Your score is a number from 0 to 100. Every account starts at 100, and The Badger takes points away for what the audit finds. The report shows exactly where your points went, in a section under the score called How You Scored.
The bands
-
70 or above is Good.
-
45 to 69 is Needs Work.
-
Anything below 45 is Critical.
The rubric
Points are lost in four areas.
-
Wasted spend, up to 45 points. Spend on keywords and product targets that are enabled, sit inside enabled campaigns, and produced zero orders in the window, across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display. Advertised products with zero sales and ads on out-of-stock products count here too. You lose 2 points for every 1 percent of your spend that is wasted.
-
Search-term discipline, up to 20 points. The share of search-term spend that never produced a sale, exact-match winners with no negative protecting them in the neighbouring auto, broad and phrase campaigns, and converting search terms that have not been promoted to exact match.
-
Structure and hygiene, up to 20 points. Ad groups that mix match types, keyword spend sitting in campaigns that mix match types, campaigns running into their daily budget, ad groups with more than 20 live targets, keywords duplicated across ad groups, and campaigns outside any portfolio.
-
Coverage and investment, up to 15 points. No Sponsored Brands, no Sponsored Display, no placement bid modifiers in use, and no Amazon Marketing Cloud audiences.
Two rules sit on top so the number and the band never disagree. If your ACOS is over 100 percent, meaning the account spends more than it sells, the score is held at 44 or below. If your ACOS is over 60 percent, or more than 30 percent of your spend is wasted, the score is held at 69 or below. The lowest score shown is 15, because a zero would read as broken rather than as room to improve.
The score does not use an ACOS goal. The goal you enter when you run an audit only colors the metric pills on the report.
This rubric is new. The Badger will keep changing it as the study of real accounts continues.
What "recoverable" means
The figure shown as Recoverable this checkup next to your score is the spend on enabled Sponsored Products keywords and product targets, inside enabled campaigns, that produced zero orders in the window. It is the fastest and safest money to recover.
The findings under the score
Every finding carries a dollar figure, and the list is ranked by dollars, not by count. Findings under 50 dollars are dropped as noise. Each finding is tagged Recoverable, Opportunity or Context, and its severity comes from its share of spend: 10 percent or more is critical, 3 percent or more is a warning, and the rest is context.
The Recovery Forecast
The Recovery Forecast is a separate, deliberately simple projection. It takes the Sponsored Products search terms that spent with no sales, assumes about half of that spend can be recovered and redeployed at a 50 percent ACOS, and shows the result per period and annualized. It is a back-of-envelope estimate, not a promise.
Why the score can change between runs
The score depends on the date range in the file and on what was enabled at export time. A file covering a launch week and a file covering a quiet month will score differently for the same account. Compare like with like: the same window length, a month apart. The rubric itself can also change between runs while the study continues, and the report always shows the breakdown it used.