In this article we provide you with all the information you need to identify negative keywords for your Amazon PPC campaigns (More about our Amazon Advertising Management Services) and how to implement effective strategies to utilize negative search keywords to prevent ad budget waste in 2026! Based on our observations, amazon negative keywords are one of the most under-appreciated aspects of Amazon PPC.
What’s the difference between Amazon PPC Negative Exact vs. Negative Phrase match?
Negative Exact hides your ad from shoppers searching that specific term (or close misspellings). Negative Phrase blocks your ad from any search query that includes that specific phrase, regardless of the order or other words included.
How do I identify the best negative keywords to add to Amazon PPC campaigns?
Analyze your Search Term Report for queries with high clicks or spend but zero sales (low conversion rates). Also, look for “unwinnable” matches, such as competitors with significantly lower prices or much higher review counts.
Should I apply negatives at the Campaign or Ad Group level of Amazon ads?
Use Campaign level for broad exclusions you want to block across all products in that campaign. Use Ad Group level for specific keywords that only apply to a subset of products (like negating “red” for a blue product ad group).
How does “Search Term Isolation” prevent wasted Amazon ad spend?
This strategy prevents self-competition. When you move a winning keyword from an Auto Campaign to a Manual Campaign, immediately add it as a Negative Exact keyword in the Auto Campaign so you don’t pay for the same traffic twice.
To begin, let’s define what negative keywords for Amazon PPC are?
Negative keywords allow you to block a particular search term from triggering your Amazon Ads when someone searching on Amazon uses that particular term as part of their search query. Think of negative keywords as a black list of keywords in your Amazon PPC campaigns.
Assume you are an Amazon FBA business selling chef knives and you are bidding on the term “chef knife.” Your ad can be placed into the Amazon PPC auction and be shown to the shoppers if the keyword “chef knife” triggers the match type.
Even if a buyer searches for a “German chef knife,” your Japanese chef knife may come up. Because your keyword phrase “Chef knife” appears in their search.
In this case, it may be a good idea to include “German” or “Germany” as a negative keyword so that any consumer searching for “German” isn’t matched with your Japanese chef knives.
We add “German” as a negative because consumers expressly seeking German knives are less likely to buy our Japanese-made blades, and we’ll often have statistics (Poor ACoS, Low CVR) to back up this claim before adding the negatives.
How to add negative keywords to amazon ppc ads – step-by-step video guide
The Easiest Ways to Quickly Find Negative Keywords for Amazon
While we will discuss some advanced tactics to identify negative keywords to add to your Amazon ad campaigns, there are also a few very obvious signs that you should definitely negative out a certain search query. These are:
Keywords with many clicks but few or no sales conversions (aka low conversion rate)
Keywords with a high cost per sales (or cost per action)
Keywords with very high CPCs (significantly above your account average) and no conversions
Keywords with a significant amount of impressions, but very few clicks (i.e. a low CTR)
Why is it Important to add Negative Keywords to Amazon Advertising Campaigns?
Not adding negative keywords is a pretty frequent problem in many Amazon PPC accounts. Many Amazon Sellers simply ignore it and continue to waste their ad spend. Adding negative keywords is often the lowest hanging fruit for improving ad account performance.
It is a fantastic way to keep your advertising from being seen by those who aren’t directly interested in what you’re selling. Remember, the goal is to pay for clicks to customers who are most likely to purchase your product.
Hence the main and most important reason to use negative keywords is to reduce your advertising costs by avoiding wasted ad spend on irrelevant search terms that could otherwise be spent on other keywords with higher relevancy and a better performance.
Don’t Neglect Negative ASIN Targeting: Stop Paying to Advertise on “Unwinnable” Pages
What many sellers don’t realize: In Amazon PPC, your ads don’t just appear in search results, they appear on your competitors’ product pages (under “Sponsored products related to this item”).
While this can be beneficial in some cases, it can also backfire. That’s because not all competitor pages are “good real estate”. If you are selling a $50 premium blender, you do not want your ad appearing on a $20 budget blender’s listing. The price gap is too high, and the click will rarely convert. While you compete with said listing for the same search terms, you do not actually compete for the same customers!
