The Amazon Search Term Report: How to Read It and What to Do With It

The Amazon search term report shows the actual customer searches that triggered your Sponsored Products ads, with impressions, clicks, spend, sales, and orders for each one. You use it to find converting searches to add as keywords and wasteful searches to add as negatives. Reviewing it weekly is the single highest-value routine in Amazon PPC.

Your keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what shoppers actually typed. With broad, phrase, and auto targeting, those can be very different. The report is how you see the gap.

How to download the search term report

1. In the Amazon Ads console, open Measurement and Reporting, then Sponsored ads reports.
2. Click Create report.
3. Choose Sponsored Products as the ad product and Search term as the report type.
4. Pick a time unit (Summary is easiest for analysis) and a date range. Last 30 days is a good default; use 60 days for low-traffic products.
5. Run the report and download it as a spreadsheet when it's ready.

Amazon keeps a limited window of report history, so if you want long-term trends, download and save reports regularly. Sponsored Brands has its own search term report as well; choose Sponsored Brands as the ad product to get it. Menu names in the console change from time to time, so if you don't see these exact labels, look for the reports section in the left navigation.

What the key columns mean

Sponsored Products reports for sellers use a 7-day attribution window, so sales from the last few days will still fill in. Avoid making decisions on the most recent 2 to 3 days. Read more about the Amazon Ads attribution window.

A weekly search term review process

Open the report in a spreadsheet and add a filter row. Then work through four passes.

Pass 1: Harvest the winners

Filter to search terms with 2 or more orders and ACoS at or below your target. Remove any that are already exact match keywords. These are your harvest list. Add each one as an exact match keyword in a manual campaign and add it as negative exact in the campaign it came from. Detailed steps in how to harvest keywords from auto campaigns.

Pass 2: Negate the waste

Filter to search terms with zero orders. Sort by spend, highest first. Negate anything irrelevant immediately. Negate relevant terms that have spent more than your target cost per order or passed your click threshold. Our negative keywords guide has decision rules.

Pass 3: Fix bids on high-ACoS converters

Filter to search terms with orders but ACoS above target. These are profitable to keep at the right price. If the term is an exact keyword, lower its bid. If it comes through broad or phrase, consider harvesting it into exact at a lower bid so you control the price.

Pass 4: Review ASIN search terms

Filter the customer search term column for values starting with 'b0'. These are product detail pages where your ad appeared. ASINs that convert well are candidates for a product targeting campaign. ASINs that spend with no sales can be added as negative product targets.

Worked example

A seller of a $25 bamboo cutting board set with a 30% target ACoS runs a 30-day report on a broad match campaign. The campaign spent $620 on $1,550 in sales (40% ACoS). Here is what the review finds:

Cutting the $220 of zero-order spend alone would bring the campaign to $400 spend on $1,550 sales, a 25.8% ACoS, before any bid changes. The harvested winners now get their own budget and bids in exact match.

Common misreadings

• Judging terms with tiny data. A term with 3 clicks and no orders tells you almost nothing. Wait for enough clicks.
• Confusing targeting with search term. The 'Targeting' column is your keyword; the 'Customer search term' column is what the shopper typed. Decisions about negatives use the search term.
• Expecting every sale to appear. The report only shows sales attributed to ad clicks within the window. Organic sales lifted by ads won't show here. That's what TACoS is for.
• Treating exact match search terms as new discoveries. Exact keywords mostly match themselves and close variants, so their search terms rarely reveal anything new.

Useful spreadsheet columns to add

A few calculated columns make the review much faster. Add them once to a template and reuse it each week.

• Clicks per order: clicks divided by orders. Compare it to your account average to spot weak terms.
• Target cost per order: price x target ACoS. Any zero-order term whose spend exceeds this has already failed.
• Is exact keyword: a yes/no flag so you can filter out terms you already target exactly.
• Action: harvest, negate exact, negate phrase, lower bid, or wait. Filling this column is the review; uploading the changes is the easy part.

How often should you review it?

Weekly for active campaigns, using a rolling 30-day window. High-spend accounts may review twice a week. Brand-new campaigns need 1 to 2 weeks of data before the first review. This review is the backbone of any weekly Amazon PPC optimization routine.

If the weekly spreadsheet work keeps getting skipped, AdSpark's AI search-term review runs these passes automatically and suggests harvests and negatives you can approve, with every action logged and reversible.

FAQ