Negative keywords block your ads from showing on irrelevant shopping queries or product pages, which stops wasted spend before it happens. The fastest way to put this to work: pull your search-term report, flag the clear losers, and add them as negative phrase or negative exact matches at the campaign or ad group level. Pair that with negative product targeting for ASINs you never want sitting next to your listing, and you’ve closed the two biggest leaks in a PPC budget.
TL;DR:
- Negative keywords should be reviewed weekly from search-term reports, with thresholds of at least 20 clicks before making exclusions.
- Use negative phrase match for broad irrelevant themes and negative exact match for specific queries, applying negatives at campaign or ad group level based on scope.
- Negative product targeting effectively excludes your ad from specific competitors or irrelevant product pages that keywords cannot address.
- Changing the match type of an existing negative keyword requires deleting and recreating it, due to Amazon’s restrictions.
- Implementing a consistent, catalog-wide negative keyword strategy with change logs can prevent wasteful spend across multiple products and marketplaces.
How negative keywords and negative product targeting work
Amazon Ads gives you two negative keyword match types, and understanding the difference matters more than most sellers realize. Negative phrase blocks ads from showing on any search query that contains the complete phrase or a close variation of it. Negative exact blocks only the exact phrase typed in, plus close variations, which makes it the tighter, more surgical option. Amazon documents both behaviors in its advertising FAQ, including the close-variation matching that catches minor misspellings or word order changes.
Scope matters just as much as match type. Negatives applied at the campaign level block the term across every ad group inside that campaign, while ad-group-level negatives only affect that one group. Use campaign-level negatives for terms that are universally irrelevant to everything you sell, and ad-group-level negatives when a term only causes problems in one specific group, say, when it competes with a more targeted ad group for the same product.
Negative product targeting works differently. Instead of blocking a search query, it excludes your ad from showing on a specific product detail page or against a competing brand. This matters when a rival’s listing drives clicks but never converts, or when your ad shows up next to a product you don’t want associated with your brand, a scenario where keyword negatives can’t help because there’s no search term to match.
Adding, editing, or removing negative keywords in Amazon Ads
You can add negative keywords while creating a campaign or at any point afterward, inside Campaign Manager under the Negative keywords tab for the campaign or ad group you’re managing. From there, you type or paste the term, choose negative phrase or negative exact, and save.
One rule trips up a lot of advertisers: you cannot change the match type of an existing negative keyword. According to Amazon’s help center, if you added a term as negative phrase and later decide you need negative exact, you have to delete the original entry and create a new one.
Amazon also enforces word and character limits on negative keywords, and these vary by match type, so check the current specifics in Amazon’s targeting guide before building large lists, especially if you’re preparing a bulk upload.
Finding negative keywords with the search-term report
The search-term report is your primary discovery tool, available in Campaign Manager under Sponsored Products reporting. It shows every actual customer search that triggered your ad, along with clicks, spend, orders, sales, and ACOS or ROAS for that specific query.
The temptation is to cut a term the moment it looks bad. Amazon’s own targeting guidance recommends waiting for a reasonable sample, roughly 20 clicks as an example threshold, before judging a term’s performance. A single click with no sale tells you almost nothing; 20 clicks with zero conversions tells you plenty.
Once you’ve identified a term with a real spend-to-sales mismatch, decide between phrase and exact based on collateral risk. If the exact phrase is the only problem, negative exact keeps related, better-performing variations alive. If every variation of that phrase is bad, negative phrase shuts the whole cluster down.
The broader workflow, outlined in Amazon’s keyword targeting guide, follows a simple loop: start broad to discover new converting terms, promote the winners into manual phrase or exact campaigns for tighter control, and exclude the losers as negatives in the broad or automatic campaign they came from. Run that loop weekly and your account gets cleaner over time instead of just bigger. For a deeper look at reading these reports, our search-term analysis guide walks through the data side in more detail.
Negative keyword examples and templates you can copy
Most wasted spend falls into a handful of predictable buckets. Here are templates worth adapting to your own catalog:
- Bargain intent: negative phrase for “cheap,” “free,” “used,” and “discount” when your product sits at a premium price point.
- Informational intent: negative phrase for “how to,” “what is,” and “review” when these searches rarely convert for your category.
- Wrong device or model: negative exact for competitor model numbers or incompatible specs, like “iphone 13 case” when you only sell cases for the iPhone 15.
