Why My Search Term Report Shows ASINs, Not Keywords

Step by step

1. Download the search term report for the automatic campaignPull the report for a window with enough volume. Sort by spend. Flag every row that starts with B0: those are not queries, they are product detail pages your ad served on. Amazon's guide says targeted ASINs that generate clicks or conversions show up in the search term column.
2. Separate the ASIN rows from the query rows before you touch anythingTwo different controls fix two different problems. Query rows are handled with negative keywords, phrase or exact. ASIN rows are handled with negative product targeting. Mixing them is why the first attempt usually fails.
3. Exclude the page, not the word, with negative product targetingFor the ASIN rows with spend and no sales, add the ASIN as a negative product target. Amazon describes this as adding a negative list of products to prevent ads from displaying on an ASIN's product page. Do it at ad group level when only one ad group is affected, at campaign level when all of them are.Campaign manager › campaign › ad group › Negative targeting
4. Add negative keywords only for the rows that really are queriesUse negative phrase to catch a family of queries and negative exact for a single one. Amazon's definitions: negative phrase stops ads on queries containing the complete phrase or close variations, negative exact stops ads on queries containing the exact phrase or close variation.Campaign manager › campaign › Negative keywords
5. Set the exclusions on new campaigns at creation timeBoth lists can be loaded before launch, which saves the first two weeks of wasted spend on a campaign that you already know will pick up the same substitute pages.Create campaign › Negative keyword targeting / Negative product targeting
6. Wait before you judge itAmazon's guidance is to review a term once it has at least 20 clicks, and to let a negative run for two weeks or more before changing strategy again. Pulling the negative after three days tells you nothing.

The problem, as it shows up

You open the Sponsored Products search term report for an automatic campaign, and half the rows are not searches. They are strings like B0C7XXXXXX. Some of them have clicks, spend, and no sales at all.

Then you try to kill them the way you kill a bad query, by adding them as negative keywords, and nothing changes. The clicks keep coming.

This is one of the oldest and most repeated confusions in Amazon Ads. A seller forum thread asking exactly this (Can you set an ASIN as a negative KW in PPC?) has 2.1K views and 25 replies, and most of the answers in it contradict each other.

Why it happens

An automatic campaign does not only match search queries. Amazon's own targeting guide lists four match types for auto targeting, and two of them are not searches at all:

• Close match: "We may show your ad to shoppers who use search terms closely related to your products."
• Loose match: "We may show your ad to shoppers who use search terms loosely related to your products."
• Substitutes: "We may show your ad to shoppers browsing detail pages of products similar to yours."
• Complements: "We may show your ad to shoppers who view the detail pages of products that complement your product."

Substitutes and complements put your ad on a product detail page. There is no search query to report, so the report writes down the page instead: the ASIN. In Amazon's wording, those alphanumeric entries correspond to ASINs and the related product detail page on which your ad displayed. Amazon's guide says the same thing from the other side: "Targeted ASINs that generate clicks or conversions show up in the 'search term' column."

So a negative keyword cannot touch it. A keyword blocks a query. There was no query. What you need is the other kind of negative: negative product targeting, which Amazon describes as adding "a negative list of products to prevent ads from displaying on an ASIN's product page".

One more detail that catches people in the opposite direction: in a product targeting campaign you can exclude ASINs and brands, but you have no keyword-level control over where the ad serves. Advertisers have been reporting that mix for years, including this thread on X (9 likes, 8 replies) arguing that ASIN targeting campaigns surface in search term reports and that you can only negate ASINs inside them, not keywords.

Which ad clicks never become sales?

See my ad spend

What other sellers report, and what Amazon confirms

The forum threads are full of recipes that are worth separating from the documentation.

What Amazon's own guide confirms: negative targeting works in both automatic and manual campaigns; negatives can sit at campaign or ad group level; negative keywords take phrase and exact match; negative product targets exclude ASINs and brands.

What other sellers report, and Amazon does not confirm anywhere: that an exact negative keyword built from an ASIN stops a detail page placement. Several sellers in those threads say they had "zero luck" with it. Treat it as folklore, not procedure.

Catch it before it eats the budget

The reason this matters is not tidiness. A detail page placement on a substitute product is a shopper who is already looking at a competitor. It converts worse than a keyword click almost by definition, and in an auto campaign it is spending the same budget.

Amazon's guidance on when to judge a negative is explicit, and it is the part most people skip: review a term once it has at least 20 clicks, and let a negative run for two weeks or more before changing strategy again.

How to stop it coming back

• Split the two intents. Keep one automatic campaign for discovery and move proven queries into a manual keyword campaign and proven ASINs into a product targeting campaign. Then each report has one job.
• Read the report by row type, not top to bottom. Rows that start with B0 are pages. Everything else is a query. They need different negatives and they deserve different bids.
• Re-check after every catalogue change. A new variation or a changed category pulls in a new set of substitutes, and the ASIN rows change with it.
• Keep a running exclusion list. Negative product targets are the only control that holds, and they are cheap to maintain once the list exists.

If the same report is also showing spend you cannot place at all, the next two things to read are where Sponsored Products budget goes outside Amazon and why a CPC can come in above your bid. For the campaign structure behind all of this, start from the Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands comparison.

#amazon ads#sponsored products#negative targeting#search term report

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