The search term report is the most useful file in Amazon advertising. Your keywords are what you told Amazon to target; search terms are what shoppers actually typed when your ad was clicked. The report joins the two, so you can see, for every campaign and keyword, which real queries produced sales and which drained budget. It is available for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands under Reports in the campaign manager, or through the Amazon Ads API.
How the search term report works
You choose the ad type, a summary or daily view, and a date range. As of September 2026 the lookback is limited to the previous 65 days, so sellers who want year-on-year data must download and store reports regularly or schedule recurring reports. The report includes a row for each search term that received at least one click on your ad; terms that only earned impressions are not listed.
Key columns per row: campaign, ad group, targeting (your keyword or "*" for automatic), match type, customer search term, impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, spend, orders, sales, ACoS and ROAS. Sponsored Products sales use a 7-day attribution window.
Worked example: a broad keyword "kids school bag" shows 1,800 clicks and ₹14,400 spend in the summary. The search term report splits that into "kids school bag for girls" (600 clicks, 72 orders, ACoS 12%), "school bag" (900 clicks, 30 orders, ACoS 45%) and "trolley bag for kids" (300 clicks, 0 orders). The seller adds the first as an exact keyword with a higher bid, cuts the bid on the second, and adds "trolley" as a negative phrase. Nothing in the keyword-level view would have shown this.
Why the search term report matters for sellers
Automatic and broad campaigns spend on Amazon's guesses. The report is the only way to audit those guesses. It is also the primary source of new keywords: converting search terms are the highest-quality keyword ideas available because they are proven on your own listing. Sellers who never open the report typically carry 20 to 40% wasted spend, in our experience across Indian accounts, and it is the first thing an agency looks at when taking over an account.
How to use the search term report
- Download it weekly and keep a rolling archive, since Amazon only serves 65 days.
- Sort by spend with zero orders to find negatives; sort by orders to find keywords worth promoting to exact match.
- Look at automatic campaigns first. They generate the most new terms.
- Check the match type column to see which broad and phrase keywords are matching too loosely.
- Act on the file, not the campaign manager; the manager's search term tab is filtered and shorter.
Blooprint's weekly optimisation cycle under marketplace ads management starts with this report; the Amazon ads guide for India shows where to download it.