How do you read the Amazon search term report?

The Amazon search term report lists the searches shoppers made before clicking your Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands ads, with what each one cost and sold. Only searches with at least one ad click appear. You read it to make three decisions: add the searches that sell as exact keywords, negate the searches that spend without selling, and spot the words that keep losing money across many searches.

Gloriads reads that report for you: its Search terms view keeps up to six years of searches, splits them into single words and pairs, and turns a waste into a negative in two clicks. See it in the live demo.

For sellers, vendors, KDP authors and agencies. Checked against Amazon's help pages in October 2026.

Want the searches and their words added up for you? Open the Search terms page in the live Gloriads demo, no sign-up.

The search term report at a glance

Display has no search term report. Its closest report, matched target, lists the product pages (ASINs) where the ad appeared and got at least one click. Streaming TV has no search term report either.

What does the search term report show?

One row per search, per keyword or target that matched it, in a summary or day by day. The columns that matter:

Three things surprise most readers:

• An ASIN in the search column (such as "b00ipgvvz4") means the ad showed on that product's page, not on a search. It only appears for Sponsored Products automatic campaigns and product-targeted ad groups, and for Sponsored Brands product targeting.
• Some searches were never typed. Outside search, such as off-Amazon placements, Amazon infers the search that best matches your product.
• Impressions are lower than in campaign manager, because searches that got no click are left out.

There is no ACOS column: ACOS is cost divided by sales, the inverse of ROAS (a ROAS of 4 is an ACOS of 25%). Convert ACOS and ROAS.

Sales are counted on the day of the click, within a lookback window: 7 days for Sponsored Products sellers, 14 days for vendors and authors, 14 days for Sponsored Brands. A sale can take up to 12 hours to appear, and a day's figures stay incomplete until its window has ended.

Where do you find the search term report?

• In campaign manager: open a campaign's ad group, then its Search terms section.
• In the old reports page: Sponsored ads reports, report type Search term. It closes on December 31, 2026: from December 17 nothing new can be created there, and at the shutdown its saved reports, schedules and history are deleted.
• In unified reporting, its replacement: Reporting in the console's left menu, then Create report with template, then Search term. It can mix several accounts and marketplaces in one report.

Amazon's migration tool moves your scheduled reports to unified reporting before the old reports pages close on December 31, 2026. One gap: unified reporting does not yet give search terms for legacy Sponsored Brands campaigns (those without ad groups); Amazon plans it for later in 2026.

How far back does the search term report go?

65 days in the old search term report. Amazon advises downloading and saving your reports monthly to keep the history.

Unified reporting keeps far more: up to 24 months by day or week, and up to 6 years by month, year or for a whole date range. One pull broken down by day covers 120 days at most.

How do you read it? Three decisions

1. Add the searches that sell as exact keywords

A search with sales at a cost you accept deserves its own keyword, in exact match, with its own bid. Amazon's tip in its help page: find the keywords that generate sales and add them to your campaigns.

When that search came from an automatic campaign, add it there as a negative exact keyword, so the two campaigns stop competing for it. Amazon's Target Promotion does both for an automatic campaign with one product in one ad group, from the ad group's Search terms page: automatic vs manual targeting.

2. Negate the searches that spend without selling

A search with clicks and no sale, or a cost you do not accept, is a negative keyword candidate:

Negative keywords take effect within 72 hours, negative products within 96 hours. Start with negative exact when in doubt: a short negative phrase can also block searches that sell. How negative keywords work.

3. Read the words, not only the searches (n-grams)

Most wasted spend is spread over many searches that each cost a little. An n-gram is a piece of a search: one word (1-gram), two words in a row (2-gram) or three (3-gram). Add up every search that contains the same piece, and a pattern appears.

Example, with made-up figures for a water bottle:

Search by search, no row stands out. Word by word:

"kids" cost $20 in two searches and never sold. If your bottle is not made for children, a negative phrase "kids" blocks those two searches and every future one that contains the word. Check first that the word is not part of searches that do sell, and never negate your own brand.

Search terms and n-grams in Gloriads

Gloriads' Search terms page does this adding-up for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, one marketplace at a time:

• Group by: Word cuts every search into words, pairs and triplets, with a Spend without sales column to sort on.
• Add as negative turns a word into a phrase negative and a whole search into an exact negative, in two clicks, with a preview before anything is sent to Amazon.
• Add as keyword does the opposite for a search that sells.
• Periods from the last 30 days to all time, up to 6 years.
• Words of your never negate list, such as your brand, are locked.

Frequently asked questions