How to Mitigate Low ASIN Fit
Use your Search Term Report to identify ASINs (they look like b07xxxxxx) that are eating up your ad budget while not contributing to your bottom-line. But don’t stop there. Proactively add Negative ASINs for competitors that you cannot beat:
The Review Bullies: Negate products that have 5,000+ reviews if you only have 50. You will rarely win the click.
The Price Undercutters: Negate products that are priced 30% lower than you. Shoppers on those pages are looking for a bargain, not premium quality.
Different Amazon Keyword Match Types and How they Impact Negative Keyword Targeting
Before we go into the specifics of Amazon negative keywords, it’s vital to have a firm grasp on Amazon PPC’s three main keyword match types (Exact, Phrase, and Broad). If you are unfamiliar with this concept, check out our article on different Amazon PPC keyword match types.
As a basic primer, refer to the table below. The term “baby towel” will be used as an example to demonstrate how different Amazon keyword match types work. We’ll go through the various keyword match types available: exact, phrase, and broad.
Overall, while choosing keywords and match types, keep in mind that as you move from exact match, to phrase match and broad match, you cast a wider net and reach a larger audience. While this gives you the opportunity to show your Amazon product listings to more potential shoppers, you also forfeit targeting precision and your chances of getting the perfect consumer with every ad impression decrease.
Does that make sense? Now that we’ve covered match types, let’s return to negative keywords and how they fit into the picture.
Exact Match Negative and Phrase Match Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are used to filter out search queries. They prevent your ads from showing when a shopper uses a “negative keyword” as part of their search query on Amazon.
Negative Exact Match Keywords
A negative exact match type will hide an ad from shoppers who are looking for that exact term or near misspellings and plurals.
Negative Phrase Match Keywords
A negative phrase keyword, on the other hand, will prevent ads from showing for any search queries that include the negative phrase match keyword. There are no negative broad match types.
The Negative Keyword “Isolation” Strategy: How to Scale Amazon Ads Without Competing Against Yourself
Most sellers make a fatal mistake when running cherrypicking keywords: they find a winning keyword in an Auto Campaign (e.g., “leather wallet”), add it to a Manual Exact Campaign, but leave it running in the Auto Campaign. The result? Your Auto Campaign and Manual Campaign are now bidding against each other for the same spot. You are driving up your own CPCs by competing against yourself!
The Fix: Search Term Isolation To scale efficiently, you must treat your Auto Campaigns as “Discovery Engines” and your Manual Campaigns as “Profit Engines” that you use to zero in on converting search terms. Use this workflow:
Harvest: Identify a search term in your Auto Campaign that has generated 3+ sales.
Promote: Add this term as an Exact Match keyword in your “Winners” Manual Campaign.
Isolate: Immediately add that same term as a Negative Exact keyword in your Auto Campaign.
Rinse and Repeat: Depending on your sales and ad spend, go through this cycle once per month or once per quarter. Pro tip: If you want to speed things up, work with an Amazon Seller Agency like SellerMetrics. Thanks to our scale, we have visibility into millions of dollars of ad spend. As a result we have more data and learn about shifting consumer behaviors, seasonality related factors or newly evolving search patterns faster! All our clients benefit from these learnings as we can apply them to their respective accounts.
By negating the winner in the Auto campaign, you force Amazon to stop spending budget on what you already know works (which is now handled by your Manual campaign) and instead use that budget to find new winning keywords. You stop paying for the same real estate twice.
Different Categories of Negative Keywords for Amazon FBA Businesses
There are different types of negative keywords and in some cases unearthing them is straightforward, in other cases things can be tricky. Let’s dive right in:
Competitors’ Brand Keywords While a case can often be made for purposely bidding on competitors’ brand names, in many cases you may also want to avoid doing that. In many cases shoppers who are already searching for a competing brand have already made up their mind and serving your ads to them may not be cost efficient. In practice, you may setup a specific ad campaign to target competitors’ keywords and thus want to exclude them from all your other campaigns – as negative keywords.
