The Amazon Ads Search Term Report, Explained for Authors
Updated 2026-07-15
The search term report shows the actual searches shoppers made before clicking your ads — not the keywords you bid on, but what people really typed. It's the single most useful document in Amazon Ads, and most beginning authors never open it.
Keywords vs search terms
If you bid on "cozy mystery" in broad match, your ad might show for "cozy mystery books with cats 2026". The keyword is what you bid on; the search term is what the shopper typed. The report maps one to the other, with impressions, clicks, spend, and sales for each pair.
Where to find it
In the Amazon Ads console: Measurement & Reporting → Sponsored Ads reports → create a Sponsored Products "Search term" report. Schedule it weekly so it lands in your inbox without effort.
The harvesting loop
This loop — harvest winners into exact, block losers with negatives, feed surprises back in as seeds — is how a mediocre starting keyword list becomes a profitable one over a few months.
- Winners: search terms with sales → add them as exact match keywords with their own (higher) bids
- Losers: terms with meaningful clicks and zero sales → add as negative keywords
- Surprises: recurring themes you hadn't thought of → new seed keywords to expand
A 20-minute weekly routine
For that last step, paste the new seeds into our free tool and export the variants as a bulksheet-ready CSV — the whole top-up takes a couple of minutes.
- Sort by spend, descending. Deal with the top 20 rows first.
- Negative-out anything with ~10+ clicks and no orders.
- Promote converting terms to exact match.
- Expand any new seed ideas into broad/phrase/exact variants and add them.