How to Read Your Amazon Search Term Report (and Act on It)

You are spending $50 a day on Amazon Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads. Your Advertising Cost of Sale (ACoS) is sitting at 35%. You have tweaked bids, paused campaigns, raised budgets, lowered budgets — but you have never once downloaded your Search Term Report.

If that sounds like you, you are running your ad campaigns blind. The Search Term Report (STR) is the single most valuable data source in your entire PPC account, and most Amazon sellers never open it. It shows you exactly what shoppers typed before clicking your ad — not the keywords you targeted, but the actual words real customers used. That difference matters more than any bid adjustment you will ever make.

In this guide, I will walk you through how to download the STR, how to read every column, and how to use a simple four-bucket system to turn that raw data into lower ad spend and higher sales. No guesswork, no theory — just the process I use every two weeks across my own campaigns.

Key takeaways:

• The STR shows customer search terms, not your keywords — it reveals what shoppers actually typed before clicking your ad
• Check it every 14-30 days, not weekly — seven days of data is too noisy to make good decisions
• Use the four-bucket system — sort every search term into Winners, Potentials, Money Drains, or Irrelevant
• Harvest winners into exact match campaigns — this is how you turn auto campaigns into a keyword goldmine
• Negate money drains immediately — one bad search term can burn $10-$20 per day with zero orders

What is the Search Term Report?

The Search Term Report is a downloadable spreadsheet from Seller Central that shows every customer search term that triggered your ads during a specific date range. It is different from the targeting report, which shows performance by the keywords and ASINs you chose to target.

Here is why that distinction matters. Say you are running an auto campaign for a garlic press. You targeted no specific keywords — Amazon is matching your ad to search terms it thinks are relevant. The targeting report would show you “auto campaign — close match” with aggregate data. The STR shows you the actual terms: “garlic press stainless steel,” “garlic mincer heavy duty,” “garlic crusher easy to clean,” and maybe “onion chopper” — a term that has nothing to do with your product but Amazon decided to show your ad for anyway.

Without the STR, you would never know that “onion chopper” burned $14.30 of your budget last month with zero orders. You would also never know that “garlic press stainless steel” converted at 18% and deserves its own exact match campaign with a higher bid. The STR gives you both of these insights in the same spreadsheet.

How to download your Search Term Report

Here is the step-by-step process inside Seller Central:

1. Log in to Seller Central and go to Advertising in the top navigation.
2. Click Reports (not “Campaign Manager” — a common mix-up).
3. Under “Report Type,” select Search Term.
4. Choose your date range. I recommend 30 days for routine checks and 60 days when you are doing a deep optimization pass. Avoid seven-day reports — the sample size is too small and you will make decisions based on noise.
5. Click Create Report. Amazon takes a few minutes to generate it.
6. Download the .csv file and open it in Excel or Google Sheets.

Pro tip: Set a calendar reminder every two weeks to pull this report. Consistency matters more than frequency. I pull mine on the 1st and 15th of every month — same days, same process, no excuses.

Why not seven days? A search term might get 200 impressions and two clicks in a week. That is not enough data to decide anything. Over 30 days, that same term might show 1,200 impressions, 15 clicks, and two orders — now you have something to work with.

Understanding each column

The STR has a lot of columns, but only seven matter for decision-making. Here is what each one tells you.

• Customer search term — the exact phrase the shopper typed into Amazon’s search bar before clicking your ad. This is the raw, unfiltered truth about what people are actually looking for. Sometimes it matches your keyword perfectly. Often it does not.

• Impressions — how many times your ad appeared for this search term. I use 1,000 impressions as my minimum threshold before making any decision about a term. Below that, you are guessing.

• Clicks — how many shoppers clicked your ad after seeing it for this term. Clicks cost money, so every click without a sale is ad spend you need to justify. A term with 50 clicks and zero orders is a problem.

• Spend — your total cost for this search term during the report period. This is the number that hurts when you see it next to zero orders. Sort by spend descending — your biggest money drains float to the top immediately.

• Orders and sales — the number of purchases and total revenue attributed to this search term. These are the money metrics. A term with three orders on $8.40 in spend is a winner. A term with zero orders on $45 in spend is bleeding you.

• ACoS (per-term) — your advertising cost of sale for this specific search term, calculated as spend divided by sales. A term with $5 in spend and $50 in sales has a 10% ACoS — excellent. A term with $30 in spend and $40 in sales has a 75% ACoS — that needs attention. For a deeper breakdown of how ACoS works across your full account, read my ACoS guide.

• Click-through rate (CTR) — impressions divided by clicks. A high CTR means your ad is relevant to this search term — shoppers see it and want to click. A low CTR (below 0.3%) means shoppers see your ad but it does not match what they are looking for. Low CTR terms drag down your campaign quality score over time.

The four-bucket system for search terms

This is the framework I use every time I open an STR. Every search term goes into one of four buckets, and each bucket has a specific action.

Bucket 1: Winners — low ACoS, at least one order.

These are your best-performing search terms. They convert, they are profitable, and they deserve more budget.

Example: “stainless steel garlic press” — 1,800 impressions, 22 clicks, $11.44 spend, three orders, $71.85 in sales. ACoS: 15.9%.

