According to eMarketer, 93% of marketers consider PPC the second-most-effective method for building business visibility.
You are a brand or aggregator who relies on the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising model to drive sales and growth.
However, you are not sure how well your ad spending is performing.
The best way to know whether your PPC budget is driving sales, profitability, and sales growth is to conduct a full PPC account review.
But a new client Amazon PPC audit is time-intensive, which is why most 7-9-figure Amazon brands outsource it.
You’re probably wondering how quickly a PPC team can complete a full account audit.
The answer lies in how thorough the process is and the PPC team’s experience in auditing Amazon ad spending.
How Long Does a Full PPC Account Audit Actually Take?
Objective Answer: There is no single, fixed timeline for how long a full PPC account review should take.
As a 2025 Inc. 5000 company (ranked #829), IG PPC has found that the required time for an Amazon PPC audit depends on the size and complexity of your account, the scope of the review, and the accuracy of the data you provide, among other factors.
The table below provides a breakdown of how account size affects the time it takes to do a full PPC account audit:
| Account Size | Estimated Time |
|---|---|
| Small accounts with few campaigns or small ad budgets. | At least 3 to 5 business days |
| Medium complexity accounts with multiple campaigns. | 5 to 15 business days |
| Large enterprise accounts with high ad spending. | Several weeks |
Keep in mind that these are the timelines you should expect when dealing with a human-led, deep dive examination. Some automated tools might provide some insights into your account in several hours. However, they do not offer the same level of context as a human audit.
Schedule a call today to learn how long a full Amazon PPC audit would take for your account(s).
Factors That Influence PPC Audit Speed
The truth is that a full account audit takes time, and rushing through the process often results in missed insights that could help you seal budget leaks or maximize your advertising budget.
As previously stated, the time it takes to conduct a full account PPC audit depends on the following factors:
- Account Size and Ad Spending: The number of campaigns, keywords, ad variations, and the size of your audience list are often the most significant factors in estimating audit duration. This is because it determines the volume of the historical data to be analyzed.
- Level of Detail: A quick health check might take several hours, as it aims only to unearth surface-level issues. However, a deep-dive audit involves forensic-level analysis of multiple PPC metrics, so it is reasonable that it should take longer.
- Data Availability and Accuracy: If your conversion tracking is active and accurate, the process will take less time than if tracking is broken or analytics are not aligned with your advertising metrics. That is because in the latter scenario, the audit team will need time to reconcile data before they can begin the process.
- Your Service Provider’s Capacity: Experienced professionals with a proven track record and refined auditing workflows often take less time to review your historical data and identify areas for improvement.
- Tools Utilization: PPC audit tools speed up the process by automating data collection and analysis. However, you still require human-led analysis to make sense of the data and derive actionable insights.
Breakdown of the Amazon PPC Audit Process
According to The State of PPC 2024 Global Report, Amazon was the only e-commerce platform ranked among the top 10 most popular PPC advertising sites, generating $47 billion in annual revenue solely from ads.
Given the amount of money brands and aggregators spend on Amazon, it makes perfect sense for them to conduct regular audits to determine if Amazon PPC is worth it and whether their marketing budgets are translating into sales.
In fact, here’s what Reddit user Clean_Bat_6637 says on why brands should get a PPC audit:
“Audit covers each and everything related to your account, or it can be for PPC only. It’s a process that’s taken to identify the leakage points, problems, and stagnancy of the account or PPC strategy.”
However, given the complexity of the audit process, most brands and aggregators outsource to PPC agencies.
At IG PPC, the Amazon PPC audit process is as follows:
- Discovery Call: Clients schedule a no-obligation call to tell the audit team about their Amazon brand and also see if they are a good fit.
- Finding Inefficiencies: The IG PPC Amazon audit team reviews past campaigns to identify underutilized ad spend and determine how much you’d need to generate one unit of sale.
- Scrutinizing Low-Performing Amazon PPC Campaigns: The Amazon PPC audit team analyzes campaigns with high click-through rates but low sales to identify why potential customers dropped off.
- Finding Hidden Growth Areas: The audit team hunts for untapped opportunities clients can exploit to boost campaign performance, such as partial automation and bidding for prime ad placement.
- Evaluate Keywords and Search Terms: The Audit team analyzes customer searches to identify high-cost, low-return keywords and search terms you can add to negative keywords. You should also ensure you use a healthy mix of broad, phrase, and exact match keywords.
- Listing Audit: The IG PPC team evaluates the quality of your product listings to ensure they are not contributing to a high ACoS. In addition, analyze individual product conversion rates to identify issues at the ASIN level.
- Competitor Analysis: IG PPC account managers compare your product listings and advertising strategies with those of your closest competitors to identify market gaps you can exploit to get an edge.
- Detailed Reporting: The IG PPC audit team schedules a one-on-one call where you’ll learn about your ad spending leaks and how to maximize your PPC budget to increase your sales.
IG PPC has over a decade of experience providing comprehensive Amazon PPC audits that deliver quick, significant improvements in campaign performance for new and existing customers. The account managers also offer specialized pre- and post-acquisition audit services to help aggregators assess the profit potential of prospective brands they’d like to acquire. This has positioned IG PPC as a strategic partner for Amazon aggregators looking to take other brands under their wing to scale their operations and boost revenue growth.
Benchmarks for Fast Yet Accurate PPC Audits
While speed matters during PPC audits, it shouldn’t come at the expense of actionable insights; the best PPC audits strike a balance between efficiency and depth to help Amazon sellers consistently refine their campaigns and boost profits.
