# Amazon Search Term Report: How to Read It and What to Do Before Black Friday

How to download and read the Amazon search term report, which terms to harvest or negate, and the cleanup to finish before Black Friday CPCs arrive.

**TL;DR:** The Amazon search term report lists the real shopper searches that got a click on your ads, with spend, orders and ACoS for each. Use it both ways: promote terms that convert under your target ACoS to exact match, and negate terms that keep spending without selling. Do a full pass now, before Black Friday makes the data noisier and every wasted click more expensive.

URL: https://autron.ai/blog/amazon-search-term-report-guide  
Updated: 2026-10-12  
By: Adrian Steele

---

Your keyword list tells you what you bid on. The **Amazon search term report** tells you what shoppers actually typed when they clicked your ad, and what happened next. It is the most useful report in the Ads console for finding new keywords and cutting waste, and most accounts open it far less often than they should.

The timing matters this month. Black Friday falls on November 27 and Cyber Monday on November 30, and the weeks before them bring rising CPCs, gift searches you have never seen and a lot more traffic to waste money on. Every search term you promote or block now is one less decision to make in the middle of the peak, when the data is at its noisiest and every click costs the most.

Here is how to pull the report, read it properly, and turn it into keyword and negative changes before Q4 locks in.

## What the Amazon search term report shows

Amazon describes it as the report that helps you [find the shopping terms used by customers shopping on Amazon that resulted in at least one click on your ad](https://advertising.amazon.com/library/guides/sponsored-products-best-practices). Three details in that definition shape how you read it.

**It only includes clicked terms.** A search that showed your ad 5,000 times and never got a click won't appear. For visibility on terms you are missing, use the separate [search term impression share report](https://advertising.amazon.com/resources/whats-new/search-term-impression-report-sponsored-products), or Brand Analytics, covered in our [Search Query Performance guide](https://autron.ai/blog/amazon-search-query-performance-report-guide).

**Each row is a pair.** The customer search term sits next to the keyword or target that matched it. The same search can appear several times, once for each campaign or ad group that caught it. That duplication is often the first sign of [overlapping keywords bidding against each other](https://autron.ai/blog/duplicate-keywords-across-amazon-ad-groups).

**Not every row is a search.** In auto campaigns and product targeting, many "search terms" look like `b0c7xk2m4q`. Those are product detail pages where your ad appeared, and they are as actionable as keywords.

## How to download the search term report

In the Amazon Ads console:

1. Open **Measurement and reporting**, then **Sponsored ads reports**, and click **Create report**.
2. Set the report category to **Sponsored Products** and the report type to **Search term**.
3. Choose the time unit. **Summary** gives one row per term for the whole period, which is what you want for decisions. **Daily** is useful only when you are investigating a specific spike.
4. Pick the date range. For a decision pass, 30 days is a good default. Use 60 if your account is small and most terms only get a few clicks.
5. Run the report and download the spreadsheet.

Sponsored Brands has its own search term report built the same way. Run both, because Sponsored Brands often catches broader category searches that Sponsored Products never sees.

Two cautions before you analyse anything. First, orders keep being attributed for days after the click (the column names, such as **7 Day Total Sales**, tell you the window), so the last week of any range will understate sales. Leave a few days of buffer, or re-run it later. Second, Amazon only keeps a few months of history, so if you want year-over-year search term data for next Q4, export and save this year's now.

## How to read the columns

The spreadsheet has more than twenty columns. These are the ones that drive decisions:

| Column | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Customer Search Term | What the shopper typed, or the ASIN of the page they were on |
| Targeting / Match Type | Which of your keywords or targets matched it, and how |
| Impressions, Clicks | How often your ad showed and got clicked for this term |
| Spend | What those clicks cost you |
| 7 Day Total Orders | Orders attributed within seven days of a click |
| 7 Day Total Sales | Revenue from those orders |
| ACoS | Spend divided by sales for this term |
| 7 Day Conversion Rate | Orders divided by clicks |

The most important habit is to read **search term and targeting together**. A broad-match keyword "garlic press" that looks fine at the keyword level may be making all its money on "garlic press stainless steel" and losing it on "garlic peeler". The keyword report averages those together. The search term report pulls them apart.