- Unrelated categories: negative phrase for adjacent but irrelevant terms, such as “kids” on an adult-only product or “wholesale” on a single-unit listing.
Lean toward phrase match when an entire theme is irrelevant, and exact match when only one specific query is the problem but close variants still convert. If you sell multiple variants of the same product, tailor each template to the variant’s ad group rather than applying one blanket list across your whole catalog. For sellers juggling multiple SKUs against competitor pricing, a tool like Dropship Detector can help confirm which competing ASINs are genuinely non-competitive before you exclude them.
Managing and troubleshooting negative keywords
If a negative keyword still seems to let traffic through, check close-variation matching first: Amazon’s negative match types block the phrase and its close variations, not every loosely related query, so a truly unrelated term may need its own negative. Reporting lag is another common culprit. Changes don’t always reflect in the search-term report instantly, and some placement types simply aren’t covered by keyword negatives at all, which is where negative product targeting fills the gap.
Bulk uploads cause a disproportionate share of problems. A practitioner discussion on Amazon’s advanced tools documentation notes that a blank “Operation” field or an incorrect “Entity” value can make an upload fail silently, meaning the file processes without errors while the rows are simply ignored. Always verify upload status and spot-check a sample of rows after any bulk change.
Once a negative is live, give it time. Amazon’s own guidance suggests letting negative targets run for about two weeks before reassessing performance, since a shorter window won’t give you a reliable read on ACOS or ROAS movement.
Quick best-practices checklist for negative keywords
- Review the search-term report weekly and flag terms with real spend but no conversions.
- Wait for a meaningful sample before cutting a term, not just one or two bad clicks.
- Use negative phrase for broad irrelevant themes and negative exact for single problem queries.
- Apply negative product targeting to exclude non-complementary ASINs or competing brands.
- Log every change with the date, campaign, and reason, so you can trace performance shifts later.
- Re-check bulk upload results row by row instead of trusting a “success” message alone.
Pro Tip: Keep a running negative keyword list per product line so you’re not rebuilding the same exclusions every time you launch a new campaign.
Agency perspective: scaling negative keyword governance
At the scale we manage campaigns across dozens of ASINs and multiple marketplaces, negative keywords stop being a one-off task and become a governance problem. We rely on naming conventions and change logs so every exclusion is traceable to a person, a date, and a reason, which matters when a campaign’s performance shifts and someone needs to know what changed.
Our iDerive Analytics Platform looks across an entire catalog rather than one campaign at a time, which surfaces cross-catalog negative candidates a single-campaign view would miss, like a term that wastes spend on three different product lines at once. That catalog-wide view is also how we catch opportunities a manual weekly review tends to overlook.
— Dan Katona
Let us handle your negative keyword hygiene
Running a disciplined negative keyword process across a large catalog takes real time, and most brand teams would rather spend that time on product strategy than spreadsheet audits. Our Amazon Growth & Optimization service manages this work for you, from search-term review to bid strategy, backed by the same iDerive analytics we use to spot cross-catalog waste before it eats into margin.
If you’d rather have a team run the hygiene checklist above across every campaign while you focus on growth, reach out through our Amazon Growth & Optimization page to request a consultation.
FAQ
What are examples of negative keywords?
Common examples include bargain terms like “cheap” or “free,” informational phrases like “how to” or “review,” and mismatched model numbers or specs that don’t match your product. Sellers typically add these as negative phrase or negative exact depending on how broad the irrelevant theme is.
How do I remove negative keywords in Amazon ads?
Open the Negative keywords tab for the campaign or ad group in Campaign Manager, find the term, and delete it. If you need a different match type for the same term, you must delete the existing entry and add a new one, since Amazon does not allow editing the match type of an existing negative keyword.
What words are prohibited on Amazon listings?
Listing restrictions are a separate matter from negative keywords and are governed by Amazon’s content policies rather than advertising settings. Check Amazon’s seller policies directly for current prohibited terms, since this falls outside standard PPC negative keyword management.
What are keywords in Amazon?
Keywords are the search terms advertisers target so their ads appear when shoppers search for those terms, used in manual Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns. Negative keywords work in the opposite direction, excluding specific terms so ads do not show on irrelevant searches.
Sources
- FAQs - Advertising questions and resources | Amazon Ads
- ads-advanced-tools-docs discussion — bulk upload pitfalls
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