Unfit Product Features & Characteristics We are back to the “Japanese knife set” example. Features or attributes that clearly do not fit your Amazon product listings should routinely be added as negative keywords. Think of factors, such as materials, origin, color or product sub-category. Basically you want to brainstorm all potential keywords that shoppers could think of in the context of your product that do not all apply to your products. However, sometimes intuition may be misleading. For example, what if most people who were looking to buy knife sets on Amazon bought them for the purpose of gifting and really didn’t care about whether they get Japanese or German knifes? While in the case of knifes this is most likely not the case, this may apply to other product types. It is thus important to understand the context and intent of shoppers who buy your products and to only include terms that will definitely not trigger a sale!
Search Terms that are – Statistically Speaking – not working So this category is tricky. What if you have spent a certain amount of budget on a set of keywords without seeing any sales coming in. Should you exclude them and add them as negative keywords? What if the next ad click on such a keyword actually triggered a sale? This is were you need to understand the concept of statistical significance. The accurate definition of statistical significance is:
“the probability of the null hypothesis being true compared to the acceptable level of uncertainty regarding the true answer”. Or to put it simple: statistical significance measures the likelihood that a certain event (in this case not generating a sale) is caused by chance (bad luck!) or can be explained by an underlying factor (i.e. your product listing is not a good fit for a given search term).
So this is where things get complicated and some number crunching is required to make statistically accurate decisions that actually help you maximize Amazon FBA sales.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQyJquVDo3M
Which Data to Analyze to Spot Negative Keywords in your Amazon Advertising Account?
As outlined in the past section, in many cases identifying irrelevant search terms is straightforward and deductive reasoning is sufficient to add certain keywords to your “black list”. But how about search terms where things are not as clear cut? How do you figure out which search terms are to be added as negative keywords? Is there a common threshold to trigger a negative keyword? What is considered a good or a bad search term?
In practice, evaluating whether or not a certain keyword will bring in the right kind of shoppers to your listing can be difficult. For example, should the keyword “kitchen knife” be included as a negative keyword if you are selling the chef knife? Sometimes the decision can be made be looking at the data.
Analyzing the Amazon Search Term Report
A great starting point is analyzing historic Amazon ad performance. The data we’re talking about comes in the form of a Search Term Report in your Advertising Console account. This displays what consumer queries are being shown as an impression for your Amazon PPC campaigns.
To download your Search Report. Go to the side nav and choose “Report” in your Amazon ad console.
Once in the Report Screen, click “Create report”
Select the report type “Search Term”, click “Run report”. You create a search term report for the following ad types:
Download the report, and examine which search terms that are not reaching your performance objectives or poor KPIs (ACoS, CVR, CTR) by using filters in Excel or any other spreadsheet program. These search terms with poor metrics will be the candidates to be added as negative keywords.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaJx_RYHzw
How to Add Negative keyword using Bulk Operation Files 2.0 in Amazon PP
How to Use Statistical Confidence Analysis to Decide which Keywords to add as Negative Keywords?
Now that we know how to find and export all the search terms our Amazon ads have triggered we need to decide which ones to add as negative keywords – based on their performance.
Let’s take an example: Say keyword A has triggered 50 clicks and had zero conversions, but keyword B which has also accumulated exactly 50 clicks had one sales conversion. Is keyword A “working” and keyword B is “not working” or are differences in performance coincidental?
This is where a statistical significance test comes in handy. Without going into too much detail, when it comes down to deciding whether or not A has outperformed B, you want to conduct what is called a two-sided significance test. The good news is that you do not need a PhD in statistics to check whether the performance of two keywords is really different, or if differences in performance are caused by chance. You can use any statistical significance calculator that is available online (for example here).
Simply input the number of ad clicks in the “visitors” box, input the number of sales conversions and then select “two-sided” and select a 90% or 95% confidence interval. 95% is better, but you may need many clicks to get results, so 90% is a good fallback option.
The result of the test will show you whether keyword B really performed better than keyword A, or if it might be better to wait a bit longer.
If you’re utilizing amazon PPC management software like SellerMetrics to assist with adding negative keywords at scale, you can simply define a metric-based rule to suggest negative keyword additions, which the software can either apply automatically or present to you for human review. More on that later
Best Practices for Managing Negative Keywords Across Different Amazon Ad Campaigns
Now that you know how to differentiate between performing and under-performing keywords let’s dive into a more tactical of negative keyword utilization. Let’s use chef knives as an example again, and let’s say we’ve gone from selling chef knives to now selling butcher knives as a new product, and we’ve set up two manual campaigns. The first has exact match keywords, whereas the second has broad match keywords.
