Identify and Manage Underperforming Amazon Ads Search Terms

How Search Terms Create ROAS Erosion

Amazon Ads records performance at the search term level, but many sellers primarily watch account-level or campaign-level totals. That can hide a common pattern: top-line sales stay steady while a subset of terms becomes more expensive to convert. These terms may keep getting clicks because they look topically relevant, but they fail to produce enough orders to justify their cost.

A few signals can help you spot them:

• Spend is rising while conversion rate stays flat or declines
• Clicks are high but orders remain low or zero
• The term is broad and attracts shoppers with a different purchase intent
• ROAS for the term is weak compared with the rest of the campaign

These patterns are especially important when your overall ROAS is falling even though total sales appear stable.

A Practical Cleanup Workflow

The goal is not to pause everything. It is to remove or reduce the terms that clearly waste budget while keeping the queries that still convert. A simple review cycle can work well:

• Pull a recent search term report and sort by spend
• Focus on terms that spend heavily but convert at a lower rate than the campaign
• Add clearly irrelevant or consistently non-converting terms as negative keywords
• Lower bids on terms that convert but not efficiently enough
• Review again after enough new data has accumulated

For teams managing larger accounts, a tool like Amazon Negative Keyword Tool by Todoza can help turn this into a ranked cleanup queue based on campaign-specific metrics instead of relying on manual scanning.

When This Matters

This type of cleanup is most useful when sales remain steady but efficiency is weakening. If your best sellers are still converting and only a few terms are dragging down the account, a focused negative keyword pass can produce a clearer picture quickly. It is also useful before increasing budgets: adding spend to an account with hidden wasteful search terms can amplify the problem rather than scale profit.

However, search term cleanup works best as part of a review process. Some teams prefer read-only analysis that highlights the worst terms and leaves final changes to a person who understands the product and its margins.