By Ted Gibson — RippleEffect
An Amazon account audit should cover five things: the catalogue, the listings, the advertising, account health, and the inventory and Buy Box position sitting underneath all of it. That list is not controversial, and every agency offering a free audit will claim all five. What separates an audit worth reading from a lead magnet is narrower than coverage. It is whether the findings come back in priority order, whether each one names the number it is meant to move, and whether whoever wrote it will tell you which of your problems is not worth fixing yet.
The five areas, and the question each one is really asking
The catalogue question is whether the range you sell on Amazon is the range you meant to sell: variations that have split, child products orphaned from their parent, duplicates competing with each other, and the long tail of SKUs quietly costing more to stock than they return. The listing question is narrower than whether the copy reads well. It is whether the main image works as an advert at thumbnail size, which is a different job from packaging, and whether the Buy Box is reliably yours. Marknology puts 80 to 85% of purchases in most categories through the Buy Box, so an audit that never mentions your share of it has skipped the cheapest problem in the account.
Advertising is the section most free audits are strongest on and least useful about, because a bad ACOS is easy to screenshot and easy to promise to fix. The questions that matter are whether your total advertising cost of sale is defensible against your own margin rather than against a published benchmark, and the published benchmarks contradict each other badly, and how much of the spend is defending your own brand name rather than buying new customers. That second one is measurable in a fortnight and it is usually the largest single number an audit can move.
Account health and inventory are the two sections most likely to be thin, because neither is glamorous and neither sells a retainer. Amazon keeps its performance thresholds inside Seller Central rather than on the open web, so an agency quoting them at you is quoting them second hand and the authoritative version is the one on your own account health dashboard, which is worth having open while you read. On stock, Marknology's rule of thumb is that an inventory performance index below 400 puts your storage limits at risk and below 450 you should already be acting.
What you should actually get back
Coverage is not a deliverable. An audit that returns forty findings has told you very little, because forty findings and none leave you in the same position on Monday morning. Ours comes back as your listings, campaigns and catalogue with a prioritised set of first moves, and the prioritising is the part that takes the time. Ask whoever wrote yours for the order and the reasoning behind it, and ask what they decided to leave alone. If everything in the report is urgent, nothing in it has been diagnosed.
Nobody agrees how often you should run one
There is no standard here and the published advice is nowhere near converging. eStore Factory says most sellers should run a complete audit every 30 to 90 days. Data4Amazon recommends twice or thrice a year. Marknology sets the floor at once a year. Riverbend Consulting splits it by type, with advertising and account health monthly, listings and inventory quarterly and compliance annually. Monthly at one end, annual at the other, twelve times apart, from four firms describing the same job. Our own view is that an audit earns its keep against a decision rather than a calendar: a renewal, a hire, an agency change, a launch, a new marketplace. A brand doing £20,000 a month in the UK, or $50,000 in the US, has two or three of those in a year and each one deserves a proper look.
It is worth saying plainly that a free audit is a sales asset. Ours is, everyone else's is, and that is not a reason to refuse one. It is a reason to read it as a work sample rather than as a favour, because you are watching how someone thinks about your account before you pay them to touch it, and that is more informative than a pitch and more informative than a price. What the work costs afterwards is published, which at least takes one variable out of the comparison.