The hallmarks of a fast and effective PPC audit include:
- Clear Audit Objectives: Amazon brands and aggregators should define what they hope to achieve from the PPC audit, such as cost reduction, scale-readiness, or RoAS improvement. This helps tie the insights back to the business goals.
- Time to Insight: Teams should communicate with their clients how long the comprehensive account audit process will take to manage expectations.
- Structured Workflows: Exceptional PPC teams have standardized audit checklists to speed execution without overlooking even the most minor yet essential details.
- Focus on High-Impact Metrics: Effective audit teams prioritize essential metrics such as RoAS, impression share, search term waste, and budget efficiency to paint a clear picture of their clients’ ad campaign performance.
- Concise Reporting: Comprehensive PPC audits should highlight high-impact findings, such as ad spend leaks and untapped opportunities Amazon brands can exploit to grow sales consistently.
How Experienced PPC Teams Optimise Audit Time
Seasoned PPC teams have standardized workflows and audit checklists that help them cut through the noise and go straight to identifying what’s actually moving the needle for your Amazon campaigns.
At IG PPC, account managers have experience with hundreds of Amazon brands and aggregators, and collectively manage up to $3 billion in annual sales. This means they recognize red flags and unexplored opportunities quickly, cutting audit time by a significant amount.
Other ways the IG PPC team reduces the audit turnaround time include:
1. Leveraging Automation
IG PPC audit teams use Amazon PPC software, such as Helium10, to automate repetitive tasks, including data collection and negative keyword list building. This significantly reduces the time spent on low-impact tasks.
Automation also helps identify issues in real time and recommend timely interventions, especially for Amazon ad spending. For example, a PPC audit could reveal wasted ad spend on negative keywords, which should be marked immediately so the money can go to high-performing campaigns.
2. Parallel Review
A good PPC team understands each team member’s strengths. This allows them to spread out auditing tasks to different individuals for simultaneous review.
Where one may analyze a company’s bid strategies, another may track landing page performance, and another may monitor data accuracy, thereby reducing turnaround time.
3. Defining Clear Goals
At IG PPC, auditing begins with a discovery call, during which clients outline what they want to achieve from the process.
For example, a client may want to improve their CTR by 15% within 2 quarters or achieve double-digit ROAS growth within a quarter. This saves time otherwise wasted tracking metrics that will have no bearing on the final report.
4. Using Prioritization Frameworks
One thing that sets experienced teams apart is that they use prioritization frameworks, such as the ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) Method, to determine which issues to address first.
The framework ensures the audit team addresses high-impact, easy-to-implement changes first, giving Amazon sellers and aggregators quick wins they can build on.
5. Proven PPC Audit Workflows
The best PPC teams use proprietary audit frameworks refined through years of account audit experience. This helps eliminate redundant steps and ensures the process moves quickly without overlooking essential metrics.
For example, IG PPC uses standardized audit processes that make the process reproducible. This means a client would receive a report that is significantly the same regardless of the account manager who undertakes the audit.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Below are answers to common questions about complete account PPC audits:
What are the Most Common Mistakes Found in PPC Audits?
PPC audits can unearth numerous mistakes, including:
- Failure to monitor sales conversions at all or counting a single conversion multiple times, which inflates your metrics.
- Using broad keywords that lead to clicks but very few conversions, resulting in wasted ad spend.
- Failure to optimize landing pages and product listings to encourage shoppers to make their purchase decision when in your store.
- Hesitation to add phrases to negative keywords, resulting in ad wastage on low-impact search strings.
How Much Do Agencies Charge for PPC Audits?
The cost of a PPC audit can vary widely depending on its complexity. A firm offering a flat-fee model can charge you anywhere between a few hundred dollars for simple audits and several thousand dollars for more in-depth audits.
A Reddit thread on agency pricing reflects how much variance there is within the industry, as indicated by user KalaBaZey, who states:
“I have seen people charge $2k for an account that spends 5k a month. With your numbers, paying $4k per month just seems like the case of you get what you pay for.”
The good news is that IG PPC offers a free PPC audit and doesn’t tie Amazon sellers to contracts.
How Often Should a Full PPC Audit Be Conducted?
It varies: some Amazon sellers and aggregators conduct PPC audits monthly, while others conduct them annually.
However, as a company that has won multiple awards as the best PPC agency, IG PPC recommends performing a comprehensive PPC audit at least every 3 months, a reasonable interval to determine whether your strategy is effective.
Do PPC Audits Include Competitor Analysis?
Yes. A full PPC audit compares your business’s performance with that of your competitors.
This includes analyzing your competitors’ keyword usage and bidding strategies, and conducting an Amazon listing audit to identify gaps you can exploit to dominate your categories.
Conclusion
Conducting a full PPC account audit helps you seal leaks in your ad spend and allocate resources to the best-performing campaigns, boosting your bottom line. However, while the exact time the review will take varies depending on the scope and data accuracy, most audits take between a week and three weeks.
The IG PPC team has unrivalled knowledge and experience in full account audits to help Amazon sellers and aggregators zap hidden costs, achieving a 34% TACoS improvement in 90 days. This includes specialized pre- and post-acquisition audit services for aggregators looking to add new Amazon stores to their catalog.
Book a call today and discover ways to optimize your PPC spend and drive more sales for your Amazon brand.
