How to download and read your Amazon Ads search term report

Download it

1. Sign in to the Amazon Ads console you use for your books (through KDP or directly).
2. Open Reports (under Measurement and Reporting) and choose Create report.
3. Set the category to Sponsored Products and the report type to Search term.
4. Pick a date range of 30 to 60 days that ends at least 14 days ago. Kindle Unlimited page reads keep arriving after the click, so recent days look worse than they are.
5. Run the report, wait for it to finish, and download the file (.xlsx or .csv).

Menu names move around as Amazon updates the console, but the report type has been called Search term for years.

The columns that matter

• Campaign Name, Ad Group Name: where the click happened. Negatives go here.
• Targeting and Match Type: the keyword (broad, phrase, exact), product target (an ASIN) or auto group you bid on. Bids live here.
• Customer Search Term: what the reader typed. Searches that look like b0xxxxxxxx are other books' product pages, from product targeting or auto campaigns.
• Impressions, Clicks, Spend, CPC: what you paid for the traffic.
• Total Sales and Total Orders (with a 7 or 14 day window in the name): purchases credited to the ad.
• KENP read and estimated KENP royalties: Kindle Unlimited pages read after an ad click, where your report includes them. Without these columns, KU borrows are invisible.
• ACOS and ROAS: spend divided by sales and its inverse. Both ignore page reads and later books in the series.

Read it the right way for a series

Sort by spend, not ACoS. The terms that cost the most deserve the first look. For each one, ask three questions: did it bring readers (orders or page reads), what are those readers worth across the whole series, and has it had enough clicks to judge?

A term with 40 clicks and no orders but 1,200 pages read is a Kindle Unlimited winner that ACoS shows as a 100% loss. A term with 40 clicks, no orders and no pages is waste. The report holds both; ACoS can't tell them apart.

How many clicks is "enough" depends on your book. If your account usually wins a reader every 10 clicks, a term with 20 clicks and nothing to show is past bad luck. One with 6 clicks isn't. The method page explains the exact rule the analyzer uses.

What to do with it

• Negate search terms with enough clicks and no readers, as negative exact (or negative product targets for ASINs) in the ad groups where they ran.
• Move bids on targets based on what a click earns across the series, not on ACoS.
• Harvest profitable searches from auto, broad and phrase into their own exact keywords.

The free analyzer does all three from the file you just downloaded, without uploading it anywhere.