Amazon Search Terms Report: How to Read It, Use It, and Stop Wasting Ad Spend

Most sellers download the Amazon Search Terms Report, glance at it, and do nothing useful. The report sits in a spreadsheet with thousands of rows, and the default reaction is to look at the top-spending terms, feel mildly concerned, and move on. That’s a missed opportunity worth real money - because this report is the only place Amazon tells you exactly which customer queries are eating your budget and which ones are actually driving sales.

The difference between sellers who run profitable PPC campaigns and those who bleed ad spend usually comes down to how often and how carefully they act on search term data.

What the Search Terms Report Actually Contains

The report shows every customer search query that triggered your ad and resulted in at least one click. Not impressions alone - clicks. If a term generated impressions but no clicks, it won’t appear here.

Sponsored Products columns cover the core metrics: the exact customer search term, the keyword or ASIN target that triggered it, match type, impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, spend, and then the payoff columns - 7-day sales, orders, units, ACoS, ROAS, and conversion rate.

Metric	What It Tells You
Customer Search Term	The exact query the shopper typed
Targeting / Match Type	Which keyword or ASIN target triggered the impression, and the match type
Impressions / Clicks / CTR	Volume and engagement
CPC / Spend	What you paid
7-Day Sales / Orders / Units	What you got back (7-day attribution window)
ACoS / ROAS	Efficiency metrics
Conversion Rate	Orders divided by clicks

Sponsored Brands adds two critical dimensions. First, the attribution window stretches to 14 days instead of SP’s 7. Second, you get brand halo metrics - sales attributed to non-promoted ASINs in your catalog. If an SB campaign shows $2,000 in promoted ASIN sales and $600 in halo sales over 14 days, you’re undervaluing that campaign by 23% if you only look at promoted sales. Most sellers never open the SB search terms report, which means they’re making budget decisions on incomplete data.

Sponsored Display does not have a search term report. SD targets audiences and product contexts, not keyword searches.

How to Access the Report

The old path (Seller Central > Reports > Advertising Reports) is outdated. As of 2025-2026:

1. Log into Seller Central, go to Advertising > Campaign Manager
2. In the left column, click Measurement & Reporting
3. Click Sponsored Ads Reports, then Create Report
4. Select campaign type (Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands)
5. Under Report Type, select Search Term
6. Choose your time unit (Summary or Daily) and reporting period (up to 65-day lookback)
7. Click Run Report

Set up recurring downloads - weekly is the minimum useful cadence. Daily granularity gives you more to work with than summary, especially for bid optimization.

One report most sellers miss: the Search Term Impression Share Report, which shows your percentage of all ad impressions for a given term and your rank among advertisers. Available for both SP and SB campaigns with a 30-day lookback.

The 4-Bucket Framework for Search Term Decisions

Staring at thousands of search terms is paralyzing without a decision framework. Sort every term into one of four buckets:

Bucket	Criteria	Action
Winners	3+ orders, ACoS below target	Move to exact match campaign, increase bids
Potential	Some clicks, 1-2 orders, need more data	Maintain bids, gather another 2 weeks of data
Underperformers	High clicks, ACoS > 2x target	Reduce bids 10-15% per week; negate if no improvement after 3 rounds
Wasted Spend	Clicks, zero orders, spend > your profit margin	Negate immediately

The fourth bucket is where most of the money is. For a product with an $8 margin, any search term that has spent $8+ with zero orders is costing you the equivalent of a sale you never made. Negate it and move on.

This framework works best when you run it weekly. Monthly is too slow - by the time you catch a wasted-spend term, it may have burned through $50-100 unnecessarily.

Your search term data holds the blueprint for more profitable campaigns. Feedvisor’s AI-driven advertising optimization analyzes search term performance in real time, automating bid adjustments and negative keyword decisions that would take hours to execute manually.

Negative Keyword Optimization: Where the Real Savings Are

This is the highest-ROI activity you can perform with the Search Terms Report, and most sellers underspend time on it. Brands that systematically optimize negative keywords typically see around 28% less wasted ad spend and a corresponding lift in ROAS.

Three signals tell you a term should be negated. First, the spending threshold: if the term has spent more than your product’s profit margin with zero orders, it’s burning money. At an $8 margin, that’s $8 gone with nothing to show for it. Second, the click threshold: 15-20 clicks with zero conversions means the traffic isn’t relevant, though you should adjust upward for high-priced products with naturally lower conversion rates. Third, the ACoS threshold: if a term’s ACoS stays at 2-3x your target after two bid reductions - say your target is 25% and it’s still above 60% - it’s not going to improve.

Default to negative exact unless the entire concept is irrelevant. Negative exact blocks only that specific query; negative phrase blocks any query containing the phrase, which can accidentally suppress converting traffic. Use negative phrase for clearly irrelevant categories: “free,” “DIY,” “rental,” “wholesale” (if you’re B2C), or competitor brand names you don’t want to conquest. For everything else, negative exact is safer.

