Is Your Amazon Agency a Black Box? How to Audit It From Your Own Account

You pay an agency every month. You get a report every month. And if someone asked you what the agency actually changed in your account last week, you'd have to go and ask the agency.

That's the black box. Your agency might be doing excellent work, but in a monthly PDF, good work and no work can look the same.

You can audit your Amazon agency from accounts you already own. Its ad changes happen inside your Amazon Ads account, which keeps a change history for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns and a search term report of what you paid for. Seller Central, Amazon Ads, and Brand Registry each list who can act for you. So open those screens first, then ask your agency about a recent week and hold each answer up against what you saw:

1. What changed in the account this week?
2. Why did it change?
3. Who decided, and did anyone on your side approve it?
4. What happened afterward?
5. Could you have seen all this without asking?

Here's a made-up brand to follow through the steps. Say you sell bamboo kitchen storage, you do about $4 million a year on Amazon, and your agency runs your ads and your listings. On the 5th of each month you get a 14-page PDF with ACoS, TACoS, and sales charts. It's polished, and you still couldn't say what anyone did in week two.

Here's what good answers sound like for that brand. Asked what changed, a good agency says the drawer organizer campaign got a bigger daily budget on Tuesday, while a vague one just says it's been optimizing. The reason should be something it noticed, like the organizer's best search term running out of budget before lunch while there was plenty of stock to sell.

Approval depends on the size of the change. Nobody at the brand needs to sign off a small bid tweak, but a doubled budget or new listing copy should reach someone there before it goes live. And the result is just what that campaign sold in the days after the change.

The fifth question is the one the agency can't answer for you. If it has to dig through its own spreadsheet for any of this, or can't answer at all, the brand is still in the box.

You need your own login to these screens, and admin-level access for the user and role checks. If you can't open them yourself, that's your first finding, and the access section further down shows which roles you should hold. Every Amazon screen and date below was checked against Amazon's own pages in November 2026.

Start your Amazon PPC audit in the change history

If your agency runs your ads, start here. You don't need a specialist to read this screen. In the Amazon Ads console, go to Campaigns and click History. A note at the end of Amazon's Sponsored Brands setup help page says History shows changes to Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns, including campaign settings, targeting, and negative targeting, for one campaign, one ad group, or all of them at once.

Pick last month and read that history side by side with the agency's report for the same month. In the kitchen storage example, the PDF says "bids optimized across the account", while History shows two budget increases on one campaign and nothing else for 19 days. That might be fine, since a stable account doesn't need daily edits. You now have a specific question to ask about those two changes and the quiet weeks around them.

While you're there, put the PDF's spend and sales for the month next to the campaign totals in the console for the same dates. If they don't match, ask which report and attribution window the agency used. And because Amazon's help page doesn't say History records which person made each change, ask the agency to name who made each one, and make sure everyone works under their own login.

See what you paid for in the search term report

The search term report for Sponsored Products lists the searches that led to at least one click on your ads, with spend and sales for each. Amazon gives this report a 65-day lookback window, so it only ever shows your recent history.

Sort by spend. Are you paying for searches that have nothing to do with your product, and are the same wasted terms still there month after month? Then check History for the negative keywords added in that period. If the bamboo brand keeps paying for "bamboo toothbrush" clicks and no negative keyword ever appears, you've found something the PDF didn't mention.

For more on reading those rows, see our guide to Amazon PPC clicks that don't turn into sales.

Check Seller Central permissions, Ads users, and Brand Registry roles

This part matters most if you ever leave, so do it now while things are calm.

Seller Central: Open Settings, then User Permissions. The primary user, which Amazon also calls the account administrator, is whoever registered the account, so check that it's you or someone at your company. Then look at how the agency shows up.

In a November 2023 Seller Forums post, an Amazon staff member told sellers to put contractors and outside companies under authorized partners, on the Authorized Partners tab in Global Account, and not to add them as secondary users. Give each one only the permissions it needs, the post said, and look over the list now and then. Labels on your screens may have changed since, so go by what you see.

While you're in there, open Manage Your Apps. It lists the outside apps you've authorized to work with your account, and some of them may belong to your agency.

Amazon Ads: If your ads account runs through Seller Central, you add ads users from User Permissions there. Accounts managed in the Ads console list users under Administration, then Account access and settings, with Admin, Editor, Viewer, or custom roles. Amazon's help page on managing Ads users says only Admins can invite, update, or remove users, so at least one Admin should be a person on your payroll.

Brand Registry: An Amazon staff post from April 2023 lists three Brand Registry roles: Administrator, Rights Owner, and Registered Agent. The Administrator is the one that matters here, because it assigns roles to everyone else. If the only Administrator works for your agency, the agency decides who can protect your brand.

Line up ad spend against stock, listings, and Account Health

Ads can't sell what isn't there. They need stock, a live listing, and an account in good standing, so look at the work around the advertising, even if your agency's contract only covers ads.

Open your Account Health page and your inventory, and line them up against the ad spend. Were ads running on a product that was about to stock out? Was a listing suppressed for a week while its campaign kept spending?

If the agency also runs your listings, open a few live product pages and compare the title, bullets, and images with what it says it changed. None of this is automatically the agency's fault, since maybe nobody ever asked it to watch stock. Either way, you'll find out who is meant to watch stock and listings, and whether anyone notices when a stockout or a suppressed listing starts wasting ad spend.

