Find and cut wasted Amazon ad spend

1. Why ad spend leaks

Your keyword is not what buyers type. When you run an auto campaign, or broad and phrase match keywords, Amazon shows your ad for many related searches. Some of them sell. Many get clicks from people who wanted something else, like a kids sipper when you sell a 1-litre steel bottle. Every one of those clicks costs money.

The search term report lists the exact words buyers typed before clicking your ad, with clicks, spend and orders for each. That's the only place this waste is visible, and it's what the Ads Waste Finder reads.

2. Download the search term report

1. 1Sign in to Amazon Ads (advertising.amazon.com, or your country's Amazon Ads site, or Advertising → Campaign Manager from Seller Central).
2. 2Open Measurement & Reporting → Sponsored ads reports and click Create report.
3. 3Set Report category = Sponsored Products, Report type = Search term, Time unit = Summary.
4. 4Pick a date range of 30–60 days that ends at least 7 days ago. Amazon can take several days to credit an order to the click that caused it; recent days make good terms look like waste.
5. 5Click Run report. When the status says Completed, download it. Upload that file to the tool unchanged.

Amazon renames menus now and then. If a label looks different, look for "Reports" and the "Search term" report type for Sponsored Products.

3. Choose your settings

Target ACoS

The most you're willing to spend on ads for every ₹100 of ad sales. A simple starting point is your profit margin before ads: if you keep ₹35 from a ₹100 sale after Amazon fees, product cost and GST, then above 35% ACoS each ad sale loses money.

Clicks with no order

How many clicks a search term gets without an order before you call it waste. If about 1 in 10 clicks on your products turns into an order, 10–15 clicks is fair. For expensive products that convert slowly, use 20 or more.

…or spend with no order (optional)

Catches expensive terms that waste money in few clicks. Setting it to your profit per unit is a good rule: once a term has spent that much without a sale, it has cost you a full sale's profit.

Never suggest as negative

Your brand name and spellings of it. Brand searches are cheap insurance against competitors; the tool will never suggest blocking them and lists them separately for you to review.

4. Read the results

The headline number, ACoS without waste, shows what your ACoS would have been if the wasted terms had been blocked. That's the improvement on the table.

5. Apply the changes in Amazon Ads

Click Download action plan: it lists every change with its campaign and ad group. Then work through it in Campaign Manager:

a) Add negative exact keywords (Wasted spend)

1. Open the campaign, then the ad group named in the action plan.
2. Go to Negative keywords → Add negative keywords.
3. Choose Negative exact, paste the terms (use Copy keywords in the tool), and save.

Negative exact blocks only that exact search, so it's the safe choice.

b) Block ASINs (Wasted spend, ASIN rows)

1. In the same ad group, open Negative targeting → Products (in auto campaigns this may be called Negative product targeting).
2. Paste the ASINs (Copy ASINs) and click Exclude.

c) Add negative phrase words (Waste words): carefully

A negative phrase like kids blocks every search containing that word. Only add a word if no version of it could ever fit your product. When in doubt, use negative exact on the individual terms instead.

d) Lower bids (High ACoS)

• Manual campaigns: in Targeting, find the keyword that triggered the term (shown under Match) and set the bid near the suggested amount.
• Auto campaigns: you can't bid per search term. Lower the bid of the targeting group shown (close match, loose match, substitutes, complements), or move the term to a manual campaign.
• Change bids by at most 20–30% at a time, then wait a week.

e) Harvest winners

1. In a manual campaign, add the term as an exact keyword (or the ASIN as a product target), with a bid close to its current cost per click.
2. In the auto/broad campaign it came from, add the same term as negative exact, so your own campaigns don't bid against each other and the exact keyword gets the traffic.

6. Rules to avoid mistakes

• 1Leave out the last 7 days. Late-credited orders make good terms look bad.
• 2Never block your own brand, or a term that sells in another ad group.
• 3Relevance beats numbers. A clearly relevant term with 10 clicks and no order may just be unlucky. Lower its bid instead of blocking it.
• 4Small steps. Change bids gradually and give each change a week before judging it.
• 5Fix the listing too. If many relevant terms get clicks but no orders, the problem may be price, images, reviews or delivery speed, not the keywords.

7. Your 2-week routine

8. FAQ