Amazon search term report: how to read it, save it and act on it every week

1. 1Archive

   Download 30 days, skip the last 7, save it

2. 2Price

   Add break-even ACoS and allowed clicks per order

3. 3Harvest

   2+ orders under target go to exact match

4. 4Negate

   Past the click threshold with no orders

5. 5Feed SEO

   Top converting terms go to the listing

What the Amazon search term report shows

Your keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what shoppers actually typed. A phrase match keyword like "bamboo cutting board" can match dozens of real queries, from "large bamboo cutting board with juice groove" to "bamboo board for cheese". The search term report lists each of those queries with the spend and sales it drove.

For Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, each row ties a customer search term to the campaign, ad group and target that matched it, with impressions, clicks, spend, orders, sales, ACoS and conversion rate. Rows from automatic campaigns and product targeting often show an ASIN instead of words. That means the ad showed on another product's page, not in search results, and it should be judged as a placement on that product, not as a keyword.

Sponsored Display has no search term report, because it targets audiences and products rather than queries. Its closest relative is the matched target report.

• Customer search term: the words typed, or an ASIN for product page placements
• Targeting and match type: which of your keywords or targets caught it
• Clicks, spend, orders and sales: the money columns
• ACoS and conversion rate: the efficiency columns

Where to find it in 2026

In the Amazon Ads console, open Measurement and reporting, create a report and choose search term as the report type for Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands. Pick daily or summary, set the date range and download as a spreadsheet.

One thing changed this year. Amazon moved advertising reports into a unified reporting experience, which Adbrew reports became generally available in June 2026. The same source says the old Sponsored ads reports page stops creating new reports after December 17, 2026 and closes on December 31, 2026, with saved reports and schedules removed. If you rely on a scheduled search term report, rebuild the schedule in the new reporting area before then and check that the columns match what your spreadsheets expect.

Three traps the standard guides skip

The first trap is that the data disappears. Several reporting tools, including SellerApp and Nova, put the console lookback for search term reports at about 65 days. Older guides say 60. Either way, anything older is gone from the console. A term that converted well in last year's peak season cannot be found again unless someone saved it.

The second trap is late orders. Sponsored Products credits an order to the ad if the purchase happens within 7 days of the click for sellers, and Sponsored Brands uses 14 days. A term clicked yesterday has not had time to convert. Judge the last week and you will cut terms that were simply early.

The third trap is small samples. Amazon mostly lists terms that received at least one click, and low-volume searches can be grouped or hidden for privacy. A term with 6 clicks and no orders tells you almost nothing, yet it is the most common thing sellers negate.

• Save a copy every month so the 65-day window never costs you history
• Leave the most recent 7 days out of any decision, 14 for Sponsored Brands
• Set a click threshold from your own conversion rate before acting on any term

Read each term against your margin, not a flat ACoS rule

A flat rule such as "negate anything above 40 percent ACoS" ignores the fact that every product has a different margin. Start from break-even ACoS: your margin before ad spend, as a share of price. If a product keeps 35 percent of its price after cost of goods, fees and shipping, any ACoS above 35 percent loses money on that sale.

Then set a target below break-even that leaves the profit you want, and turn it into a maximum ad cost per order. Divide that by your average cost per click and you get the number of clicks a term is allowed to use per order. That number, not a gut feeling, decides when a term has had a fair chance.

Worked example with illustrative numbers

These numbers are illustrative. Take a $30 product with a 35 percent margin before ads, so break-even ACoS is 35 percent. You choose a 25 percent target ACoS, which allows $7.50 of ad cost per order. At an average CPC of $1.00, a term may spend up to 7.5 clicks per order and still hit target.

Your product converts at 10 percent on its proven terms. Now look at a new term with 20 clicks and no orders. If it truly converted at 10 percent, the chance of 20 clicks in a row without an order is 0.9 to the power of 20, about 12 percent. That is unlucky, not impossible, so the honest move is to lower its bid, not negate it.

At 30 clicks with no orders, the same math gives about 4 percent. Now the term is very unlikely to be a 10 percent converter, and it has already spent $30, four times the allowed cost per order. That is the point to add it as a negative exact.

On the other side, a term with 4 orders from 28 clicks at $1.00 CPC has a cost per order of $7.00, under the $7.50 limit. That term earns its own exact match keyword with a bid priced from the same math.

Weekly search term report playbook: 5 steps

Run this once a week. On accounts with a few hundred dollars of daily spend, it takes under an hour once the template is built.

• Ads manager, Amazon Ads console: download the Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands search term reports for the last 30 days, excluding the most recent 7. Save the file to a dated archive folder. Metric: an unbroken monthly archive with no gaps.
• Ads manager, spreadsheet: add each product's break-even ACoS, target ACoS and allowed clicks per order next to every row. Metric: every row with spend has a target beside it.
• Ads manager, Campaign manager: move terms with 2 or more orders at or under target ACoS into an exact match campaign, and add them as negative exact in the source campaign so the two do not compete. Metric: share of spend on exact match rises month over month.
• Ads manager, Campaign manager: add negative exact for terms past your click threshold with no orders. Lower bids on terms between half and full threshold instead of negating. Metric: spend on zero-order terms falls while total orders hold.
• Account manager, listing review: send the best converting terms that are missing from titles, bullets or backend fields to whoever owns the listing. Metric: organic rank on those terms in the following four to eight weeks.

Use the report beyond PPC

The search term report is the cheapest market research a brand gets. Terms that convert well tell you the language buyers use, which belongs in the title and bullets. Terms with high clicks and low conversion often point to a listing problem, such as a missing size, a price gap or an image that does not answer the question the shopper asked.

ASIN rows deserve their own review. If your ad converts well on a specific competitor's page, that product is a good target for a dedicated product targeting campaign. If it keeps losing on one product page, that competitor probably beats you on price or reviews, and more bid will not fix it.

When this advice does not apply

The click threshold math needs a stable conversion rate. A new product in its first weeks has no reliable rate yet, so run it with a broader tolerance and accept some waste to collect data. Very low priced products with thin margins may never support paid search profitably, and no amount of search term work will change that.

Branded terms and defensive campaigns also sit outside these rules. Their job is to protect the shopper you already earned, and they are judged on total sales and share, not on the same ACoS target. Finally, if most of your spend runs through Sponsored Display or DSP, this report covers only part of the picture.

How PPC Spider handles the search term report

PPC Spider runs Amazon PPC to profit-capped ACoS targets set from each product's margin, with negative targeting in every plan. SpiderOS, our platform, adds live reports, profit per product and 24x7 ads monitoring. Amazon PPC management starts at $995 a month on the Launch plan for up to $10k of monthly ad spend, Growth is $1,250 for up to $40k with daily bid and budget management, and Scale is $2,200 for up to $120k. Every plan is a flat retainer, never a percentage of ad spend, with a 90-day initial term. If you want a second opinion first, start with the free Amazon audit.

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