At some point every Amazon PPC manager has had the same internal monologue:

I need to review my search terms this week. Actually, I’ll do it Friday. No, definitely Monday. Okay, next week, for real.

We’re not judging. We’ve talked to enough advertisers to know that the Search Term Report is everyone’s best intention and nobody’s priority. It’s not that it isn’t important; it absolutely is. But it’s a time-consuming manual process that has to compete with bids, budgets, reporting, and the other things that need attention in any given week.

But what if you had an automated process set with your specific guardrails that could run at scale? This is exactly what we’ll explore in this blog.

What auto campaigns are actually for

Amazon’s automatic targeting works by matching your ads to customer search queries based on your product listing, like close match, loose match, complements, and substitutes. Per Amazon’s own advertising documentation, Amazon controls which queries trigger your ads.

Inside an auto campaign, you can adjust group-level bids for match types, but you cannot control bids at the individual search term level. That means a query converting consistently at 8% ACoS gets the same bidding treatment as one converting at 60%.

There’s no per-term precision, no impression share control, and no way to protect your best performers from being lumped in with everything else Amazon decides to match.

The structural fix is moving that proven term to an exact match manual campaign, where you set the bid, control the placement, and stop paying auto-campaign rates for something that’s already earned a more focused strategy. But Amazon’s Search Term Report only goes back 65 days, so the longer you wait, the more you’re working with aging data.

If a search term converted strongly three weeks ago and you haven’t acted on it yet, you have time. If it has been converting for six weeks and you still haven’t moved it, you are already working near the edge of what the report can show you.

So if you wait long enough, the conversion history that would have justified the promotion is simply gone, and you are back to making decisions without the evidence that should be driving them.

This is why the frequency of your harvest matters as much as the quality of any individual session. A term that converts this week needs to be in your manual campaign before its data ages out of the window you can actually see.

How to turn Amazon search terms into keywords manually

Most advertisers who harvest keywords do half the job. They add the converting term to a manual campaign, move on, and leave the auto campaign still bidding on the same query.

That actually becomes keyword duplication.

The full process has two sides. You add the search term as a keyword to your manual campaign and as a negative exact match to the auto campaign it came from.

Without the second step, both campaigns bid on the same query at the same time. Amazon’s auction doesn’t distinguish between your own campaigns and pits them against each other, and your CPCs go up accordingly.

Here’s the step-by-step manual process:

1. Download your Search Term Report from the Amazon Ads console
2. Filter for the last 30 days of data
3. Sort by orders descending; identify terms meeting your promotion threshold
4. For each qualifying term, add as an exact match keyword to your target manual campaign
5. For each qualifying term, add as a negative exact match in the originating auto campaign
6. Sort by spend descending with zero orders and identify terms meeting your negation threshold
7. Add those terms as negative exact matches in the auto campaign they ran in
8. Cross-reference new keywords against your existing manual campaign keyword list to avoid duplicates

Here’s a video that takes you through the step-by-step manual process of finding the keywords.

Why this manual process fails at scale

Understanding the steps isn’t the issue. Running them reliably, week after week, across multiple accounts, is where things break down.

• The volume problem

A mid-size account running four to six auto campaigns generates hundreds of search term rows per reporting period. Most advertisers download the report monthly. By the time they get to it, some of the data is already six weeks old, and the sheer volume of rows makes it hard to move quickly without missing things.

• The threshold problem

Most advertisers don’t have a written rule for what qualifies a search term for promotion. Without documented criteria, like minimum orders, ACoS target, minimum click volume, and lookback window, every session produces a different judgment call.

What looked like a strong performer after a good weekend looks shakier on a slow Wednesday. So consistency requires rules, and rules require documentation.

• The negative keyword gap

Even when advertisers get through the positive keyword additions, step two (negating the term from auto) gets skipped, often because you’re moving fast through a long list, and the second action gets dropped.

As Amy Hebdon, founder of Paid Search Magic and one of the most widely recognized voices in PPC, described on PPC Town Hall:

“I can go through and play, you know, infinite whack-a-mole to say, oh, someone typed in, ’ How can I adopt a kid.’ We don’t want to show for that. But there’s always going to be variations of how they spell or write or think about that. I can’t get that to not show.”

Manual review catches what you see on the day you look. It can’t catch every variation, and it can’t catch anything on the weeks you don’t look.

How to set your keyword graduation criteria for Amazon Ads

Before any tool or automation is useful, you need the criteria on paper. A practical starting point for keyword promotion is to have a search term with two or more orders at or below your target ACoS over the last 30 days, which is a candidate for exact match promotion.

