaign structure, keyword-level performance, negative keyword coverage, ACoS versus TACoS by campaign type, and wasted spend specifically identified and quantified — not just flagged in general terms.
You get a clear picture of where your budget is actually going, and a specific plan for what to fix first, in order of impact.
If it's been a while since anyone actually looked closely at your PPC account, that's usually where the easiest wins are sitting.
Talk to us about a PPC audit.