I've audited a lot of Amazon PPC accounts, and almost every seller bleeding money on ads is making one of these three mistakes:

1. Auto campaigns are still on after 60+ days.

Auto campaigns are for keyword discovery, not scaling. If yours have been live for 2+ months and you haven't harvested the converting search terms into manual campaigns, you're paying full price for Amazon's guesswork instead of your own targeting.

2. ACOS looks fine at the campaign level, but is hiding dead weight at the keyword level.

A campaign can show a healthy 25% ACOS while 40% of its keywords have zero conversions in 30+ days. Averages lie. Always pull the search term report and sort by spend with zero orders — that's your negative keyword list, sitting in plain sight.

3. Bids haven't been touched since launch.

Amazon's suggested bids drift upward over time as competition increases. If you set bids once and walked away, you are almost certainly overpaying for placements that used to convert at a lower cost.

The fix isn't complicated, it's just tedious to do manually every week — pull the search term report, flag zero-conversion spend, harvest winners, kill losers, adjust bids. That's the whole audit.

I built a template that automates this checklist for my own accounts and started sharing it with a few sellers I work with — happy to answer questions on PPC audits in the comments if anyone wants a gut check on their own numbers.