The Search Term Report for Merch: Find Winners, Cut Losers

You set up an ad, picked a few keywords (or let Amazon pick them), and money started going out. But what did shoppers actually type before they clicked your shirt? The search term report answers that, and it is the most useful report most Merch sellers never open.

This guide explains what the report is, how to read it without drowning, and the two jobs it is made for: promoting winners and blocking losers.

What the search term report is

A keyword is what you bid on. A search term is what a shopper actually typed into Amazon. They are often different.

Say you bid on cat shirt in broad match. Amazon may show your ad for funny cat shirt women, cat lover gift, or black cat halloween tee. Each of those is a separate search term, with its own clicks, spend and sales.

The search term report lists those real searches. Amazon describes it as the shopping terms that led to at least one click on your ad. So a search that showed your ad but never got a click will not appear here.

It also shows something people miss at first: entries that look like B0XXXXXXXX. Those are not typos. They are ASINs (Amazon's product IDs), and they mean your ad appeared on that product's page rather than in a search result. Auto campaigns produce a lot of these.

Where to find it

In the Amazon Ads console, reports live under the reporting section (Amazon has renamed this menu over the years, so look for "Reports" or "Measurement & reporting"). Create a report with:

• Ad product: Sponsored Products
• Report type: Search term
• Time unit: Summary is easiest to read. Daily is useful if you want to see trends.

Amazon keeps a limited window of search term data, roughly the last 65 days according to most sellers and tools. If you want a longer history, download the report regularly and keep your own copies.

How to read it without getting lost

A fresh download can have hundreds of rows and many columns. You only need a handful to start:

ACoS (advertising cost of sale) is ad spend divided by ad sales. If you spent $4 and the ad brought $20 in sales, your ACoS is 20%.

ACoS alone does not tell you if you made money. For that you need your break-even ACoS: your royalty divided by the sale price. If a $19.99 shirt pays you $4 in royalty, your break-even ACoS is about 20%. Above that, the ad cost more than you earned. (These are example numbers. Royalties depend on product, price and marketplace, so check your own in the Merch dashboard.) The full method is in Break-Even ACoS for Merch.

A simple way to work through the report:

1. Sort by Orders, highest first. These are your candidate winners.
2. Then sort by Spend, highest first, and look at rows with zero orders. These are your candidate losers.
3. Ignore everything in the middle for now. Low clicks and no orders usually just means "not enough data yet."

Harvesting winners into exact match

Harvesting means taking a search term that already brought a sale and bidding on it on purpose, usually as an exact match keyword in a manual campaign.

Why bother, if the auto campaign already found it? Three reasons:

• Control. In exact match you set a bid for that one phrase. In an auto or broad campaign, that phrase shares a bid with everything else.
• Clean data. You can see exactly how that term performs over time.
• Budget focus. You can spend more on proven searches without raising bids on unproven ones.

Amazon's own guidance says the same thing: keep checking your search term report and add the high performers as exact match.

What counts as a winner

There is no official threshold, and sellers disagree. A reasonable rule for Merch, where each product sells in small numbers:

• At least two orders from the same search term, and
• An ACoS at or below your break-even for that product.

One order can be luck. Two or more orders from the same phrase is a pattern worth testing. If your royalty is thin, be stricter.

How to harvest

1. Create a manual campaign (or use an existing one) with an exact match ad group for that product.
2. Add the winning search term as an exact keyword.
3. Start the bid near what the term was actually costing per click in the report (spend divided by clicks), and keep it below what your royalty can afford.
4. Optionally, add the same term as a negative exact in the original auto campaign.

That last step is debated. Negating it stops your two campaigns from bidding against each other for the same search. But if you negate too early and the new exact keyword does not get impressions, you lose a search that was working. A safer order: harvest first, check that the exact keyword is getting traffic for a week or two, then negate it in the source campaign.

ASIN search terms can be harvested too, as product targets in a manual campaign. If your ad on a certain competitor's page keeps converting, target that ASIN directly.

Adding losers as negative keywords

A negative keyword tells Amazon not to show your ad for a search. It is how you stop paying for clicks that never turn into sales. (For the full picture, see Negative Keywords for Merch.)

Amazon offers two negative match types for keywords:

• Negative exact: blocks that exact search (and close variants like plurals).
• Negative phrase: blocks any search that contains the phrase. Much broader, so use it carefully.

Good candidates for negatives:

• Irrelevant searches. Your shirt is about cats and the search was cat litter. Negate it now, no data needed.
• Wrong product type. Searches for cat mug or cat poster when you sell shirts.
• Proven losers. Relevant-looking searches that spent real money with zero orders.

How much data before calling something a loser

Do not negate a search after 3 clicks. Amazon's own Sponsored Products targeting guide suggests evaluating a keyword after it has had at least 20 clicks before adding it as a negative.

Example For Merch, you can also think in money. If a shirt earns you $4 in royalty and a search has spent $6 with no sale, it has already cost more than one sale would have paid. That is a fair point to act, even before 20 clicks, if the clicks are expensive.

ASIN search terms that spend without selling can be blocked with a negative product target.

A routine that fits a busy week

You do not need to live in this report. A steady habit works better:

• Every 1 to 2 weeks: download the report, harvest clear winners, negate clear losers.
• After a change: give it about two weeks before judging it. Amazon suggests letting negative keywords run for two weeks or more before changing strategy again.
• Keep a log. Note what you negated and why. If a campaign suddenly goes quiet, the log tells you where to look.

Tip Remember that negatives are not permanent. If you block something by mistake, you can remove it.

How MerchPPC helps

MerchPPC reads your search term data next to each product's real royalty, so you see a search term's spend against what that product can afford rather than a bare ACoS. From the Advertising console you can take a search term row and stage it as a negative keyword, which waits in the Publish queue until you approve it. It also lists the search terms that already brought orders for a product, so your harvest candidates are in one place instead of buried in a spreadsheet.

The short version

• The search term report shows what shoppers really typed (or which product pages you appeared on) before clicking.
• Sort by orders to find winners, and by spend with zero orders to find losers.
• Harvest winners (two or more orders, ACoS under break-even) into exact match.
• Negate irrelevant searches right away, and relevant ones only after real data (around 20 clicks, or spend above one sale's royalty).
• Review every one to two weeks, and give each change about two weeks to show results.