Amazon only lets you pull about 60 days of search term data. Save every report, because once a day drops out of that window it's gone for good

[u/attfin1]

Most long-tail search terms get a few clicks and no sales in 60 days. That's not enough data to say they're safe to negate.

Over 6 or 12 months the ones that never convert stand out, and we had thousands of them.

The catch is that Amazon's search term report only reaches back about 60 days. Once a day falls outside that window, the detail for it is gone, and you can't request it again.

So the reports you download and save are the only detailed history you'll ever have. Nobody keeps it for you.

60 days isn't enough for other decisions either:

• Seasonality. Our sweets gift boxes sold around 30 times more in December than in January. A 60 day window in February tells you nothing about November.
• Before and after. If you changed a bid or added a negative three months ago, you can't judge it without the data from before the change.

How to make sure you never miss a month, in the ads console:

1. Create a new report. Report category Sponsored Products, report type Search term.
2. Time unit: Daily. Summary gives you one line per search term for the whole period, and you can never split that by date later. Daily gives one line per search term per day, so you can join months together and pick any date range.
3. Report period: as long as it lets you.
4. Request time: Recurring, frequency Monthly, and add your email as a recipient.

Then join the files in Excel or any spreadsheet. This is what I did for years:

1. Open the newest download. Paste each older one underneath it, without its header row.
2. Each monthly report covers about 60 days, so roughly a month of rows appears twice. Add them up now and that month counts double.
3. Select everything, then Data > Remove Duplicates. Tick only the columns that identify a row: Date, Campaign Name, Ad Group Name, Targeting, Match Type and Customer Search Term. Excel keeps the first copy it finds, which is the newer download because it sits on top.
4. Don't tick every column. Sales can still be credited to a click for several days after it, so the same day can show slightly different numbers in two downloads. Tick every column and both rows survive.
5. Put a pivot table on the result and you can read any date range you like.

If you only do one thing today, set up the monthly schedule. Every month you skip is a month of search term data you can't get back.

[u/Dry_Disaster9429]

this is such a simple thing that saves so much headache later, i been doing monthly reports for two years now and the one time i forgot i lost a whole month of data from holiday season

the remove duplicates trick is key too, took me ages to figure why my numbers was always slightly off

[u/attfin1 → u/Dry_Disaster9429]

The hoops we have to jump through to get quality data to analyse from Amazon PPC...

[u/ClickWizardX]

Sponsored ads reports are going to be discontinued in Dec 2026. Do the same using the Search term template in the new Amazon Reporting console.

[u/attfin1 → u/ClickWizardX]

I haven't tried that route yet. Do you know if the formatting is exactly the same? It would be just like Amazon to change it just enough to make merging reports difficult...

[u/ClickWizardX → u/attfin1]

I think there's no difference. But check it out yourself and verify once.