Three exist: a free written audit from an agency that wants the account, a paid one-off audit priced as a project, and an hourly diagnostic. Pick by what you plan to do with the findings. Our audit is free and returns a written report with prioritized fixes within 48 hours.
The short version
- Free audits are lead generation, and that is fine as long as you get the written report either way.
- Paid audits buy independence, which matters when the auditor should not be the implementer.
- Hourly diagnostics suit one narrow question, not a whole account.
- Judge any audit by its diagnosis, not by the length of the deck.
- The output should be ranked by expected impact, with an owner and an effort estimate per item.
You are probably here because sales dropped and nobody can say why
That is the usual reason a seller starts looking at audits. Units are down, ACoS crept up, and the reporting you have shows what happened without explaining it. Before you buy anything, be specific about which question you need answered, because the three audit formats answer different ones.
If the question is "what is wrong with this account", you want a full written audit. If it is "is this specific campaign structure sane", an hour with a specialist is enough. If it is "should I trust the agency currently running this", you want someone with no interest in taking over the work.
Symptom to cause to who should look at it
| Symptom | Most likely causes | Audit format that answers it |
|---|---|---|
| Sessions flat, conversion falling | Image or price change, new competitor, review trend, variation split | Full written audit |
| Sessions falling, conversion stable | Rank loss, keyword cannibalization, one channel switched off | Full written audit |
| ACoS rising with flat sales | Bid inflation, match-type overlap, budget capping at the wrong hours | Hourly diagnostic |
| Revenue fine, profit falling | Return rate, fee changes, dimensional weight, discount stacking | Paid project audit |
| Everything fine, growth stalled | Only one or two traffic channels running | Full written audit |
That last row is the most common and the least diagnosed. There are five ways traffic reaches an Amazon listing: organic search, paid ads, promotions, influencer and creator content, and off-channel demand you bring in yourself. Most sellers run two of them well and never activate the rest, then conclude the category is saturated. An audit that only inspects campaigns cannot see this, because four of the five channels leave almost no trace inside the ad console.
What a proper audit covers
Whatever you pay, the report should cover all of it:
- Listing quality, title through backend, against the top competitors rather than against a checklist.
- Primary image click-through rate, because it decides how much of search demand you even get to compete for.
- Conversion rate by ASIN and by variation, with the reasons attached.
- Ad performance at structure level, not just at spend level.
- Traffic channel activation, all five, with which are running and which are dormant.
- Pricing, including where you sit against the category and what your discount cadence has taught buyers.
- Return rate and what the reviews say is causing it.
If the report you receive is a screenshot tour of your own dashboards, you bought a summary, not an audit. The value is in the causal claim: this number is low because of that, and here is the fix, ranked.
Comparing the three options
Free. An agency invests a few hours because it wants the work. The trade is that the recommendations tend to point toward services they sell. That bias is manageable if the report is written, specific, and yours to keep. Ours is free, delivered in writing with fixes in priority order, inside 48 hours, and there is no charge and no obligation attached to it. About 50 operators run this work in-house, so the audit is done by the operators who would run the account, not by a sales team.
Paid project. You pay for a fixed deliverable. The advantage is independence, and it is worth buying when you already have an agency and want a second opinion on their work. Ask what the fee includes: number of ASINs, marketplaces, and whether a follow-up call is part of it.
Hourly. Cheapest, narrowest, and best used after a full audit has told you where to dig. Bring one question and the data ready.
What most agencies will not tell you
Half of what turns up in an audit is not an agency problem at all. Price, packaging, landed cost, and return rate sit with the brand, and no amount of account management fixes a product that arrives damaged or costs too much to ship. A good audit will say so, which is uncomfortable for the person hoping to sell you monthly management.
The other thing: audits are easy to write and hard to sequence. Twenty findings with no order is a document that never gets executed. Insist that every item carries an expected impact, an effort estimate, and a name against it, or you have bought a list of things you already suspected.
Related answers
- What does a good Amazon account audit include
- Hourly vs retainer for catalog cleanup
- Amazon agency pricing models explained
- KPIs an Amazon agency should report weekly
- Amazon agency pricing and economics: the complete guide
The written 48-hour audit is available without charge at Flapen.
