The Amazon Search Term Report is the single most valuable PPC data source on the platform — and the single most consistently ignored by brand operators. If you talk to any senior Amazon advertising operator about where they look first when an account is underperforming, the answer is unanimous: "Pull the last 90 days of search term reports and read them."
Yet most brands download the report once a quarter, glance at top-line ACoS, and close the file. The search term report is doing nothing for them. Meanwhile, the brands that DO mine it weekly are quietly compounding ACoS improvements that look like magic from the outside.
[Settles in.] Let's walk through what's actually in this file, how to download it, the five columns that matter, the weekly mining workflow, and why this is the foundational PPC skill that nobody on your team is bored enough to learn.
What the Amazon Search Term Report Actually Is
The Amazon Search Term Report is a downloadable CSV showing every customer query that triggered one of your sponsored ads, along with the impressions, clicks, spend, and sales each query produced. It is generated by Amazon Advertising Console and updated daily. The report exists for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands separately.
The data is uniquely valuable because it shows the gap between what you bid on (your keywords) and what customers actually typed (their search terms). Those are not the same thing. Amazon's match-type system expands your keyword "running shoes" to capture queries like "running shoes for men size 10," "best running shoes," "Nike running shoes for women," and increasingly weird variations that may or may not be relevant to what you sell.
Your keyword report shows what you're bidding on. Your search term report shows what's actually happening. Optimize against the search term report — or be optimized by the algorithm.
The actionability is what makes this report uniquely powerful. Every row is a decision waiting to happen: promote this term to exact match, add this term as a negative, increase bid on this performer, decrease spend on this loss-maker.
How to Download Your Search Term Report
Five-minute setup. Do this once, then save the report template for repeat use.
The report can be tens of thousands of rows for established accounts. Don't let the volume intimidate you. Most of the work is done in 30 minutes with the right filters.
The Five Columns That Matter Most
The full report has 20+ columns. Most of them are noise for optimization purposes. These are the five that actually drive decisions.
Ignore: click-through rate (interesting but rarely decision-driving), Match Type (interesting context but not where the optimization happens), Targeting (we already know this), Campaign Name (we already know this).
The Weekly Mining Workflow
The workflow that turns the search term report from a static file into an optimization engine. 30-45 minutes per week for a mid-sized account.
Step 1 (5 min): Pull last 7 days search term report. Filter to Spend > 0.
Step 2 (10 min): Sort by Spend descending. Identify the top 20 spending terms. For each: is the ACoS profitable (below your target)? If yes, consider promoting to exact match. If no, decide whether the issue is bid (lower it) or relevance (add it as a negative).
Step 3 (10 min): Sort by Conversions descending. Identify any term with 3+ conversions in 7 days that isn't already an exact-match keyword. These are immediate exact-match promotion candidates.
Step 4 (5 min): Filter to Spend > $20 AND Conversions = 0. These are your immediate negative keyword candidates. Add them as negatives in the campaign they came from.
Step 5 (5 min): Document what changed. The next-week\'s report should show measurable shifts.
The discipline of doing this weekly is the single biggest separator between accounts that compound improvements and accounts that drift. (See Amazon PPC management for the full operating cadence.)
Promoting Converters to Exact Match
This is the offensive half of search term mining. When a customer search term is converting profitably on broad or phrase match, you want to capture that traffic at exact match — which gives you tighter bid control and usually a lower CPC.
Adding Negative Keywords
The defensive half. Negative keywords are how you stop wasted spend on terms that consistently click but don't convert. (Deeper dive: Amazon negative keywords.)
Most accounts have 5-15% wasted spend that disappears the moment a disciplined negative keyword pass happens. (See how to reduce Amazon ad spend waste.)
Reading Search Term Reports for Strategy
Beyond tactical mining, the report reveals strategic information most brand operators never extract. Worth doing every 90 days at minimum.
Six Common Mistakes
Patterns that consistently kill the value of search term mining. Avoid these and you\'re ahead of 80% of brand operators.
The Bottom Line
The Amazon Search Term Report is the foundational PPC document. Mining it weekly is the single most valuable optimization habit a brand operator can build. The workflow takes 30-45 minutes per week. The compound effect over 12 months is the difference between a profitable PPC account and a profitable PPC account at 30% lower ACoS.
If you\'re evaluating an Amazon PPC service or agency, the search term report is your test case. Ask them to show you a sample weekly search term review they\'ve done for another client (sanitized). What they actually do with this data is the difference between an agency that compounds your results and an agency that watches them happen.
[Final stage direction: there is no faster path from "I should optimize my Amazon ads" to "my Amazon ads are actually optimized" than 30 minutes a week in the search term report. The brands that do this win the patient way. The brands that don\'t keep wondering why their ACoS won\'t move.]
FAQ
The Amazon search term report (technically the Sponsored Products Search Term Report) is the downloadable file from Amazon Advertising Console showing every search query that triggered one of your ads, plus impressions, clicks, spend, sales, and conversions for each. It is the single most important data source for Amazon PPC optimization — the foundation of negative keyword work, keyword promotion, and bid strategy decisions.
Weekly at minimum. Most optimization happens at the search term level: pulling converting terms out for promotion to exact match, dumping non-converting terms into negatives, identifying new keyword opportunities. Brands that review monthly leave 20-30 percent of available ACoS improvement on the table. Brands that review quarterly are not actively managing PPC — they are watching it happen.
In Amazon Advertising Console: navigate to Reports, click 'Create Report,' select Sponsored Products, then Search Term Report. Choose your date range (we recommend last 30 days for weekly reviews, last 90 days for quarterly strategic reviews), then download as a CSV. The report can also be scheduled to deliver automatically each week.
The keyword report shows performance for keywords you've explicitly added to your campaigns. The search term report shows the actual customer queries that triggered your ads — which can include phrases that don't exactly match your bid keywords because of Amazon's match-type expansion. Search term reports are far more valuable for optimization because they reveal what customers actually search, not just what you bid on.
Yes. The customer search terms revealed in the report are real, verified queries that converted. These belong in your listing title, bullet copy, and backend keywords. Many brands miss this synergy — they optimize PPC with the data, but never feed the same insights back into the organic listing. The bidirectional flow (PPC data informs SEO; SEO performance informs PPC bidding) is the single highest-leverage Amazon workflow most brands ignore.