Glossary · Amazon Advertising
What is Negative Keywords?
Negative keyword targeting
Quick Answer
Negative keywords stop your ads serving on search terms you have decided are not worth paying for. On Amazon they are the single cheapest efficiency lever available, because auto and broad campaigns will otherwise keep buying the same non-converting queries indefinitely.
In Detail
Understanding Negative Keywords
Amazon supports negative exact and negative phrase at both campaign and ad-group level, plus negative ASIN targeting for product-targeting campaigns. Negative exact blocks one precise query; negative phrase blocks anything containing that sequence — powerful, and easy to over-apply.
The routine that matters is unglamorous: pull the search-term report on a fixed cadence, find terms with meaningful click volume and no orders, and negate them. Terms with clicks but zero purchases at 2–3× your target CPA are the standard threshold.
Business Impact
Why Negative Keywords Matters
Wasted spend is not usually one dramatic leak; it is hundreds of small queries each taking a few hundred rupees a month. Left unmanaged for a quarter, that compounds into a material share of budget.
Negation also improves the data the algorithm learns from. Removing queries that never convert concentrates conversion signal on the terms that do, which improves placement over time.
From Our Own Book
How ATIL Works With Negative Keywords
Search-term hygiene is a standing weekly job on every account we run, not a quarterly clean-up — it is a direct input into the 18.7% blended ACOS across our portfolio.
The caution we apply: over-negating is a real failure mode. Blocking a phrase that also appears inside converting long-tails quietly removes profitable volume, so phrase negatives are checked against the converting-term list before they go live.
Figures are drawn from ATIL's managed portfolio and measured through platform APIs, not estimated.
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