A systematic review of your retail media accounts that surfaces waste, inefficiency, and untapped opportunity — with dollar-impact quantification and a prioritised action plan.
What is a retail media audit?
A retail media audit is a structured review of a brand's advertising accounts across retailer networks, examining campaign architecture, wasted spend, self-competition, attribution accuracy and retail readiness. It produces a prioritised list of specific findings, each tied to a product, campaign and dollar amount, with a sequenced action plan.
What is a retail media audit?
A retail media audit is a systematic review of your advertising accounts — across platforms, campaigns, keywords, bids, and ASIN-level performance — designed to identify structural inefficiencies, misallocated budget, and untapped growth opportunities.
Most brands with established retail media programmes have significant waste embedded in their accounts: campaigns funding competitor-brand searches, ad spend on ASINs without the Buy Box, bloated keyword lists with minimal return, and attribution models that make underperforming campaigns look profitable.
A thorough audit surfaces these issues with data — not opinions — and delivers a prioritised action plan with the expected impact of each recommendation quantified at product and campaign level. How much performance improves from structural changes alone varies substantially by account, and any consultant quoting you a percentage before looking at your data is guessing. What can be said is that recoverable structural waste is present in the substantial majority of accounts reviewed.
Campaign Architecture Review
Are campaigns properly segmented by brand vs non-brand? Match type? ASIN? A poorly structured account makes optimization impossible and inflates costs.
Keyword Efficiency Analysis
Which search terms are driving sales vs. consuming budget? We mine search term reports across all campaigns to identify wasted spend and harvesting opportunities.
Buy Box Health Check
Ad spend on ASINs without the Buy Box is pure waste. We audit every funded ASIN for Buy Box ownership and flag suppression risks before they drain budget.
Attribution & Measurement Audit
Are you measuring the right things? We review attribution windows, halo attribution, and cross-campaign cannibalisation — ensuring performance data reflects business reality.
What we examine
Where is budget going vs. where revenue is coming from? We build ASIN-level revenue attribution tables that reveal which campaigns and products are actually driving sales — and which are inflating spend metrics without business impact.
Branded keywords capturing non-brand budget, off-catalogue Sponsored Brand halo attribution, and competitor ASINs appearing in your Product Targeting campaigns all represent leakage. We quantify the financial impact and provide an immediate fix plan.
Negative keyword coverage is the most consistently under-built area in the accounts we review, and one of the few levers that recovers spend without requiring any budget increase. Every irrelevant query that converts to a click is wasted CPC. We build negative keyword lists from search term data across all match types — and audit the existing negatives too, because an over-broad negative phrase silently blocking an entire keyword cluster is just as costly as a missing one.
Are you funding the right products? We map ad investment against organic rank, conversion rate, Buy Box ownership, and margin — then recommend a reallocation that concentrates spend on ASINs with the highest probability of incremental return.
Are you missing high-intent search volume on Instacart, Kroger, or Walmart because your budget is overly concentrated on Amazon? We benchmark platform presence against category distribution and recommend network expansion priorities.
Is your reporting setup producing the data you need to make decisions? We audit your measurement stack — attribution windows, reporting cadence, KPI definitions, and dashboard reliability — and recommend infrastructure improvements.
The TNOMADS approach
Raw data, not dashboard screenshots
We work directly from platform exports, search term reports, and API data — not dashboard summaries. This means we find issues that aggregated views hide.
Dollar-impact quantification
Every finding is expressed in dollar terms: "This campaign is wasting $X/week on branded queries that are converting at 8x ACoS target." No abstract recommendations.
Prioritised, executable output
The audit deliverable is a prioritised action plan organised by impact and effort — so your team can begin implementing improvements from day one, not after weeks of planning.
The vocabulary
Comparisons
Two different engagements that get conflated when brands are deciding what they need.
| Audit | Ongoing management | |
|---|---|---|
| Question answered | What is wrong and what is it costing? | How do we run this well week to week? |
| Duration | Two to four weeks | Continuous |
| Output | Prioritised findings and an action plan | Live optimisation and reporting |
| Best when | Performance is unexplained, or before an investment or agency decision | Structure is sound and needs consistent execution |
| Independence | Can be run independently of whoever manages the account | Held by whoever manages the account |
Retailers and networks offer account reviews. They are useful and they are not neutral.
| Platform review | Independent audit | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Usually free | Paid |
| Typical recommendation | Adopt more formats, increase budget, enable more automation | Whatever the data supports, including spending less |
| Cross-platform view | Single network only | All networks together |
| Incentive | Network revenue growth | Fee is not tied to your spend |
Real results
Challenge
Mature accounts with substantial spend and years of accumulated structure, where reported efficiency looked acceptable but growth had stalled and nobody could explain why.
Our approach
Recurring findings across audits
Business impact
Rather than focusing on tactical bid adjustments, audits delivered prioritised strategic roadmaps aligned with commercial objectives.
Case studies are presented by industry rather than by client name. Figures are drawn from live account analysis. Engagements marked prior agency engagement were delivered by Ana Perez Ibarz in a previous agency role; the work and results are hers, the client relationships were the agency's. TNOMADS does not identify clients or publish client performance data without written consent.
Frequently asked questions
Why TNOMADS
About the author
Sources
Related services
What to build once the structural problems are fixed.
Where most audit findings concentrate for Amazon-led brands.
Auto/Manual cannibalisation and negative gaps are common here.
The measurement layer most audits find missing entirely.
Where attribution and overlap findings get quantified properly.
Conversion tracking problems that invalidate everything downstream.