Key Takeaways:
- Negative exact match blocks only the precise search entered (plus close variants); negative phrase match blocks any search containing that exact word sequence using the wrong one either lets irrelevant traffic through or blocks searches you actually wanted.
- Your Search Term Report, not guesswork, is the source for amazon negative keyword strategy — sort by clicks with zero or very few orders to surface real candidates.
- Irrelevant clicks don’t just waste that clicks spend; they drag down account-level CTR, which Amazon reads as a relevance signal for future ad placement.
- A negative keyword list built once at launch and never revisited stops matching what buyers actually search within weeks’ campaign keyword refinement needs a recurring cadence, not a one-time setup.
Negative Exact vs. Negative Phrase: What Each One Actually Blocks
Amazon gives you two keyword match types for exclusions, and choosing between them is where most amazon advertising negative keywords strategies either work or quietly backfire.
Negative exact match blocks only the precise search a shopper typed, plus close variants like plural forms add “leather wallet repair” as negative exact, and Amazon still shows your ad on “leather wallet repair kit” or “cheap leather wallet repair.” Negative phrase match blocks any search containing that exact word sequence in that order the same “leather wallet repair” as negative phrase blocks both of those longer searches too.
This is where most sellers new to negative keywords amazon ppc get it backward. Negative phrase match is broader and blocks more, which sounds safer, but it can also exclude searches you’d actually want if your product genuinely serves that longer query. Negative exact match is narrower and safer for surgical exclusions where you’re certain the term itself, not variations of it, is the problem.
A simple rule of thumb: use negative exact when you’ve identified one specific, clearly irrelevant search term and want to stop exactly that phrase without touching anything else. Use negative phrase when an entire family of related searches all sharing a word sequence that signals the wrong intent needs excluding at once, and you’re confident none of the longer variants in that family are actually worth keeping.
Getting the match type wrong doesn’t just fail to fix the issue it can quietly block converting traffic you never noticed was leaving. A phrase-match negative meant to stop one irrelevant search can end up excluding three or four searches that were actually buyers.
For your business, this means checking exactly which searches a proposed negative keyword would block before adding it, not assuming the match type doesn’t matter.
Finding Negative Keyword Candidates in Your Search Term Report
The Search Term Report, inside Campaign Manager, shows the actual words shoppers typed not the keywords you bid on. This is where real amazon ppc negative keywords come from, not guesswork about what “sounds” irrelevant.
Sort the report by clicks, then look for search terms with several clicks and zero or very few orders. A search term with 15 clicks and no sales over two to three weeks of data is a strong candidate; one clicks with no sale after a single day tells you nothing yet and shouldn’t be excluded on a hair trigger.
A worked example: a search term picking up 22 clicks at an average CPC of ₹18 over three weeks, with zero orders, has quietly cost ₹396 for nothing. Multiply that across a handful of similar terms sitting unreviewed in a broad-match campaign, and the monthly total is often larger than sellers expect until they actually pull the report and add it up.
Pull the report weekly, not monthly. A search term burning budget for four weeks before anyone reviews the report has already cost more than the five minutes it takes to scan clicks-without-orders and add the worst offenders to your negative keyword lists.
Be careful not to over-exclude on thin data. A brand-new product with low overall traffic might show a search term with three clicks and no orders simply because it hasn’t had enough impressions yet to produce a sale, not because the term is genuinely irrelevant. Weigh the click count against your product’s overall conversion rate before excluding a term converting at half your average rate is a candidate for a closer look, not an automatic negative.
For your business, this means the Search Term Report review becomes a standing weekly task, the same way you’d check ACoS not an occasional audit you get to eventually.
Campaign-Level or Ad Group-Level: Where to Add Them
Amazon lets you add negative keywords at the campaign level, where the exclusion applies to every ad group inside it, or at the ad group level, where it applies only to that one group’s keywords.
Campaign-level negatives make sense for a search term that’s clearly irrelevant to everything you sell a term with no path to being a buyer no matter which ad group served it. Ad group-level negatives make sense when a term is a bad match for one specific ad group’s keywords but might still be relevant to a different ad group in the same campaign targeting a related but distinct product line.