However, don’t treat ACoS as your only gatekeeper. If you’re in a ranking phase for a new product launch, a search term might convert at a high ACoS but still be incredibly valuable for building organic rank velocity. In these cases, look at your TACoS. If your overall account health and TACoS are stable, it’s often worth promoting a high-ACoS term into an Exact Match keyword to keep that momentum going, rather than leaving it to the whims of an auto campaign.

For negation, having a term with less clicks and zero orders, with spend approaching your average CPA, is a candidate for blocking.

On the question of how aggressive to be with negation, Julie Bacchini Friedman, President and Founder of Neptune Moon and Managing Director of PPC Chat, addressed this directly on PPC Town Hall:

“I think it’s about finding that balance between stopping that from happening without completely cutting off any opportunity the system might be able to find. And I think it’s a bit of a balancing act, especially for budget-conscious advertisers.

If you have a lot of budget and plenty of runway to let the algorithms do their thing, you have more flexibility in how you approach negative keywords. If you’re more budget-limited or if your conversions take longer, you might need to be more precise in your strategy when deciding what to eliminate and what to experiment with.”

The same logic applies. Your negation threshold should reflect your budget, your margin, and how quickly your products convert. But there has to be a documented answer, so you don’t have to make a new decision every week.

How to automate Amazon keyword harvesting in Optmyzr

Even with clear criteria and a well-understood process, a weekly manual review across three accounts with five or more auto campaigns each takes significant time, and it still depends on you showing up. The only version of this that runs reliably every week is one that doesn’t need your calendar to cooperate.

Optmyzr gives you two approaches depending on how much oversight you want in the process. There are two major ways to do it:

1. Rule Engine to automate harvesting on a schedule

Rule Engine is Optmyzr’s if-this-then-that automation builder for Amazon. You define conditions once; the rule checks them on a schedule and surfaces those that meet your criteria.

So before you create any automation rules, make sure you define the right scope. For instance, a brand-new product launch may need a different scope or threshold than a mature campaign. In such cases, you can use campaign labels or naming conventions to segment your rules so you aren’t treating all your campaigns the same way.

Here are three pre-built strategies that are directly relevant to keyword harvesting:

• Add New Keywords: Looks at converting search terms and surfaces them as candidates to add as positive keywords in your account. You define the performance thresholds — minimum orders, ACoS ceiling, minimum clicks — and choose the match type (exact, phrase, or broad), as well as the destination ad group, in your manual campaign. You can schedule it to run weekly.
• Non-converting keyword and ASIN search terms: Surfaces search terms that have hit a click threshold you define with zero conversions. And will add as a negative keyword (negative exact or negative phrase) at the ad group level, or at the campaign level for Sponsored Products. This is your primary tool for blocking wasteful queries before they keep accumulating spend.
• Expensive search queries: Focuses on spend rather than clicks. Catches terms where cost is high relative to zero conversions and is useful for finding expensive outliers that a click-count rule might miss if traffic is thin but bids are high.

A practical note on automatic campaigns

Amazon does not allow you to add positive keywords directly to an automatic campaign; the targeting logic there belongs to Amazon. What Rule Engine does is surface search term data from your auto campaigns alongside your manual campaigns in a single view.

The converting terms you find there should be promoted as positive keywords into a manual campaign. Non-converting terms can be added as negative keywords at the Sponsored Products auto campaign level, which is how you stop paying for queries that have already proven they don’t convert for your product.

The Search Terms Scope help article explains exactly how the data is aggregated and what actions are available for each campaign type.

Remember that all pre-built thresholds are starting points. So please review the preview before applying changes. Once you’ve confirmed the rule is behaving as expected, you can schedule automatic application.

2. Optmyzr Express for guided bulk review (when you want to stay in the loop)

If you’d rather review every decision before it goes live than check a changelog after the fact, Optmyzr Express is what you need.

Optmyzr Express surfaces pre-scored keyword candidates from your search term data. You go through them in bulk — approve, skip, or archive each suggestion — and apply in one pass. It uses a broader signal base and analyzes the last 60 days of data to find winning patterns that a shorter 30-day window might overlook.

Optmyzr Express has three Amazon optimizations relevant to keyword harvesting: Add New Keywords, Add Negative Keywords, and Pause Non-Converting Keywords.

This suits advertisers who want direct oversight on every change; Rule Engine suits those who’ve validated their logic and want it running reliably in the background. Both are a significant improvement over downloading and manually filtering the raw Search Term Report each week.

