How To Analyze Your Amazon Search Terms Report

To begin your analysis, you must first locate the document within your Amazon Advertising console. Navigate to the Advertising tab, then select Campaign Manager from the dropdown menu. Once inside the dashboard, locate the Reports tab on the left-hand navigation bar. Select Create Report and choose Sponsored Products as the report type. You will need to select the Search Term report from the list, set your desired date range, and click Run Report. Amazon will generate a CSV or Excel file that contains every search term that triggered your ads, including the number of impressions, clicks, spend, and sales generated by each.

Working with a spreadsheet is essential for large accounts where thousands of terms might appear over a thirty-day period. Use filters to sort by spend or click-through rate, as this helps you isolate the terms that have the most significant impact on your account performance. Cleaning up your data involves removing duplicate entries and ensuring that the date range is long enough to provide a statistically relevant sample size. If you only look at one or two days of data, you might make premature decisions based on noise rather than actual customer behavior patterns.

Effective analysis focuses on three core metrics: Click-Through Rate (CTR), Cost Per Click (CPC), and Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS). CTR indicates how relevant your product listing appears to the customer when they see your ad. A low CTR often suggests that your primary image or title needs refinement to better match the search query. If your CTR is high but your sales are low, the issue likely resides on your product detail page, such as pricing, reviews, or insufficient product information, rather than the ad targeting itself.

ACoS provides a direct view into profitability for each specific search term. A high ACoS suggests that you are spending too much to acquire a sale through that term, which necessitates a bid reduction or a complete exclusion of the keyword. Conversely, terms with a low ACoS and high volume are your winners. These terms deserve higher bids to maximize their visibility and capture more market share. By segmenting your search terms into high-performing and low-performing buckets, you gain a clear roadmap for budget reallocation.

Negative keywords are the most effective way to protect your account from wasted spend. When you review your search terms report, look for queries that have received high impressions and clicks but zero sales. These are your primary candidates for negative matching. A typical scenario involves a product like a premium leather wallet showing up for search terms related to cheap plastic wallets. If the search intent does not align with your product quality, you are effectively paying for traffic that is unlikely to convert into a purchase.

Steps to implement negative keywords

• Filter your report by Sales to find terms with zero conversions.
• Sort these zero-sale terms by Spend in descending order.
• Identify terms that are completely irrelevant to your product offering.
• Copy these terms and add them to the Negative Keywords tab in your campaign settings.
• Choose between Negative Phrase or Negative Exact match types based on your goal.

Using negative keywords correctly prevents your ads from appearing in irrelevant auctions. This improves your overall account health by increasing your average CTR, which can positively influence your quality score over time. Be careful not to block terms that might be relevant but are currently experiencing a low conversion period. Always verify the search term intent before adding it to your negative list to ensure you do not inadvertently stop traffic that could eventually lead to a sale.

Search terms that perform well in automatic campaigns should be harvested and moved into manual campaigns. Automatic campaigns are excellent for discovery, but manual campaigns offer much greater control over bids and placement. By moving a winning search term to a manual campaign as an Exact match, you can assign a dedicated bid that reflects its true value to your business. This strategy allows you to secure top-of-search placement for high-converting queries without risking your budget on broader, less-defined terms.

In a typical account, this migration process happens on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. You should monitor the performance of these harvested terms in their new manual campaigns to ensure they maintain their efficiency. If a term performs well in the manual campaign, you can gradually increase the bid to capture more volume. If performance drops, consider reviewing your listing content to ensure it remains relevant to the search query. This iterative process creates a cycle of constant optimization for your advertising account.

Not every high-spend term should be immediately negated. Sometimes, a high-spend, low-conversion term indicates that your product is being discovered by a new audience segment that you had not previously considered. Before negating such a term, check if the search query is relevant to your product. If it is relevant, the issue might be your landing page. Perhaps the customer is looking for a different feature or a different price point than what you currently offer.

Analyze the customer reviews and Q&A section for your product to see if customers are expressing confusion about the product’s capabilities. If the search terms reveal that people expect your product to do something it cannot, consider updating your product description to clarify its use. This approach saves you from losing sales while simultaneously improving the customer experience. Sometimes, the search terms report acts as a mirror, reflecting gaps in your product information that you had not realized existed.

Start this week by downloading your search term report for the past thirty days. Filter the results to show only those terms that have generated clicks but no sales, and identify the top five spenders in that list. Once you have these, add them as negative exact matches to the relevant campaigns. This small action will immediately reduce wasted spend and improve your account efficiency. After completing this, set a recurring calendar reminder to perform this review every month, ensuring your ad spend remains focused on terms that actually convert.

Remember that consistent monitoring is superior to occasional, massive overhauls. Small, incremental changes based on the data in your reports lead to long-term stability and growth. If you encounter terms that are closely related but not quite right, test them in a separate campaign before committing significant budget to them. Keeping your account organized and your data clean will make it much easier to scale when you are ready to expand your reach. Focus on the metrics, follow the data, and refine your approach one term at a time.

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