Search terms that spend your budget without producing a single sale are the purest form of wasted ad spend. The Search Term Analyzer makes them easy to find, confirm, and negate in bulk. This SOP is the workflow.
When to use it: weekly on auto campaigns, monthly on broad match manual campaigns. The filter takes under two minutes to run.
Step 1: Open the Search Term Analyzer
Go to Advertising Analytics and click the Keywords and Search Terms tab. Scroll down to the Search Term Analyzer section. This table shows performance broken down by search term, with the option to expand each term and see which campaigns it is running in.
Step 2: Filter for zero-sale terms
In the Search Term Analyzer, locate the Unit Sold column filter.
Set Unit Sold equal to 0.
The table will now show only search terms that had ad spend but zero orders in your selected date range.
Sort by Spend descending to see where the most money is going with no return.
To see which campaigns each term is running in, click the + icon next to any search term. This expands the row to show campaign-level performance for that term, which is useful when the same search term appears across multiple campaigns at different efficiency levels.
Step 3: Confirm the term is genuinely dead
Amazon's attribution window for Sponsored Products is typically 7 days. A search term with spend from yesterday and no orders yet is not necessarily a wasted term, because the purchase may still come through. Use a date range of at least 14 days when running this analysis, and focus on terms with multiple clicks and sustained spend over time, not single-click outliers.
Step 4: Decide what to do with each term
Clearly irrelevant to your product (wrong category, wrong audience, competitor brand you're not targeting): add as a negative exact match at the campaign level.
Vaguely related but consistently not converting: add as a negative exact match and monitor whether ACoS improves.
Appears relevant but has very low spend (1-2 clicks): give it more time before acting. The sample is too small.
Appears in multiple campaigns with $0 sales across all of them: negate at the portfolio level rather than campaign by campaign.
Step 5: Export for bulk cleanup
Once you've confirmed the filter, click More Options and select Export Data. Use Summarized Data and export as XLS format. The export supports up to 150,000 rows, so you'll get the full list of zero-sale search terms with their associated campaigns in one file. This is the most efficient way to build a bulk negative keyword upload for Seller Central.
What to expect: running this consistently steadily improves ACoS as budget shifts away from non-converting terms toward the ones that sell.
The other half of the problem: search terms that do convert, just at an ACoS that eats your margin, have their own playbook. See "How to Find and Fix High-ACoS Search Terms That Convert".