Amazon Search Term Report: How to Read and Use It

The Amazon search term report shows the exact searches shoppers typed before clicking your Sponsored Products ads, with impressions, clicks, spend, orders and sales for each one. You download it from the Ads console under Measurement & Reporting > Sponsored ads reports > Create report > Sponsored Products > Search term. Use it to find search terms to move into exact match, and wasteful terms to add as negative keywords.

Key takeaways

• The report links each real customer search to the keyword or target that triggered it.
• Two actions matter most: harvest profitable terms and negate wasteful ones.
• Judge terms with enough clicks, and ignore the last few days while sales are still being attributed.
• Rows that show an ASIN instead of words are product page placements.

What the search term report shows

Your campaign targets keywords and products. Shoppers type search terms. The search term report connects the two.

Say your phrase match keyword is "bamboo sheets". The report might show these search terms triggered by it: "bamboo sheets queen", "cooling bamboo sheets", "bamboo sheets for hot sleepers", "bamboo crib sheets". Each gets its own row with its own results.

Key columns

The report also splits sales between the advertised SKU and other SKUs (a shopper clicked your ad for one product but bought another of yours). For seller accounts, Sponsored Products uses a 7-day attribution window, so focus on the 7-day columns.

The formulas you need

• ACoS (advertising cost of sales) = Spend / Sales
• ROAS (return on ad spend) = Sales / Spend
• CVR (conversion rate) = Orders / Clicks
• CTR (click-through rate) = Clicks / Impressions
• CPC (cost per click) = Spend / Clicks

ACoS and ROAS are two views of the same thing. A 25% ACoS equals a ROAS of 4.

How to download the search term report

Option 1: Sponsored ads reports

1. In the Amazon Ads console, open Measurement & Reporting > Sponsored ads reports. In Seller Central, the same page is under Reports > Advertising Reports.
2. Click Create report.
3. Set Report category to Sponsored Products and Report type to Search term.
4. Pick the Time unit: Summary (one row per search term for the whole period) or Daily (one row per term per day). Summary is easier to analyze.
5. Choose the Report period, such as the last 30 days.
6. Click Run report, then download the file from the reports list when it is ready.

You can also schedule the report to run on a regular basis, so it is waiting for you each week.

Option 2: Bulk operations file

Go to Campaign Manager > Bulk operations, create a custom spreadsheet, choose a date range, and tick Sponsored Products search term data. The file includes a search term tab alongside your campaign structure, which helps if you plan to upload changes back in bulk.

Option 3: Inside Campaign Manager

Open any campaign and click the Search terms tab. This is quick for one campaign, and you can add a term as a keyword or negative straight from the row. For account-wide analysis, the downloaded report is better.

Save your reports. The console only keeps roughly the last two months of search term data, so download a copy every month if you want a longer history.

How to analyze the report, step by step

Step 1: Set your thresholds first

Before you open the spreadsheet, write down two numbers:

• Target ACoS. Start from your break-even ACoS (profit per unit before ads divided by price). Our Break-even ACoS & Max Bid Calculator works it out from your price and fees. See also what is a good ACoS.
• Click threshold for judging a term. A common rule is about 100 divided by your conversion rate. At a 10% CVR, a term with 10–15 clicks and no sale is a negation candidate.

Step 2: Clean the data

• Remove the last 2–3 days if your period ends today, because attributed sales are still arriving.
• Filter to Sponsored Products only, if you mixed ad types.
• Separate keyword rows from ASIN rows (ASINs start with "B0", often shown in lowercase).

Step 3: Sort search terms into four buckets

Also flag terms that are plainly irrelevant (wrong size, wrong product) and negate them regardless of clicks.

Step 4: Look for patterns, not just rows

Group search terms by repeating words. If "twin", "crib" and "toddler" each waste a little, together they may waste a lot. A single-word negative phrase like "crib" can fix dozens of rows at once. Likewise, if "cooling" appears in many converting terms, it may deserve its own exact or phrase keywords.

Step 5: Make the changes and note the date

Add harvested terms, negatives and bid changes. Write down the date, so in two weeks you can compare before and after.

Worked example

Say you sell a queen bamboo sheet set for $45.00. Your break-even ACoS is 30%, you target 25%, and your conversion rate is about 10%, so your click threshold is around 12–15 clicks. A 30-day summary report for your auto campaign shows:

What to do:

• "bamboo sheets queen": add to your exact campaign. A starting bid from the formula AOV x CVR x target ACoS is $45.00 x 0.111 x 0.25 = $1.25. Add it as negative exact in the auto campaign.
• "cooling sheets queen": add to exact at $45.00 x 0.083 x 0.25 = $0.93, and negate exact in auto.
• "bamboo sheet set": lower the auto bid on the targeting group that triggered it, or add it to exact at a lower bid of about $45.00 x 0.067 x 0.25 = $0.75.
• The competitor ASIN: 40 clicks, no orders. Add it as a negative product target in the auto campaign.
• "twin xl": add "twin" as negative phrase. You do not sell twin.
• "eucalyptus sheets queen": only 9 clicks. Leave it running for now.

Before the changes, this slice of the campaign spent $397.60 for $1,530 in sales, a 26.0% ACoS. Removing the $56.50 spent on the two bleeders alone brings it to 22.3%, before any gains from the new exact keywords.

How the report connects to other reports

• Targeting report: shows performance by your keyword or target, not by shopper search. Use it for bid changes on the keywords themselves.
• Placement report: shows top of search, rest of search and product page results by campaign.
• Search Query Performance (SQP): a Brand Analytics report in Seller Central that shows your share of impressions, clicks and purchases for a search across both ads and organic results. It tells you how much of a search's total demand you capture, which the search term report cannot. See our guide to the Search Query Performance report.

Common search term report mistakes

• Judging terms on too few clicks. Three clicks with no sale tells you almost nothing.
• Using the last 7 days only. Late-attributed sales make recent terms look worse than they are.
• Harvesting without negating. The term keeps running in both campaigns and you compete with yourself.
• Ignoring ASIN rows. Product page traffic can be a large share of auto campaign spend.
• Only looking at ACoS. A term with a 40% ACoS and many orders may be worth keeping at a lower bid, especially if it is a high-volume keyword you want to rank for.
• Never saving old reports. Once the console's window passes, that history is gone.

Our free Search Term Report Analyzer sorts a downloaded report into winners, bleeders and negative phrase candidates automatically. For the next step after analysis, see keyword harvesting.

Bottom line

The search term report shows what shoppers actually searched before clicking your ads. Download it every week or two, set your target ACoS and click threshold first, then harvest winners into exact match and negate the terms that waste spend. Save each report, because the console only keeps a short history.

Frequently asked questions

Amazon fees, policies and features change often. Figures here were checked in October 2026; confirm current rates in Seller Central before making pricing or budget decisions. Sotrics is not affiliated with Amazon.