Every new account we take on starts the same way: nobody touches a bid, a listing or a line of copy until we can answer one question: what is the binding constraint on this business right now?
The reason matters. If your conversion rate is 0.8% and you double traffic, you have doubled your customer acquisition cost and learned nothing. If your repeat purchase rate is 11% in a category where 30% is normal, no amount of prospecting spend will fix the unit economics. The order of operations is the strategy.
The twelve points run in sequence: measurement integrity, margin model, traffic composition, conversion funnel, product page quality, catalogue and feed health, marketplace account health, ad account structure, creative volume, lifecycle coverage, technical performance, and finally competitive position. Each has a threshold that either clears it or flags it as the constraint.
In practice, about 70% of audits surface the same three culprits: attribution that cannot support a spending decision, product pages that were never rebuilt after the store scaled, and marketplace catalogues nobody has owned in eighteen months. None of them are glamorous. All of them are cheaper to fix than buying more traffic.