![Amazon search term report spreadsheet with columns for customer search term, targeting, clicks, spend, orders, sales and ACoS, where converting rows are tagged harvest and zero-order rows are tagged negate](https://autron.ai/blog/amazon-search-term-report-guide/report-mock.webp)

## A worked example: six rows, five decisions

Take a garlic press selling at $24.99, with a 30% target ACoS. A 30-day search term report includes these rows:

| Customer search term | Matched by | Clicks | Spend | Orders | Sales | ACoS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| garlic press stainless steel | garlic press (broad) | 142 | $127.80 | 14 | $349.86 | 36.5% |
| garlic mincer heavy duty | auto, close match | 38 | $30.40 | 6 | $149.94 | 20.3% |
| b0c7xk2m4q | auto, complements | 41 | $28.70 | 4 | $99.96 | 28.7% |
| garlic peeler | garlic press (broad) | 27 | $23.49 | 0 | $0.00 | n/a |
| ginger grater | auto, loose match | 22 | $15.40 | 0 | $0.00 | n/a |
| garlic press dishwasher safe | garlic press (phrase) | 9 | $8.10 | 0 | $0.00 | n/a |

Each row gets a different decision.

- **"garlic mincer heavy duty" is a harvest.** Six orders at 20.3% ACoS, found by an auto campaign. Add it as an exact-match keyword in a manual campaign, which is exactly what Amazon recommends: identify terms with higher sales and conversion, then [increase the bid on those and add them as exact match type](https://advertising.amazon.com/library/guides/sponsored-products-best-practices).
- **"garlic press stainless steel" is a harvest with a lower bid.** It converts at nearly 10% but runs above target at 36.5%. Give it its own exact-match keyword so you can bid it down toward 30% without touching the broad keyword that found it.
- **The ASIN row is a product targeting opportunity.** Four orders from a complementary product's page. Target that ASIN directly in a product targeting campaign.
- **"garlic peeler" and "ginger grater" are negatives.** Twenty-plus clicks each, no orders, and neither is the product you sell. Add "garlic peeler" as a negative exact, and "ginger" as a negative phrase in the auto campaign.
- **"garlic press dishwasher safe" waits.** Nine clicks isn't enough to judge either way.

When you promote a term to exact match, add it as a **negative exact in the campaign it came from**. Otherwise the auto or broad campaign keeps bidding on the same search, and you end up competing with yourself.

## When a search term has had enough clicks

The hardest call in the report is the zero-order row. Cut too early and you lose terms that would have converted. Wait too long and you pay for dozens of useless clicks per term, across hundreds of terms.

Use your own conversion rate, not a fixed rule. If a product converts at 10%, a perfectly relevant search term still has about a 12% chance of getting zero orders in 20 clicks (0.9 to the power of 20), and about a 4% chance in 30 clicks. That makes these sensible defaults:

- **Converts at 10% or more:** 20 to 25 clicks with no orders is enough to add a negative exact.
- **Converts at around 5%:** wait for 40 to 50 clicks, because zero orders in 20 clicks happens by chance about a third of the time.
- **Clearly irrelevant term** (a different product, a competitor's brand you don't want, the wrong size or material): negate it on sight, whatever the click count.
- **Expensive terms:** if a term's spend with no orders already exceeds what one sale is worth to you at break-even, act on spend instead of clicks.

For the full negative-keyword method, including negative phrase versus exact and n-gram analysis across a large catalog, see our [Amazon negative keywords guide](https://autron.ai/blog/amazon-negative-keywords-guide-cut-wasted-ad-spend-2026).

![Decision flowchart for each Amazon search term report row: check relevance, then clicks against the conversion-rate threshold, then ACoS against target, ending in harvest to exact match, lower the bid, negate, or wait for more data](https://autron.ai/blog/amazon-search-term-report-guide/decision-flow.webp)

## Four mistakes that make the report mislead you

**Judging the last few days.** Recent rows are missing orders that haven't been attributed yet. A term that looks like a zero-order loser on day three can turn out profitable on day ten.

**Reading campaigns in isolation.** If a search term converts in one campaign and fails in another, the difference is usually the bid, the placement or the product advertised, not the term. Check where it appears before you negate it everywhere.

**Negating your own brand.** Branded searches often show a modest ACoS in one campaign and a terrible one in another. Before blocking them, read the [cannibalization and TACoS guide](https://autron.ai/blog/does-amazon-ppc-cannibalize-your-organic-sales-the-2026-tacos-guide), because whether to bid on your own brand is a TACoS decision, not a search-term one.