The problem is that both of these campaigns include phrases that may match our knife products to customers searching for “Japanese steel butcher knives.” In this case, adding “ Japanese steel butcher knives ” as an exact match negative keyword in the broad campaign would be a smart idea.
The idea is to keep a tighter grip on which campaigns are generating ad impressions for which customer queries in order to isolate your account’s search terms. This allows us to have more control over an account’s performance.
If you want to keep your advertising account organized and performing well, you’ll need to have a structured negative keyword strategy.
When using negative keywords to prevent different ad campaigns from triggering for the same keywords (and potentially competing against each other) is important to implement a Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive (MECE) negative keyword targeting strategy.
The image below shows what we mean by that. Let’s say we target “baby towel” as an Exact Match (EM) keyword in once campaign and as a Phrase Match Keyword (PM) in another Amazon ad campaign. In this scenario our keyword targeting is not exclusive and the campaigns are competing for the same clicks.
We can fix this by adding “Baby Towel” as a negative exact match keyword to one of the campaigns. Now we have reached an “exclusive state” where the campaigns do not overlap.
As we keep adding more negative keywords to our phrase match campaign we need to ensure that we do not create situations where we reach an “exclusive but NOT exhaustive” state. This would lead us to accidentally exclude search queries that may be relevant for us (in this example “hooded baby towel”).
In practice this can easily happen, just think of products that come in different sizes and colors. One “filter” negative keyword can wipe out an entire search query word cloud.
Adding Negative Keywords at Campaign or Ad Group Level?
Negative keywords for Amazon can be applied to both campaign and ad group levels. The scope of their impact is determined by the level at which they are added.
When you add a negative keyword to an ad group, it just appears in that ad group; but, when you add a negative keyword to a campaign, it’s effective for every ad group in that campaign.
Adding a negative keyword to a campaign may have a significant influence on the campaign’s impression and its related ad groups. When adding negative keywords into the campaign level, you must be very selective.
The best practice is to add a negative exact match at the ad group level for the majority of the negative keywords. This guarantees that the scope of what is blacklisted is narrow and specific. There is some situation where we use negative phrase match and/or on a campaign level, but those are cases where we know for sure we don’t want to be appearing for, a good example of this is gender-specific items.
Top 3 Benefits of Using Negative Keywords
Here are some of the reasons why you need to identify and set up Amazon negative keywords on your PPC campaign:
Avoid wasted ad spend
As mentioned, Amazon bills advertisers based on clicks. If your ad appears on an irrelevant search results page, there’s a huge chance that shoppers would click on your ad, but not convert into a sale. Without using negative keywords, you may blow up your budget on search queries that are meaningless to what you offer.
Better product ranking
Advertising for bad search terms may also result to unqualified leads, and lower click through rates (CTR). In Amazon’s algorithm, when you and a competitor are targeting the same search results page, Amazon would decide on which seller gets the better positioning based on the history of the products.
If your ad appears on multiple irrelevant search queries, your CTR will be affected and will give a negative effect on your product performance. Because of that, Amazon may view your ad as less-worthy than your competitor’s ad for the top spot on the search results. Using negative keywords can help prevent this, and may even help improve your organic ranking.
Avoid keyword cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization happens when you have two ad groups or campaigns that are competing for the same keyword. For example, if you sell both gray water bottles for working out and blue water bottles for babies, and you bid on the phrase match keyword “water bottles,” both products may appear for search queries containing “water bottles”. The order of which ad or product will appear on search results is not within your control, and there’s a chance that one product will outrank the other product regardless if it is the more relevant product.
Using negative keywords helps you to determine which products to prioritize for each keyword, as well as block specific keywords that you want to use for other products.
Step-by-step Guide in Adding Negative Keywords
Ready to add negative keywords to your campaign? Great. So how do you exclude words from amazon search? We’ve provided the steps below. Remember that you can adjust them as often as you want, but we recommend that you do it at least once a week upon checking your performance report.
Click on the Negative Keywords tab.