Products you don’t sell, variants you don’t carry, informational queries (“how to,” “what is”), and price-sensitive modifiers (“cheap,” “used” for premium products) are the usual suspects for negation.

Run this process weekly for new and high-spend campaigns, bi-weekly for scaling campaigns, and monthly for mature campaigns. The first 60-90 days produce the most negative keyword opportunities, especially from auto and broad match campaigns.

Keyword Harvesting: Moving Winners to Exact Match

The flip side of negating losers is promoting winners. Keyword harvesting moves high-converting search terms from auto or broad match campaigns into exact match campaigns where you control the bid precisely.

The process is straightforward:

1. Export the Search Terms Report (last 30 days, daily granularity)
2. Filter for terms with 3+ clicks and a conversion rate above 10%
3. Create exact match campaigns for top performers
4. Add those terms as negative keywords in the original auto/broad campaign to prevent bidding against yourself
5. Monitor exact match campaigns for 2 weeks, then scale winners and pause losers

In practice, say a term converts at 12% on $1.10 CPC in your broad match campaign. Moving it to exact match at $0.90 CPC cuts your ACoS on that term by roughly 18-22%. Do this for your top 20 terms and the account moves - well-executed harvesting typically improves campaign ACoS by 15-25% within the first 60 days.

One nuance: check the search term’s performance across placements. Top of Search placements typically convert at 2-3x the rate of Rest of Search, but CPCs are correspondingly higher. A term that looks marginally profitable in aggregate might be highly profitable at Top of Search and a complete waste everywhere else. The placement report paired with search term data reveals this.

Brand Analytics vs. the Ad Report

If you’re Brand Registered, you have access to a completely separate search tool: the Search Query Performance (SQP) dashboard in Brand Analytics. Most sellers confuse it with the advertising report, but they answer fundamentally different questions.

Feature	Advertising Search Terms Report	Brand Analytics SQP
Data type	Paid ad performance only	Organic + total market
Market share data	No	Yes (impression, click, purchase share)
Funnel depth	Impressions > Clicks > Sales	Impressions > Clicks > Cart Adds > Purchases
Spend / ACoS / ROAS	Yes	No
Competitive intelligence	None	Your share vs. total market per query

SQP is the more underused of the two - most sellers who have Brand Registry access never open it. A query where you have 15% impression share but only 5% purchase share tells you something different than one where both numbers are 15%. The first has a conversion problem; the second has a visibility problem. Different diagnosis, different fix.

Use the ad report for campaign optimization. Use SQP for market positioning and listing optimization. Sellers who combine both make better decisions than those who rely on either alone.

Programmatic Access and the 60-Day Retention Problem

Amazon retains search term data for approximately 60 days. After that, it’s gone permanently. If you’re not downloading reports regularly, you’re losing historical data essential for trend analysis and seasonal planning.

If you’re managing more than a handful of campaigns, the Amazon Advertising API (v3) provides programmatic access to search term reports with multiple attribution windows (1-day, 7-day, 14-day, 30-day). Amazon Marketing Stream pushes near-real-time campaign data to your AWS account, enabling automated bid and negative keyword changes based on hourly performance. And Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) supports custom SQL queries across all advertising data - no-code templates were added in September 2025, making it accessible without a data engineering team.

If you’re spending more than about $5,000/month on Amazon ads, automated report downloads should be non-negotiable. The 60-day retention limit means any gap in your download schedule creates a permanent blind spot. Feedvisor’s advertising platform handles this automatically, pulling search term data continuously and applying optimization decisions that account for TACoS and full-funnel profitability.

FAQ

How often should I review the Amazon Search Terms Report?

Weekly for active campaigns, especially during the first 60-90 days. High-spend campaigns (over $100/day) benefit from twice-weekly reviews. Mature campaigns in steady state can shift to bi-weekly. Sporadic reviews miss patterns that compound into wasted spend.

What’s a good conversion rate for search terms on Amazon?

Average across categories is roughly 8-12% for Sponsored Products. Category variation is significant - beauty and consumables often run 15%+, while electronics may sit at 5-7%. Any search term below 3-4% after 20+ clicks deserves scrutiny.

Should I negate search terms with high impressions but no clicks?

The Search Terms Report only includes terms that received at least one click, so high-impression zero-click terms won’t appear here. For low-CTR terms, check the Search Term Impression Share Report or campaign-level targeting report. The fix is usually listing optimization (title, main image, price) rather than negation.

What’s the difference between search terms and keywords?

Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what customers actually type. Your broad match keyword “running shoes” might trigger the search term “women’s trail running shoes size 8.” The Search Terms Report bridges this gap - showing exactly which customer queries matched your targets and how each performed.