How to Read and Act on Your Search Term Report
The search term report is the closest thing Amazon gives you to reading your customers' minds. It shows the exact words shoppers typed before clicking your ad — and whether those clicks turned into sales. Learn to read it and you'll never guess at keywords or negatives again. Here's how to turn that raw report into decisions.
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Search terms vs. keywords
First, clear up the confusion. A keyword is what you target and bid on; a search term is what the shopper actually typed. With broad and auto campaigns, one keyword can trigger dozens of different search terms. The report exposes that gap — showing you the real queries hiding behind your targeting, which is exactly where the opportunities and the waste live.
Reading the columns
Don't get lost in the sea of numbers. A handful of columns tell you almost everything:
| Column | What it tells you | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Search term | The exact shopper query | Relevance to your product |
| Clicks | Interest volume | Enough clicks to judge fairly |
| Spend | Cost of that term | High spend, low return |
| Orders | Sales generated | Zero orders on high spend |
| ACoS | Efficiency of the term | Well above your target |
| Conversion rate | Clicks that became sales | Strong converters to scale |
Every row in the report is a small verdict: this search either made you money, cost you money, or hasn't been given a fair enough trial to say yet.
Mining the winners
Sort or filter for search terms with a healthy number of orders and an ACoS at or below your target. These are proven converters — real demand you've validated with your own money. Promote each into an exact-match keyword in a manual campaign where you can bid confidently and control its performance. This is keyword harvesting, and it's how strong accounts keep compounding.
Cutting the losers
Now flip it: filter for terms with meaningful spend and zero (or very few) orders. Judge each one for relevance. If it's clearly off-target — wrong material, wrong audience, a competitor's brand — add it as a negative keyword to stop the bleeding. Be careful not to negate a genuinely relevant term that simply hasn't had enough clicks yet.
Quick tip
Set a "spend without a sale" threshold tied to your product price. A $30 product that has burned $30 in clicks with no order is a strong negative candidate; three clicks and no sale usually isn't.
Spotting patterns, not just single terms
The real skill is reading the report for themes rather than treating every row in isolation. If a dozen different search terms all contain the word "kids" and none convert, the lesson isn't twelve separate negatives — it's a single negative-phrase "kids" that sweeps the whole family out at once. Likewise, if several converting terms share a modifier like "stainless steel," that's a signal to build a dedicated ad group around it. Zoom out and let the clusters, not just individual queries, guide your decisions.
Where auto campaigns shine
Automatic campaigns are your richest source of new search terms because Amazon matches your listing to queries you'd never think to bid on yourself. That makes the search-term report from an auto campaign a genuine discovery engine — a steady feed of real customer language, some of it surprisingly profitable. The trade-off is that auto campaigns also surface plenty of junk, which is exactly why disciplined report review and negative mining matter most there.
A note on data windows
The single most common mistake is acting on too little data. A search term with two clicks and no sale tells you almost nothing; the same term with forty clicks and no sale tells you a lot. Always look at a window long enough to accumulate meaningful click volume before drawing conclusions, and remember that low-traffic terms simply take longer to reach a verdict. Patience here prevents you from cutting keywords that would have converted with a fair trial.
Building a weekly routine
- Pull the report for a window with enough data — a week or two, not a day.
- Harvest converting terms into exact-match campaigns.
- Negate the clearly wasteful terms.
- Flag the "maybes" and revisit them once they've accumulated more clicks.
Doing it faster with Adtomic
The report is powerful but the manual filtering and cross-referencing gets old fast. Helium 10's Adtomic automates the analysis — it surfaces harvest-ready winners and flags wasteful terms against your rules, so acting on the report becomes a quick weekly review instead of a spreadsheet marathon. That consistency is what separates accounts that improve from ones that drift.
The bottom line
The search term report is the feedback loop at the heart of profitable PPC. Read the columns that matter, harvest your winners, negate your losers, and give the undecided terms time. Turn that into a weekly habit and your campaigns get sharper every single week.
Ready to put this into action?
Helium 10 gives you the tools in this guide in one dashboard. Start free through our link.