Weekly checks keep an Amazon ads account running: negatives added, bids nudged, overspend caught. What they rarely do is step back. Over a few months, an account managed only week to week drifts. Budgets reflect last quarter's priorities, rules fire on thresholds nobody has revisited, and campaigns that were supposed to be temporary are still running.
The end-of-month review is the step back. This playbook lays out a two-hour review in six steps. It assumes a weekly routine is already in place; if not, start with the weekly reporting playbook.
When to run it
A few days into the new month. Attribution means the last days of the previous month are still filling in on the first. By the third or fourth, the month is close to complete and the numbers will not move much more.
Block the time. A review squeezed between other tasks becomes a glance at the dashboard, and a glance does not answer the questions below.
Step 1: Results against plan
Start with four numbers for the month: total sales, ad spend, ACoS and TACoS. Compare each with the plan you set at the start of the month, and with the same month last year if you have it.
Write one sentence explaining each gap. "Spend ran ahead of plan because the new launch campaign scaled faster than expected." "TACoS rose because organic sales dipped during a stockout." If you cannot explain a gap, that is the first thing to investigate before changing anything.
Step 2: Where the money went
Split spend by campaign type: brand, generic, competitor, discovery, launch. Then by product. The question is whether spend went where the plan said it should.
Accounts drift toward whatever campaigns spend most easily. Broad discovery campaigns can absorb budget quietly while the campaigns tied to the month's priorities stay underfunded. Look for campaigns whose share of spend grew without a decision behind it.
Then check pacing. Which campaigns ran out of budget on most days, and which ended most days with budget left? Budget pacing covers how to read this. A campaign that ran out every afternoon and hit its ACoS target is a candidate for more budget. One that never spent its budget does not need the headroom.
Step 3: The rules and schedules
If you use automation, this is where it gets reviewed. Read through the month's change log and ask three questions about every rule.
Did it fire? A rule that never triggered may have a threshold set too loosely, or it may be watching a campaign that changed.
Did it fire too often? A rule that triggers daily is no longer handling exceptions. It has become the normal state of the campaign, and the underlying setting probably needs changing instead.
Did its changes help? Compare the campaigns a rule acted on with those it did not. Keeping a PPC change log makes this step possible; without one, you are guessing.
Review dayparting schedules here too. Hourly patterns shift with the season. A schedule built in winter may pause hours that now convert. Pull the month's hourly data and check that paused or reduced hours are still the weak ones.
Step 4: Structure
Look for structural problems the weekly routine works around rather than fixes. Ad groups with mixed products that need different bids. Search terms converting well in auto campaigns that have never been moved into manual campaigns. Campaigns with no spend for a month that should be archived. Duplicate targeting across campaigns, where your own campaigns compete for the same search.
Fix one or two each month. Restructuring everything at once makes the next month's results impossible to read.
Step 5: Alerts and guardrails
Check which alerts fired during the month and whether any problem slipped through without one. If a campaign overspent for three days before anyone noticed, the alerts need tightening. If an alert fired ten times and nobody acted, it is noise and should be loosened or removed.
Look at the guardrails too: maximum bids, budget caps, the limits on what any rule can change. As the account grows, limits set months ago can become too tight or too loose. Alerts worth setting covers what a good alert set looks like.
Step 6: Next month's plan
End with a short plan for the coming month. Budget by campaign type. Target ACoS and TACoS. Any events on the calendar, such as a sale, a launch or a holiday, and the budget or rule changes each needs. The one or two structural fixes you chose in Step 4.
Keep it to a page. This becomes the plan you compare against in Step 1 next month, which is what turns a monthly review into a loop rather than a ritual. Setting PPC budgets helps with the budget lines.
When the monthly review is not enough
If the review keeps finding the same structural problems, or the results against plan are off by a wide margin for several months running, the account needs a deeper look. The audit process covers that, and it is worth running once or twice a year regardless.
Frequently asked questions
When should I do a monthly Amazon ads review?
A few days into the new month, not on the last day. Amazon attributes orders to ad clicks for several days after the click, so the final days of the month are incomplete until the attribution window closes. Reviewing on the third or fourth gives you a complete month.
How long should a monthly Amazon PPC review take?
About two hours for a typical single-brand account, longer for agencies or large catalogs. If it takes much longer, the weekly routine is probably leaving too much undone. If it takes much less, it may be skipping the structural questions that only the monthly review asks.
What is the difference between a monthly review and an audit?
A monthly review checks results against plan and adjusts budgets, rules and structure for the next month. An audit is a deeper, less frequent look at the whole account, usually once or twice a year or before a major change such as adopting automation.
Off Hours logs every rule change and includes spend alerts on every plan, so the monthly review has a complete record of what your rules did and when. Start a free 14-day trial.