Reporting, Dashboards, and the 30-Day Audit

A seller cannot control what they cannot see clearly. Part II built the PPC engine: break-even math, campaign roles, Lottery testing, ASIN classification, search-term interpretation, negatives, winner graduation, data maturity, seasonality, and weekly review.

But as the account grows, campaign decisions are not enough. A Merch account can look healthy while estimated profit shrinks, acceptable campaign averages hide weak ASINs, winners stay buried inside noisy structures, seasonal campaigns keep leaking, or low-bid performance works only because CPC stayed contained.

This chapter turns reporting into account management. The seller should read the account as a system with layers: account data for direction, campaign data for structure, and ASIN/search-term data for action. Reporting is useful only when it improves the next decision.

The chapter then defines the three-layer reporting system, the control dashboard, the 30-day audit, and a practical priority order. The goal is not to stare at dashboards more often. The goal is to understand what the account needs next.

Dashboard note: estimated royalty, estimated profit after ads, break-even ACoS, CPC tolerance, and action labels are review aids, not exact platform-reported profit or automatic instructions. Check current reports, metric definitions, attribution behavior, and royalty assumptions before relying on the dashboard for decisions.

The output of this chapter is not a finished dashboard or spreadsheet. It is a minimum working reporting surface.

The seller should know:

• which layer answers the question;
• which rows deserve visibility now;
• which fields are estimates;
• which findings become the next queue, action, or decision-log entry.

The decision log from Chapter 9 is the input. Chapter 10 asks whether those weekly signals and changes add up to a stable account pattern over a wider review window.