Back in August of last year, Kristin wrote a great post about how to get started advertising on Amazon’s Seller Central. If you’ve been advertising on Amazon for a few weeks or months and are looking to improve your campaign performance one of the best places to look is your search query reports.

How To Find Amazon Search Query Reports

First, sign into your Amazon Seller Central account. In the top navigation, look for the tab labeled “Reports”. (You may have different options than the image below) Hold the mouse over it and then click on “Advertising Reports”.

Now you’re going to choose your report criteria. For Report Type, we want to leave it on “Search term”. You can name it whatever you’d like and then select the reporting period. It’s just like the interface where you’ve got predefined options like “Today” or “Month to date” but you can set a customized date range as well.

After you’ve set it up the way you want, click on the yellow “Create report” button and it should generate shortly and appear in the table below. It will be a .xlsx file that you can use your Excel skills to slice and dice for non-performing keywords (non-converting terms, high spend & low return terms, etc.) Make a list of these and proceed to the next step.

Adding Negative Keywords

Now that you’ve got a list of negative keywords you’d like to add to your campaign, go back to the Campaign Manager and click on the name of the desired campaign. On this screen you’re looking for the “Negative keywords” link just below the campaign name:

Click on the yellow “Create negative keywords” button and a data entry box will appear. Cut/paste your list into the box and then choose if you would like them to be Negative Phrase or Negative Exact. You can only do one type at a time, so if you have some of both you’ll need to repeat this step a second time. Click the yellow “Add these keywords” and then the “Done” button.

Why Use Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords inform Amazon when NOT to show your sponsored products. For keyword-targeted campaigns, this won’t be as big of an issue, but for automatic-targeting campaigns, this is a vital optimization lever that helps you educate the machine learning & improve your results.

If this post was helpful to you, here are some of our other posts that may be of interest to you:

• Which Side of the Amazon Are You On? Getting Started With Amazon Vendor Central
• Tips for Curating an Amazon Paid Search Keyword Strategy
• Ways to Overcome Amazon’s Frustrating Financial Threshold Warnings

What are your biggest tips for Amazon campaigns? We’d love to hear your experiences in the comments!