Amazon Negative Keywords (2026): How to Find and Add Them, With Thresholds and a Template for Indian Sellers

Negative keywords are the cheapest optimisation in Amazon advertising. Every one you add stops a search term you were paying for and never converting, and it keeps working every day without another bid change. Yet most Indian seller accounts we audit have fewer than twenty negatives in total, and the same wasted terms show up month after month. This guide explains negative phrase versus negative exact, where to add them, the search term report workflow, the click thresholds we use, negative ASINs, a monthly routine and a template. It assumes you know the basics from our Amazon ads guide for Indian sellers.

Definitions follow Amazon's advertising library. Amazon's own help pages on negative targeting and campaign limits did not render publicly when we checked, so the limits quoted are from third-party readings of them and are marked. Checked 25 September 2026.

What is a negative keyword on Amazon?

A negative keyword is a term that stops your Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands ad from showing when a shopper's search contains it. Amazon's targeting guide describes negative targeting as excluding "low-performing or irrelevant keywords and ASINs" to improve click-through rate and return on ad spend. Negatives work in both automatic and manual campaigns; in auto campaigns they are the only keyword control you have.

Negative phrase or negative exact: which one?

Rule of thumb: use negative exact for a specific search term that had clicks and no orders, so you remove only that term and keep its longer variants, which may still convert. Use negative phrase for a word or short phrase that signals an intent you will never serve: "free", "used", "second hand", "repair", "manual", "spare parts", a size or colour you do not stock, a material you do not use, or a competitor brand you have tested and cannot convert. One negative phrase on "free" removes dozens of future search terms at once.

Campaign level or ad group level?

Sponsored Products accepts negative keywords at both levels. Campaign-level negatives apply to every ad group in the campaign; ad-group negatives apply only to that ad group. Per Olifant Digital's reading of Amazon's limits page, you can add up to 1,000 negative keywords per campaign and up to 1,000 per ad group, and the two allowances are separate. In practice the choice is simple:

• Campaign level for intent blockers ("free", "used", competitor brands) and for any term that is wrong for the whole product line.
• Ad group level for terms that are wrong for one ASIN but right for another in the same campaign, such as a size or colour. Better still, keep one ASIN or variation family per ad group so this case is rare.
• Harvest negatives (a term you moved to exact match elsewhere) go at ad group level in the auto or broad ad group it came from.

How do you find negatives in the search term report?

The search term report shows the actual shopper searches your ads appeared for, with impressions, clicks, spend, orders and sales per term per campaign. The workflow we use:

1. In the ads console, Reports, create a Sponsored Products search term report for the last 60 days (30 days if spend is high). Download as a spreadsheet.
2. Filter to rows with orders = 0. Sort by spend, highest first.
3. Apply the click threshold below. Every term above it becomes a negative exact in the campaign it appears in.
4. Scan the zero-order list for repeated words ("free", a wrong size, a wrong material, a brand). Each becomes a negative phrase at campaign level.
5. Now filter to rows with orders greater than 0 and ACoS above your break-even. These are not negatives; they are bid cuts. Do not negate a term that converts.
6. Finally, terms that convert well in auto or broad: add them to the exact campaign and negative-exact them where they came from.

What click threshold justifies a negative?

The threshold depends on your conversion rate, because it is the number of clicks at which "no orders yet" stops being bad luck. If your ASIN converts at 8%, you expect one order every 12.5 clicks; after 25 clicks with none, the chance that the term is really converting at 8% is about 12%, and after 35 clicks about 5%. Our rules for Indian accounts:

Two extra rules. Negate immediately, regardless of clicks, anything clearly irrelevant: a different product, a different intent, a term where you cannot win the Buy Box. And for high-price products (₹3,000 and up) with naturally low conversion, raise the threshold rather than negating a term that just needs more time. Remember Sponsored Products attribution runs up to 14 days, so exclude the last week's terms from the zero-order test; their orders may still be arriving.