Defaulting everything to campaign-level is the more common mistake, because it’s one clicks instead of several but it can silently block a search term from an ad group where it would have converted, just because it didn’t convert in the ad group where you first spotted it.
For your business, this means pausing for a moment before excluding at the campaign level and asking whether every ad group in that campaign genuinely has no use for that search term.
A worked example: a campaign running two ads groups one for a standard product size, one for a bundle sees an irrelevant search term appear under the standard-size ad group. Adding it as a campaign-level negative also blocks it from the bundle ad group, even though that search term was never tested there and might have converted differently. An ad group-level negative on the standard-size group only leaves the bundle ad group free to prove itself.
Knowing how to use negative keywords on Amazon effectively comes down to this kind of judgment call, repeated consistently not a single rule that applies to every exclusion. When in doubt, default to the ad group level; it’s slightly more work to maintain but rarely costs you a converting search term the way an over-broad campaign-level exclusion can.
How Negative Keywords Actually Move CTR and ACoS
An irrelevant click costs you the click price regardless of whether it converts that part is obvious. What’s less obvious is what a growing base of irrelevant clicks does to your account-level CTR, and why that matters beyond the immediate spend.
Amazon factors CTR into how it evaluates ad relevance for future auctions. A listing accumulating clicks from searches with zero buying intent sees its click-through rate diluted by traffic that was never going to convert, which can affect how competitively your ads are positioned going forward not just the ACoS on the campaign carrying those clicks.
On the ACoS side, the math is direct: removing non-converting clicks from a campaigns spend either holds sales flat while cutting spend, or more precisely stops future spend from repeating a pattern that already produced zero return. This is campaign performance improvement you can measure within the next reporting cycle, not a vague long-term promise.
LMUUNATY Wellness grew Amazon sales by 35% within 90 days of engaging Growth Naavik for account management a result built in part on this kind of disciplined keyword targeting applied consistently, not a one-time cleanup.
For your business, this means tracking CTR and ACoS together after a negative keyword pass, not just checking whether ACoS moved.
A worked example: a campaign spending ₹20,000 a month at 28% ACoS, with ₹3,000 of that going to search terms that never converted, drops to roughly 24% ACoS once those terms are excluded and the same converting sales continue without a single bid change. This is amazon ppc keyword optimization in its most direct form: not finding new keywords to bid on, but explicitly excluding the ones already proven not to work.
Does Negative Targeting Work the Same Way Across Ad Types
Negative keywords apply most directly to Sponsored Products campaigns running broad or phrase match, where Amazon has the most room to match your ad against loosely related searches.
Sponsored Brands campaigns support negative keywords too, applied the same way at the campaign or ad group level, though the smaller number of keywords typically targeted in a Sponsored Brands campaign means irrelevant matches are somewhat less common. Sponsored Display works differently it targets audiences and products rather than search terms, so click quality optimization there comes from negative product or category targeting rather than negative keywords in the traditional sense.
For your business, this means your negative keyword strategy should concentrate its weekly review time on Sponsored Products first, where broad match makes irrelevant search queries the most likely and the costliest.
A worked example: a Sponsored Display campaign showing your ad to shoppers who recently viewed a competing kitchen scale can be refined by excluding specific competitor ASINs or an unrelated sub-category — “baby scales,” for instance, if your product is a food scale through negative product and category targeting rather than a keyword exclusion, since Sponsored Display isn’t matching against search terms in the first place.
Auto campaigns are worth a mention here too. Amazon’s automatic targeting decides which searches to match on your behalf, and it surfaces its own Search Term Report often with a wider spread of irrelevant matches than a manual campaign, since the targeting logic is broader by design. The same clicks-with-no-orders review applies, just against a report that usually needs it more often.
This Week’s Negative Keyword Pass
Pull this week’s Search Term Report and sort by clicks. Flag every search term with several clicks and no orders, decide exact or phrase match for each one based on exactly what it would block, and apply campaign-level negatives only where every ad group in that campaign has no use for the term.
Once your traffic is cleaner and less of your budget is going to searches that were never going to convert, the next lever worth pulling is how you bid on what’s left. Amazon Advertising Services can help you refine your approach, while [Amazon PPC Bidding Strategy: How to Choose and Optimise Bids for Better Performance] walks through matching a bidding approach to your campaign goal once wasted spend is under control.