Harpy Glossary

Search Term Report

Amazon & D2C glossary · Harpy Media

The Search Term Report is the advertising data that shows what shoppers actually typed when your ads appeared — and how each of those queries performed. The distinction it captures is fundamental: you bid on keywords, but customers search in terms.

What is Search Term Report?

It is the most useful report in the advertising toolkit because it closes the loop. A keyword tells you where you placed a bid; the search term tells you what demand arrived; and the performance columns attached to each term tell you whether that demand converted. Everything else in campaign optimisation follows from reading it.

What it contains and how to read it

Each row pairs a customer search term with the targeting that matched it — the keyword or product target — plus the match type that connected them, and the performance metrics for that combination: impressions, clicks, click rate, spend, cost per click, orders, sales, and efficiency measures.

Reading it is an exercise in sorting by intent. Terms that generated orders are candidates to harvest into dedicated exact-match campaigns where they can be bid on precisely and protected. Terms that consumed spend without converting are candidates for negative targeting, so the budget stops flowing to queries that were never going to buy. That two-way movement — harvest and negate — is the loop that improves an account over time.

Making it a routine rather than an event

The report covers a rolling window of recent weeks, which means historical detail ages out and cannot be recovered later. Two consequences follow: pull it regularly, and archive it. Sellers who download it weekly and keep the files have a query-level history that the platform will not retain for them.

Run it on a schedule: harvest new converting terms, add negatives for the persistent non-converters, and note the themes. Over a couple of months the negatives accumulate into a profile of who your product should not be advertised to, which is often more valuable than the keywords you initially guessed at.

In practice

A seller reviews the report weekly: converting search terms move into exact-match campaigns where bids are tuned deliberately, and the terms that spent money without producing orders are negated. Over a quarter the account’s efficiency improves steadily, not because the budget grew, but because the spend stopped going to queries that never converted.

⚠️ Watch out. Optimising on keywords alone. A seller manages bids by looking at keyword performance and never opens the search-term report, so the broad terms continue matching to irrelevant queries, the spend continues, and the wasted budget stays invisible — it is recorded at the keyword level as mediocre performance rather than as the long list of specific mismatches it actually is.

💡 Harpy tip. Download the report on a schedule and archive it, because the window rolls and the history disappears. Then work it in both directions — harvest winners into exact match, negate the persistent losers — and let the negatives accumulate into a picture of who not to target.

How Harpy Media helps

Advertising optimisation is part of our growth work: search terms reviewed on a weekly rhythm, converting queries harvested into dedicated campaigns, and negatives built up so the budget follows intent.