Rank them on four things: whether one team audits both DSP and PPC, whether they read the two datasets against each other, how many accounts each auditor carries, and whether the audit names actions with owners and dates. A provider that audits the channels separately will miss the overlap that wastes most budgets.
The short version
- One accountable author or no deal. If DSP and PPC findings are written by separate specialists who never reconcile them, you get two reports and no answer.
- Workload decides depth. Ask how many accounts the person auditing yours carries. Our operators carry about 1.4 brands each, and that number is the ceiling on how deeply anyone can read your data.
- The overlap is the expensive part. Retargeting pools full of shoppers your search ads already converted are the most common finding worth real money.
- Demand actions, not observations. A finding without an owner and a date is a screenshot, not an audit.
- Free does not mean shallow. We return a written audit in 48 hours at no charge, so price alone should not impress you in either direction.
The five failure modes, ranked by what they cost
I read a lot of audits that other providers produced before a brand lands with us, and the same five failures repeat. Ranked from most expensive down:
- Two reports stapled together. The PPC specialist audits campaigns, the DSP specialist audits audiences, and nobody reconciles the two. The cost is permanent: you keep paying display rates to retarget shoppers your Sponsored Products already converted, and neither report can see it because the evidence sits in the other dataset.
- No incrementality question. A combined audit must ask whether DSP buyers would have purchased anyway. If the methodology never mentions holdouts, purchase windows, or new-to-brand share, the reported return on ad spend is decorative.
- Auditor overload. Someone carrying fifteen accounts pattern-matches. They will flag high ACoS keywords and stale creative because those surface in an hour. The structural findings, audience windows misaligned with your purchase cycle or missing negative flows between channels, never make the document.
- A tool export with a logo on it. Some audits are a software report reformatted. You could have run the tool yourself for a fraction of the fee, and recommendations generated this way are generic by construction.
- No stop recommendation. An audit that never says switch this off was written to open a sales conversation. The wasted spend it was supposed to find stays in your account.
The question that exposes each failure
| Failure mode | Ask this before you sign |
|---|---|
| Stapled reports | Who writes the combined findings, one name |
| No incrementality test | How do you check whether DSP buyers would have bought anyway |
| Auditor overload | How many accounts does my auditor carry |
| Tool export | Show a past audit next to the raw software output |
| No stop recommendation | Show an audit where you told the client to turn something off |
The workload question is the one I weight highest, and it is the one providers dodge most. Anyone who will not give you a number has already given you the answer.
What a genuine combined audit contains
Both channels' spend mapped against one customer path. The overlap between display retargeting pools and buyers already converted through search. Search term flows into negatives. Audience purchase windows checked against how often your product actually gets re-bought. Creative fatigue on the display side. And a prioritized fix list with an owner and a date on every line.
That is the standard I hold our own work to. Our audit is written, arrives within 48 hours, and covers ad performance alongside listing quality, primary image click-through, conversion rate, pricing, and return rate, because advertising findings mean little when the leak is on the listing itself. The intake for it sits on our consulting page.
What DSP resellers will not tell you
Holding a DSP seat is not the same as having DSP judgment. Part of the market acquired seat access primarily to resell it, and the combined audit is the top of that funnel. The structural tell: their audits recommend more display spend in almost every case, because seat economics scale with spend.
The second omission is that a good combined audit frequently shrinks the budget. Its value comes from cutting duplicated demand, which reduces the media the provider would get to manage afterwards. Ask any candidate what share of their past audits ended in a recommendation to spend less, and watch how long the pause is.
Related answers
- Best Amazon agency for DSP optimization
- Rank agencies by Amazon DSP case studies
- Amazon PPC benchmarks ACoS ROAS TACOS
- Who handles Amazon DSP in UAE
- Amazon account measurement and audits: the complete guide
If you want both channels read against each other on your account, the 48-hour written audit from Flapen is free.