Action: Move this term into a manual exact match campaign with a bid 15-20% above what you are currently paying per click. Negate it in the auto campaign so you control the spend precisely. This is how you scale your winners without letting Amazon decide the bid.

Bucket 2: Potentials — decent clicks, no orders yet, but the term is relevant.

These terms look like they should convert but have not yet. Before killing them, check two things: does your listing actually match what this shopper was looking for? And has the term hit 1,000 impressions yet?

Example: “garlic press with large handle” — 900 impressions, 12 clicks, $6.24 spend, zero orders.

Action: Wait. This term has not hit 1,000 impressions yet. If your garlic press actually has a large handle, give this term another two weeks. If it hits 1,500+ impressions with 20+ clicks and still no orders, then it goes to Bucket 3. If your garlic press does not have a large handle, move it to Bucket 4.

Bucket 3: Money drains — high spend, zero or near-zero orders.

These terms are burning your budget. Every day they run is money gone.

Example: “electric garlic chopper” — 3,200 impressions, 38 clicks, $22.80 spend, zero orders.

Action: Add this as a negative exact match keyword in every campaign where it appears. Do it today, not next week. That $22.80 is gone, and it will be $45 next month if you do not act. This single action — negating money drains — typically saves sellers 15-25% of their monthly ad spend within the first month.

Bucket 4: Irrelevant terms — completely wrong product or intent.

These are terms where Amazon matched your ad to something you do not sell. They should never have shown your ad in the first place.

Example: “onion chopper food processor” — 2,100 impressions, 14 clicks, $7.28 spend, zero orders.

Action: Add as a negative exact match keyword. If you see a pattern (multiple terms containing “food processor”), add “food processor” as a negative phrase match to block the entire cluster.

How to harvest keywords from auto campaigns

This is the most powerful workflow the STR enables, and it is how I build every manual campaign. Here is the exact process:

1. Launch an auto campaign for your product with a daily budget of $25-$40. Use “dynamic bids — down only” to keep costs controlled.
2. Wait two to three weeks. Resist the urge to check after three days. You need data to accumulate.
3. Download the STR. Sort by orders descending, then by spend descending.
4. Pull your winners (Bucket 1 terms). Copy every search term that generated at least one order with an ACoS below your target — typically below 30% for most products.
5. Create a manual exact match campaign with those winning terms. Set your bids 10-20% above the auto campaign’s average cost per click for these terms.
6. Negate those winning terms in the auto campaign as exact match negatives. This forces all future traffic for those terms through your manual campaign, where you control the bid.
7. Also negate your Bucket 3 and 4 terms in the auto campaign so they stop burning budget.
8. Repeat every two weeks. Each cycle, you harvest a few more winners and negate a few more drains.

Over time, your auto campaign becomes a pure research engine — discovering new terms at a controlled budget — while your manual campaigns contain all your proven, profitable keywords. This is the foundation of my entire PPC strategy, and it starts with the STR.

Pro tip: Keep a running spreadsheet of every term you negate. After three months, review the list. Occasionally, a negated term becomes relevant — maybe you updated your listing, changed your images, or added a variation. A quarterly review prevents over-negating.

For sellers running 10+ campaigns, doing this manually gets time-consuming. That is where PPC automation tools can help — several of them automate keyword harvesting and negative keyword management directly from your STR data.

Common mistakes with the Search Term Report

Checking too frequently. I have talked to sellers who pull their STR every three days. Seven-day data is noisy. A term that got five clicks and zero orders this week might convert three times next week. Pull every 14-30 days and you will make better decisions.

Not negating fast enough. The opposite problem. Some sellers pull the STR, look at the data, think “I should negate those terms,” and then close the spreadsheet and forget. Meanwhile, those money drains keep running. When you identify a Bucket 3 or 4 term, add the negative keyword that same session. Do not batch it for later.

Negating terms too aggressively. A term with eight clicks and zero orders after 400 impressions is not necessarily bad — it just does not have enough data yet. Stick to the 1,000-impression threshold before negating a relevant term. I have seen sellers negate terms that would have become their best converters if they had waited another week.

Ignoring the report entirely. This is the most common and most expensive mistake. If you are spending $30+ per day on PPC and have never downloaded your STR, you are likely wasting 20-30% of your ad budget on terms that will never convert. That is $180-$270 per month on a $30/day budget — enough to fund an entirely new product launch.

Only looking at ACoS. A search term with 80% ACoS sounds terrible, but if it generated $200 in sales and your product margin is 40%, you still made money. Check absolute profit, not just ACoS percentage. Context matters.

Your next step

Here is what I want you to do this week: log in to Seller Central, go to Advertising Reports, and download your Search Term Report for the last 30 days. Open it in a spreadsheet, sort by spend descending, and look at your top 20 terms by spend. Find the five biggest money drains — high spend, zero orders — and add them as negative exact match keywords in every campaign where they appear.

That one action, done today, will save you more money this month than any bid adjustment or budget change. It takes 20 minutes.

If you are working on improving your listing conversion rate at the same time, even better — the STR tells you which keywords bring traffic, and your listing determines whether that traffic converts. The two work together.

I break down this entire STR workflow on screen in my YouTube videos — subscribe to @AmazonFBAGirl for weekly PPC walkthroughs where I show my actual reports and real numbers.