Worked example: what negatives are worth

A home-textiles seller spending ₹45,000 a month at 38% ACoS pulls a 60-day search term report. It finds 41 terms with 20 or more clicks and no orders, totalling ₹19,600 over 60 days, or ₹9,800 a month. Another 60 terms with 5 to 19 clicks and no orders total ₹6,200 a month; these are left for now. After negating the 41 terms, spend falls to about ₹35,200 with ad sales unchanged at ₹1,18,400, so ACoS drops from 38% to 29.7%. The ₹9,800 is then redirected into the exact campaign, where converting terms run at 22% ACoS. The whole exercise took one person about ninety minutes.

What about negative ASINs and negative brands?

Negative product targeting lets you exclude specific ASINs (and, in some campaign types, whole brands) so your ad does not appear on those product pages. Use it when the placement report shows product-page placements running well above break-even and the search term report (which lists ASINs as targets for auto and product-targeting campaigns) shows which pages are burning the money. Typical candidates: pages of products far cheaper than yours, pages of your own other ASINs where you cannibalise organic sales, and pages of products with thousands of reviews where a newer listing rarely wins the comparison. Negative ASINs go in auto campaigns and product-targeting campaigns; they have no effect in keyword campaigns.

What is the monthly negative-keyword routine?

• Weekly (15 minutes): scan the last 7 to 14 days of search terms in the busiest campaigns for anything obviously wrong. Negate on sight.
• Fortnightly (60 to 90 minutes): the full workflow above on a 60-day report. Add negative exacts on threshold terms, negative phrases on repeated words, harvest converters into exact.
• Monthly: review the negative list itself. Remove any negative phrase that has started blocking terms which now convert in another campaign, and check that no converting keyword in the exact campaign is negated in it by mistake.
• Before a sale event: add the previous event's zero-order terms in advance; search behaviour during Great Indian Festival or Prime Day brings in gift and bulk terms that rarely convert for a single-unit listing.

At around 20 ASINs and ₹50,000 a month this routine is where software starts to pay back; the harvesting and negation loop is exactly what ad tools automate. Whether you do it by hand, with software or through our marketplace ads management team, the point is that it happens on a schedule.

Negative keyword template

Copy this into a sheet, one row per campaign. Columns: campaign, ad group, search term, clicks, spend, orders, decision (negative exact / negative phrase / bid cut / harvest to exact / wait), date added. Seed every new campaign with these campaign-level negative phrases before it spends a rupee:

• Intent: free, used, second hand, refurbished, repair, replacement, spare, manual, how to, review, price
• Channel: wholesale, bulk, b2b, dropship
• Fit: every size, colour, material, pack count or capacity you do not sell
• Brand: competitor brands you have already tested and cannot convert; leave untested ones for the auto campaign to try
• Your own brand name in every non-brand campaign, so brand searches are served only by the brand-defence campaign at its own bid

Keep the sheet; when you launch a new ASIN in the same category, the seed list goes in on day one. That alone puts you ahead of most of your competitors, and it feeds directly into the routine in our guide to reducing ACoS.

FAQ

Do negative keywords work in automatic campaigns? Yes, and they are the main control you have in auto. Negative exact removes single wasted terms; negative phrase removes whole intents. Negative ASINs also apply to auto campaigns.

How many negative keywords can I add? Per third-party readings of Amazon's campaign limits, up to 1,000 per campaign and a further 1,000 per ad group for Sponsored Products. Very few accounts get near either limit.

Should I negate a term with one order and a high ACoS? No. A converting term with high ACoS needs a lower bid, not a negative. Negatives are for terms that do not convert at all after a fair number of clicks.

Can a negative keyword hurt sales? A careless negative phrase can. Blocking a generic word that appears in converting searches removes them too. Check converting terms for the word before adding it.

Do negatives affect organic ranking? Not directly. They affect where your ads show, which changes ad sales, which over time influences rank. Cutting wasted spend and moving it to converting terms tends to help rank.

Are negative keywords available for Sponsored Display? Sponsored Display uses product and audience targeting rather than keywords, so negative keywords do not apply; negative product targeting does.

Keeping the negatives current

A negative list is a living document. If you would rather an Amazon Ads Advanced Partner ran the fortnightly search-term routine for you, with the free wasted-spend audit as the starting point, see our marketplace ads management service.