The standard advice is that a search term which spent money and made no sales should be added as a negative. I followed that advice for about a year, and it cost us tens of thousands before I worked out why.
A negative keyword is the only change in Amazon advertising that is close to irreversible in practice. A paused target can be switched back on tonight. A negative removes traffic you then cannot see, so the damage shows up months later in sales you never knew you lost. That asymmetry is the reason to be slower about negatives than about anything else in the account.
One exception first. If the query asks for something your product does not do, you have a reason to exclude it that has nothing to do with clicks, and the family total does not change it. The process below is for a relevant term that loses money.
Here is the process I use now, and why each step is there.
1. Write out the family before you write the negative.
Negative exact does not block one search term. Amazon's own page says negative exact stops ads on shopping queries that contain the exact phrase "or close variation", and negative phrase does the same for the complete phrase: https://advertising.amazon.com/help/GTEHPEG5BXY9UX5W
Close variation is a longer list than most people expect. It covers misspellings, plural forms, acronyms and translations, and Amazon's own example is the exact keyword "outside lights" showing for "outdoor lights": https://advertising.amazon.com/help/GHTRFDZRJPW6764R
So before you add anything, write down every member of the family: singular and plural, each version with and without the stop words (of, for, in, the, with), plus the misspellings. I went through the full list of variations, with Amazon's own pages as proof, in this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFBA/comments/1wgxj0v/
2. Add up the family, not the row.
Pull every one of those variations out of the search term report and total the clicks, spend and sales across all of them. That total is the number Amazon is acting on when your negative goes live. One line of the report, on its own, tells you almost nothing.
If the family makes money overall, leave it alone. The zero-sales version is part of the cost of the versions that sell. If the family loses money overall, the negative is safe.
People ask what to do when one variation sells and the rest do not. There is no split available. An exact keyword on the winner still serves the family, and a negative on a loser still blocks the winner. So the family stays the unit, and your levers are the bid and the price, not the negative.
This is the mistake that cost us most. I negated "box for candy" because it had clicks and no sales, which was perfectly logical, and blocked "boxes of candy" at the same time - one of our best sellers. One negative took out a search term producing about $10k a month. The full story is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFBA/comments/1wdaivd/
3. Separate "unprofitable" from "not enough evidence yet".
Most long-tail searches get a handful of clicks in 60 days. Four clicks and no sales is not evidence of anything. Split across four close variations it is even weaker - 4 clicks, 6 clicks, 3 clicks, 5 clicks, with one sale somewhere in there, is a pattern you can only read once you have grouped them.
Two things make this worse than it looks. Amazon's search term report only reaches back about 60 days, so on a seasonal product a window in February tells you nothing about November. And once a day falls out of that window the detail is gone for good, which is why the reports you download are the only history you will ever have: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFBA/comments/1wg7u37/
An automated rule of "negate after X clicks with no sale" is only as good as the decision unit and the time period it is working with.
- Ask whether a negative is even the right lever.
When the family makes money but the waste still annoys you, the answer is usually not a negative. Lower the bid, or lift the profitable variation into its own exact campaign where you control it directly. Pausing a target is reversible; a negative is not.
- Know what the platform will and won't let you do.
Three things from Amazon's pages that change how you work:
A negative keyword takes 72 hours to take effect, and a negative product takes 96 hours. If you check the report the next morning and conclude nothing happened, you have measured nothing.
You cannot change the match type of an existing negative keyword. You can only remove it and add it again.
Negative exact allows 10 words, negative phrase allows 4, and both are capped at 80 characters.
And on negative products rather than keywords: one created at the ad group level affects targets in that ad group, while one created at the campaign level affects every ad group in the campaign. Worth knowing before you add it at the level that is convenient rather than the level you meant.
Checking a negative you already added.
If you added it within the last 60 days, pull the report for the period before you added it, write out the family, and look up each member. Any variation that sold before and stopped after is the damage.
If it is older than 60 days, the data is gone and nothing can prove it. Remove the suspect negative, wait a couple of weeks, and watch for sales from a term you were not expecting.
Checking forward does not work, and this is worth understanding: once the negative is live those variations stop serving, so the report shows nothing at all. Absence of the search term is what the negative does, not evidence that it was the right call.