Here's how each check pairs with a question for the agency:

If you want to keep running these checks after the audit, our weekly Amazon account audit checklist turns them into a routine. And for what a good agency report should contain in the first place, see the KPIs and reporting cadence to expect from an Amazon agency.

Go back to the five questions and score each one against what you saw on the screens. Give it 2 points when the agency answered clearly and your screens agree. Give it 1 point when you got an answer you couldn't check, or only part of an answer, and 0 when there was no clear answer or the screens told a different story.

Add them up and you have a score out of 10. Nobody has benchmarked the cutoffs below, so move them if your account calls for it.

Stay (8 to 10): You can see what your agency does, and it can tell you why. If sales still disappoint, look first at what sits outside its reach. Did you reorder stock in time? Did you change the price? Is a catalog decision waiting on you?

A new agency wouldn't fix any of that, and it would spend its first stretch learning your account.

Narrow the scope or fix the reporting (5 to 7): In this range the work is probably getting done, and you just can't see enough of it. You can often fix that in one conversation. Ask for a short weekly note of what changed, written so you can check it against History, or for someone to walk you through the screens once a month.

Sometimes half the work is fine and the other half isn't. If the bamboo brand's ads were sharp but nobody was watching stock, it could keep the agency on ads and hand inventory to someone else. Our guides to which Amazon jobs to outsource first and an Amazon agency versus an in-house team can help you decide who that someone should be.

Plan a switch (0 to 4): You asked directly and still can't see the work, so a better-looking report won't change much. Start the transition plan below before you tell anyone.

So how did the kitchen storage brand do? Asked directly, the agency listed its two budget increases and History matched, so the first question gets 2 points, even though the PDF had called them bid optimization. It explained those increases but had nothing to say about the "bamboo toothbrush" clicks, which leaves the second question with a single point for a partial answer.

The last three questions scored nothing. Nobody could say who made the edits or who decided on them, and the PDF only showed monthly totals, so neither change was ever tied to a result. The brand only saw the changes and the wasted clicks because it opened History and the search term report itself.

That's 3 out of 10, which puts it in the switch band. The Brand Registry Administrator role also sat with the agency, so moving that role goes first on the transition list.

If you also sell on Walmart or TikTok Shop and want one team across all of it, look for an agency that covers those channels. Lumian focuses on Amazon.

When switching Amazon agencies goes badly, the reason is usually dull: things happen in the wrong order. The brand gives notice while the agency still holds the admin roles, or nobody downloads the data until it's gone. Do it in this order instead:

1. Read your current agency's contract for its notice and exit terms.
2. Make sure you hold the top role in Seller Central, Amazon Ads, and Brand Registry.
3. Download your campaigns, search terms, and saved reports.
4. Give notice, then overlap away from your peak weeks.
5. Remove the old agency's users and apps.

Before you give notice

Start with your current agency's contract. Its notice period and exit terms tell you how much time you have for everything below, so read them before you say a word to the agency. For example, if the contract asks for 30 days' notice, try to finish these steps before that clock starts.

Next, check that you hold the top role everywhere: the primary user in Seller Central, an Admin in Amazon Ads (or the matching Seller Central permission), and the Administrator in Brand Registry. Amazon's help page says nobody can leave an Ads account while they're its only Admin, so get that role into your hands before the conversation starts.

Then take copies of what the agency built.

• Campaign structure: in the Ads console, go to Campaigns, then Bulk operations, and click Download campaigns. The spreadsheet holds your campaigns, ad groups, keywords, negatives, and bids, so a new team starts from what exists.
• Search terms: download the search term report now. It only reaches back 65 days, so you can't pull anything older from it later, and you'll want your own copies.
• Saved and scheduled reports: Amazon is shutting down its sponsored ads reports pages on December 31, 2026, and says the dates may change. Saved reports, schedules, and historical data left on those pages will be permanently deleted, and from December 17, 2026, you can't create or edit reports there. Amazon's migration tool only moves active reports from the last 24 months, so if your agency built your reporting on those pages, migrate it to unified reporting in Amazon Ads and download anything older, whether or not you switch.
• Creative files: ask for the source files for your images, A+ content, and Brand Store, then check your contract for who owns them. That conversation goes more smoothly while the relationship is still running.

Pick the handover window

Late November is a rotten time for the kitchen storage brand to change hands. Black Friday lands on November 27, 2026. The brand's budgets will need daily watching that week, just as they would during a launch or a stockout, so any brand should hand over in a quieter stretch. If it can, the brand should let the old agency keep running things for a week or two while the new team looks on with view-only ads access.

After the handover

Remove the outgoing agency's users from Seller Central, Amazon Ads, and Brand Registry. In Manage Your Apps, disable any apps it authorized, and ask which ad tools it connected to your Amazon Ads account so you can remove those too. Then, after 30 days, run the five questions again on the new team. Any agency you hire should pass the same test, and that includes Lumian.

How Lumian answers the five questions

Lumian's managed service puts a Brand Manager and specialist operators alongside AI agents that work across your ads, listings, inventory, and account health. Hold us to the same five questions. If we raised the budget on a drawer organizer campaign, you should find the change in History, hear from your Brand Manager why we made it, and see what the campaign sold the week after. New listing copy comes to you first and goes live once you've approved it.

For an example of advertising work explained step by step, Lumian's published STREGA case-study result card reports ACoS falling from 69% to 17%, and the STREGA case study walks through the campaign restructuring behind it.

If your score came out low and you'd like a second opinion, Book a Strategy Call and bring your five answers.