**Treating ACoS as the only filter.** A term at 34% ACoS against a 30% target may still be profitable if your [break-even ACoS](https://autron.ai/blog/amazon-break-even-acos-q4-2026-peak-fees) is 45%. Lower the bid rather than cutting the term.

## The pre-Black Friday search term checklist

Q4 changes the report in two ways. CPCs rise, so every wasted click costs more, and shoppers search differently, with gift terms, "for him" and "for her" phrasing, and bundle searches you won't have seen in summer. Both argue for doing the heavy cleanup now, while the data still reflects normal buying.

![Calendar timeline from mid-October to early December marking three Amazon search term report milestones before Black Friday on November 27: harvest converting terms, lock in negatives, then monitor new seasonal searches through Cyber Monday](https://autron.ai/blog/amazon-search-term-report-guide/q4-timeline.webp)

**This week: harvest.** Run a 60-day Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands search term report. Promote every term with two or more orders under your target ACoS to exact match, and negate it at the source. Exact-match keywords are easier to control when bids need to change fast in late November.

**By early November: lock in negatives.** Add negatives for everything past your click threshold with no orders. Keep a list of what you negated and when, because some seasonal searches deserve to come back for the peak.

**From mid-November: watch, don't rebuild.** Run the report every two or three days with a short range. Look only for new terms with heavy spend and no orders, and new gift searches that convert. Avoid structural changes during the peak, as covered in our [campaign structure post](https://autron.ai/blog/amazon-ppc-campaign-structure-in-2026-why-fewer-campaigns-now-beat-more).

**After Cyber Monday:** re-read the period with a full attribution window before judging it, and review the seasonal negatives you set.

## How Autron handles the search term report

Doing this by hand is a spreadsheet job that never ends: export, sort, compare against target, add keywords, add negatives, repeat next week. It is also exactly the kind of rules-based work that software does more consistently than a person.

Autron's ad engine syncs your search term data every day and works in both directions. It promotes converting search terms from auto campaigns into their own exact-match campaigns, adds negatives for terms that spend without selling, and keeps re-optimizing bids toward the ACoS or TACoS target you set for each product. Because it reads your sales and traffic data alongside the ads data, it can tell a term that is losing money from one that is defending sales you would otherwise lose.

If you want to ask questions of the data yourself, [Autron Agent](https://agent.autron.ai/start) answers things like "which search terms spent more than $50 with no orders this month?" or "which auto-campaign terms should be exact match?" in a sentence, and can make the change for you once you approve it.

## FAQ

**What is the Amazon search term report?**
It is a Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands report that shows the search terms shoppers actually typed, or the product pages they were on, when your ad got at least one click. Each row ties a customer search term to the keyword or target that matched it, with impressions, clicks, spend, orders, sales and ACoS.

**Where do I find the search term report on Amazon?**
In the Amazon Ads console, open Measurement and reporting, then Sponsored ads reports, and create a report with the report category set to Sponsored Products and the report type set to Search term. Choose a daily or summary time unit and a date range, then download it as a spreadsheet.

**How many clicks before I make a search term negative?**
Base it on your conversion rate rather than a fixed number. At a 10% conversion rate, a relevant term has about a 12% chance of getting zero orders in 20 clicks by luck alone, and about a 4% chance in 30. So 20 to 30 clicks with no orders is a reasonable negative-exact threshold for most products, and lower-converting products need more clicks before you judge them.

**Why do some search terms in the report look like ASINs?**
Rows that look like b0 followed by eight characters are product pages, not typed searches. They come from auto campaigns and product targeting, and mean your ad showed on that product's detail page. Converting ASINs are candidates for a manual product targeting campaign, and ASINs that spend without selling can be added as negative product targets.

**How often should I review the search term report?**
Weekly is the minimum for an account spending a few thousand dollars a month, and more often in Q4 when CPCs rise and new seasonal searches appear. Look at at least 14 to 30 days at a time so low-volume terms have enough clicks to judge, and let recent days settle because orders keep being attributed for several days after the click.

## Clean the report before the peak does it for you

Pull a 60-day search term report this week and sort by spend. The terms at the top with zero orders are where your Black Friday budget will leak first, and the converting terms still sitting in auto campaigns are where it should go instead.

If you would rather have it checked for you, the [free Amazon PPC audit](https://agent.autron.ai/start?intent=audit) reads your search terms against your sales data and shows what to harvest and what to cut. And [Autron Agent](https://agent.autron.ai/start) starts free and runs from $50/mo.