2. Choose whether you want to use ‘Negative Phrase’ or ‘Negative Exact.’
3. Add the negative keywords you want to include in each line.
4. Click “Add keywords” and then “Save”.
Common Negative Keyword Mistakes to Avoid in 2026
We already talked about one common mistake: Competing against yourself by not removing keywords that are included in manual targeting campaigns from auto campaigns. But there are other mistakes that we often notice when we conduct our free Amazon PPC Audit to sellers interested in working with us. Here they are:
The “Single-Keyword” Trap – How to Delete Your Traffic by Accident
Negative Phrase Match is a powerful tool, but it is also a loaded gun. The most common way sellers destroy their campaigns is by using Single-Word Negative Phrase keywords that accidentally cuts converting traffic off.
Here is an example: Imagine you sell “Organic Coffee Beans.” You notice in your report that “Coffee Table” is wasting money.
Here is the mistake we often see: You add “Coffee” as a Negative Phrase keyword. In practice, you probably won’t make such a blatant mistake, but our example here is just to make a point: it’s really easy to overlook potential overlaps and to cause a keyword and negative keyword interaction.
If this happens to you, results can be devastating: You have just blocked your ad from showing for “Organic Coffee Beans,” “Best Coffee,” and “Coffee for cold brew.” You just killed your entire campaign because the word “Coffee” is in your main keyword.
As a rule of thumb: Never use a core industry term (like “Coffee,” “Shirt,” or “Phone”) as a Negative Phrase. Always use at least two words (e.g., “Coffee Table”) or use Negative Exact to be safe.
Not Negativing out Brand Keywords in Generic Campaigns
If your brand name is “Spartan Fit,” customers searching for “Spartan Fit” are already looking for you. They have incredibly high conversion rates and high CTR on this so-called “brand keyword”. If you let these searches bleed into your generic “Home Workout” campaigns, they will skew your data. You might think your “Home Workout” campaign is performing at 15% ACoS, but in reality, it’s performing at 40%, and your Brand keywords are masking the inefficiency.
The Solution: Create a specific “Brand Defense” campaign for your own keywords. Then, add “Spartan Fit” as a Negative Phrase in all your other generic campaigns. This ensures your generic campaigns are judged purely on their ability to bring in new customers, not returning fans.
How can SellerMetrics help?
As mentioned you can use the Amazon search term reports to optimize your campaigns by adding and negating search terms. But you can see that doing this manually is inefficient and prone to errors.
This is an especially tedious process when you are operating multiple marketplaces and advertising accounts.
We at SellerMetrics can either streamline this process or automate it entirely. Let’s see how it works!
1. Set the Rules
You can do this in the Automation Settings screen in SellerMetrics under “Search Term Rules” or “Negative Keyword Rules” columns.
2. Enter Rules Settings (Search Term Rules)
Here you will add settings to trigger search terms within a campaign. You will also tell the system the campaigns/ad group combo you want the search terms to be added to as a new keyword and enter what order threshold would trigger the search term.
Below are the settings to enter:
Name of the Rule (used to call the rule being created)
Destination Campaign (can select one to many)
Destination Ad Group (from the campaign selected, can select one to many)
Order/Max ACoS Threshold (tell system only grab search terms that satisfies the threshold)
Target Type (Keywords or ASINs)
Match Type and Bids
3. Add Search Terms as Keywords into Destination Campaigns
After adding the search term rules, the triggered search terms will show up on another screen for you to push the new keywords into the destination campaign with one click.
As mention earlier search term turns into a keyword in a campaign during this optimization. This is exactly how it is done!
Here you will add settings to trigger fo search terms to negate/blacklist within a campaign. You will also tell the system the campaigns/ad group combo you want the search terms to be added as a negative target and enter what click threshold with 0 order that would trigger. Below are the settings to enter:
Name of the Rule (used to call the rule being created)
Destination Campaign (can select one to many)
Destination Ad Group (from the campaign selected, can select one to many)
Click Threshold (tell system only grab search terms that satisfies the threshold)
Automate (enabled the system to add search terms automatically)
Target Type (Keywords or ASINs)
Match Type (negative exact or negative phrase)
5. Add Search Terms as Negative Targets/Keywords into Destination Campaigns/Ad Group
After adding the negative keyword rules, the triggered search terms will show up on another screen for you to push the new keywords to the negative list into the destination campaign/ad group with one click.
