I looked at thousands of Amazon PPC search term reports, and there is one patter
By Michael Erickson Facchin · June 21, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I looked at thousands of Amazon PPC search term reports, and there is one pattern that keeps repeating.
The difference between profitable accounts and leaking accounts is not budget. It’s how they treat keywords.
Most sellers don’t realize there are two completely different types of search terms in their campaigns:
Positive key phrases and negative key phrases.
And the gap between them is where profit is either created or destroyed.
Positive key phrases are the terms that generate orders. They are your validated demand. These are the exact search terms customers type, click, and buy from.
In most accounts, these keywords make up only 10–30% of total traffic, but they generate 70–90% of revenue.
For example, in one account I analyzed: $144,099 in total sales came from PPC.
But only ~600 search terms were actually producing consistent orders.
Now compare that to negative key phrases.
Negative keywords are not just “bad traffic.” They are active budget drains.
In the same account: 20,271 search terms generated zero sales.
That’s 81.84% of all traffic.
And $34,308 in spend went to those terms with no return.
So the tactical difference is simple:
Positive keywords = scale them aggressively (bids, placement, and even separate campaigns)
Negative keywords = remove them fast and systematically (search term harvesting + weekly pruning)
Winning accounts don’t have “better keywords.”
They have faster feedback loops:
- They promote winners into exact campaigns within days.
- They kill non-converting terms before they burn budget.
- They continuously move keywords from “unknown” → “tested” → “scaled” → “isolated.”
The biggest mistake?
Treating all keywords the same inside one campaign.