If you run ads on Amazon, part of your budget goes to searches that never sell.
It's not a settings problem. It's a time problem: the search term report quickly runs to hundreds of lines, and nobody reads it line by line every week.
Here's the method I use, and the free tool I built to automate it.
1. Pull the right report
In the Amazon Ads console, Reports menu: Sponsored Products > "Search term".
Take 30 to 60 days. Shorter, you lack data. Longer, you mix seasons.
Export as CSV. That's all you need.
2. Set your target ACoS
Everything starts here. Without a target, you can't say a term is "expensive".
A simple baseline: your gross margin before ads, minus a few points of safety. If a product has a 35% margin, a target around 30% is reasonable for profitability.
3. The 3 lists
List 1: terms that spend without selling
Searches that got enough clicks to have sold at least once, and sold nothing.
The right threshold isn't a magic number. It's the number of clicks where, at your average conversion rate, you should have made one and a half orders. At a 5% conversion rate, that's around 30 clicks. At 12%, about a dozen.
Action: add them as negative exact in the campaigns concerned.
List 2: terms that sell, but too expensive
They convert, so you don't cut them. But their ACoS is well above your target (more than 1.3x).
Action: lower bids by 15 to 25% on the targets carrying them, then review in two weeks.
List 3: profitable terms
At least 2 orders, ACoS under target. These are your best keywords, often found by an auto or broad campaign.
Action: move them into an exact match campaign, and add them as negative exact in the original campaign. You finally control their bid.
4. The trap to avoid
Before adding negatives, read list 1 again.
Remove your brand terms, your product names, and the typos of your best keywords: a term close to a best-seller may simply lack volume. And give products launched less than 30 days ago some slack.
5. The free skill that does all this
I turned this method into a Claude skill: "Amazon Ads Audit".
You give it your CSV export (English or French) and your target ACoS. In two minutes, it gives you:
the list of terms to add as negatives, with the wasted budget in euros
the list of terms that are too expensive
the list of terms to isolate in exact match
a summary with the 3 priority actions
Everything runs on your machine. No data is sent anywhere. And it never changes your campaigns: it prepares, you decide.
To get it: comment "AUDIT" under my LinkedIn post and I'll send it to you by DM.