FAQ: How to Find Negative Keywords for Amazon PPC Ad Campaigns
How do I find negative keywords on Amazon?
You can find negative keywords by analyzing search term reports for terms with high clicks but low or no sales, high cost-per-conversion, low CTR, or high impressions with few clicks. Identifying these underperforming keywords helps you refine your PPC campaigns and reduce wasted ad spend.
How do you add negative keywords to an Amazon campaign?
Log in to your Amazon Seller Central account, go to the campaign you want to modify, and navigate to the “Negative Keywords” tab. Enter the keywords you wish to block, choose the appropriate match type (exact or phrase), and save the changes.
How do you remove negative keywords from an Amazon campaign?
To remove negative keywords, access the campaign dashboard, click on the “Negative Keywords” tab, and check the boxes next to the keywords you wish to delete. Then, click the “Archive” button to remove them from the campaign.
How do negative keywords impact Amazon PPC performance?
Negative keywords help improve the efficiency of Amazon PPC campaigns by preventing ads from showing for irrelevant or unprofitable searches. This leads to a higher click-through rate (CTR), better conversion rates and a lower ACoS.
Should I use negative keywords at the ad group or campaign level?
It depends on your strategy. Using negative keywords at the campaign level applies them across all ad groups within that campaign, while using them at the ad group level allows for more specific targeting. Choose based on your ad structure and goals.
Should I use “Negative Phrase” or “Negative Exact” for low-performing search terms?
In 90% of cases, use Negative Exact. This surgically removes the specific bad search term (e.g., “cheap leather wallet”) without accidentally blocking good related terms. Use Negative Phrase only when you want to block an entire concept (e.g., negative phrase “free” or “used”) that never applies to your product.
How many clicks should a keyword get before I negate it?
The industry standard is the “Spend-Based Rule.” If a keyword has spent 1x your Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) without a sale, negate it. For example, if your profit margin is $10, and a keyword has spent $10 with 0 sales, it is statistically unlikely to become profitable. Cut it.
Can I add negative keywords to Auto Campaigns?
Yes, and you absolutely should. This is the primary way to optimize Auto Campaigns. You cannot add positive keywords to Auto campaigns, so negative keywords are your only steering wheel. Use them to block irrelevant terms and “graduate” winners to manual campaigns.
Does adding a negative keyword affect my organic ranking?
Not directly. Negative keywords only affect your Paid Ads. However, by preventing your ad from showing to irrelevant customers (who would click and bounce), you improve your overall Conversion Rate. A higher Conversion Rate does help your organic ranking.
What is “Negative ASIN” targeting?
Negative ASIN targeting allows you to prevent your ad from appearing on specific competitor product pages. You should use this to exclude your ads from competitors who have a significant advantage over you (e.g., much lower price or thousands more reviews), as you are unlikely to win those customers.
What happens if I accidentally negate a good keyword?
Your ad will immediately stop showing for that term. The good news is that negative keywords can be “Archived” (deleted) at any time. If you see a sudden drop in impressions, check your Negative Keyword list to ensure you didn’t accidentally negative phrase a core term like “men’s” or “gift.”
Should I negate my competitor’s brand names?
It depends. Competitor keywords are often expensive and convert lower than generic terms. If you have a limited budget, yes, negate big competitor brand names (e.g., “Nike”) to focus on generic terms (“Running Shoe”). If you have a large budget and want to conquest market share, keep them active but bid lower.
Can I use negative keywords to stop “Keyword Cannibalization”?
Yes. If you have two products (e.g., “Blue Towel” and “Red Towel”), you should use negative exact “Red” in the “Blue Towel” campaign and negative exact “Blue” in the “Red Towel” campaign. This ensures Amazon always shows the correct color variant for the specific search.
Is there a limit to how many negative keywords I can add?
Amazon allows up to 1,000 negative keywords per ad group and campaign. However, if you are hitting this limit, your campaign structure is likely too broad. You should consider using more specific Match Types in your positive keywords rather than trying to negate the entire dictionary.
How often should I update my negative keywords?
For new campaigns, check your Search Term Report weekly. New bad terms appear constantly. For mature, stable campaigns, a monthly audit is usually sufficient to catch any new wasted spend trends.