For keyword harvesting specifically, three optimizations are directly relevant on Optmyzr Express:

• Add New Keywords

This is the core harvesting action to add keywords to Amazon Ads. Optmyzr Express identifies high-performing search terms that are not currently tracked as keywords in your account and recommends adding them. It supports exact, phrase, and broad match and you choose the match type before applying.

• Add Negative Keywords

This is the other half of the harvest. Optmyzr Express uses spend and ACoS signals to identify underperforming queries and flag them for negation. It supports negative phrases and negative exact match.

Applying this at the same time as Add New Keywords is what closes the loop: you’re promoting the winners and blocking the wasters in the same session.

• Pause Non-Converting Keywords

This one is about keywords already in your manual campaigns that are spending without converting. This is optional but is useful to run alongside harvesting, so you’re not just adding new keywords while existing ones drain budget quietly in the background.

The workflow itself is straightforward. Each suggestion shows the relevant performance metrics upfront so you can evaluate without digging into the account. Campaign and ad group details are available in an expandable view for more context on a specific suggestion. If something is surfaced that you know you’ll never want to act on, archive it and it won’t keep appearing. If the timing is off, you can snooze it for a day, a week, or a month.

What keyword harvesting actually looks like with automation

Most advertisers already know what good harvesting looks like in theory. The gap is almost always in the execution. Here is what that gap looks like in practice, and what changes when you put a system behind it.

The value isn’t that automation is smarter than careful human review. It’s that it runs on the same criteria every week, whether you’re stretched or not.

Consistency is the real fix

The advertisers who handle keyword harvesting well aren’t doing something fundamentally different. They’ve removed the dependency on available bandwidth, built documented criteria, and have a process that runs on schedule.

As Frederick Vallaeys, CEO of Optmyzr, noted on PPC Town Hall, “The real skill today is finding that balance: use automation where it clearly helps, but push back when it puts your business at risk.”

Keyword harvesting is exactly that case. Your judgment defines what qualifies as worth promoting and what’s worth negating. The execution of checking and acting on that judgment every week without fail is where automation earns its place.

Start your Optmyzr 14-day free trial and set up your first Amazon search term rule.

FAQ

What is Amazon keyword harvesting?

Amazon keyword harvesting is the process of identifying search terms in your auto or broad match campaigns that have proven they convert, then adding those terms as keywords to exact match manual campaigns while negating them from the original campaign. This gives you direct bid control over your best-performing queries instead of letting Amazon’s auto targeting bid on them at a flat rate.

How do I find converting search terms in Amazon PPC?

Download your Search Term Report from the Amazon Ads console, filter for the last 30 days, and sort by orders. Terms with two or more orders at or below your target ACoS are candidates for promotion to exact match manual campaigns. Terms with high clicks and zero orders are candidates for negation.

Why should I add search terms as negative keywords in auto campaigns?

When you promote a search term from auto to a manual exact match campaign, your auto campaign will continue bidding on that same query unless you block it. The result is two of your own campaigns competing in the same auction for the same search, which drives up your CPCs and splits your impression share between campaigns you’re paying for separately. Adding the term as a negative exact match in the auto campaign closes that overlap.

How often should I harvest keywords from my Amazon Search Term Report?

Weekly is the right cadence for most active accounts. A weekly review of a smaller, fresh batch is more useful than a monthly review of hundreds of rows where the best-performing terms from three weeks ago have already shifted. Amazon’s Search Term Report supports up to 65 days of data, but that’s not permission to wait.

What qualifies a search term for exact match promotion?

There’s no universal answer; it depends on average order value, margin, and conversion velocity. A widely used starting point is two or more orders at or below your target ACoS over a 30-day window. SellerSprite’s guidance aligns with this, and Ad Badger recommends negating after 12 to 15 clicks with zero conversions. The exact numbers matter less than documenting them and applying them the same way every time.

Do I need to negate a search term from auto when promoting it to manual?

Yes, in most cases. Without the negative, your auto and manual campaigns bid on the same query simultaneously. Amazon’s auction pits them against each other, inflating your CPCs and splitting your impression share. The negative is what makes the campaign funnel structurally sound.

What is the difference between Rule Engine and Optmyzr Express for keyword harvesting?

Rule Engine runs on a schedule with conditions you set in advance — you review a change log after. Optmyzr Express surfaces suggestions for your direct approval before anything is applied.

Both are significantly faster than pulling and filtering the raw Search Term Report manually. Rule Engine suits teams who want consistent scheduled execution; Express suits those who prefer direct oversight on each decision.

Does Rule Engine apply changes without my review?

Not by default. Rule Engine shows you a preview of proposed changes before anything goes live. You review and validate the output before committing. If you decide you trust the rule’s logic after a few runs, you can set it to apply automatically on schedule.