Amazon Ads gives you a lot of reports. Most of them are noise. Three do the diagnostic work that actually improves your account: the Search Term Report, the Placement Report, and Campaign Performance. This guide covers what each one shows, the columns that matter, and what to do with what you find.
Most wasted spend in Amazon advertising is findable before it becomes a problem. The reason it accumulates is that sellers either are not looking at the right reports, or they are pulling reports but not acting on them. The goal here is to give you a repeatable reading process, not just a list of columns.
1. The Search Term Report
This is the most important report for most accounts. It shows every search query that triggered your ads over a given period, with spend, clicks, impressions, and orders for each. It answers the most fundamental question in Amazon advertising: what are buyers actually typing when they see your ads?
The gap between your keywords and your actual search terms is where most wasted spend hides. A broad match keyword like "kitchen storage" can trigger queries like "kitchen storage ideas" (relevant) but also "kitchen storage cabinet assembly instructions" (not a product search) or a competitor's brand name (even less relevant). The Search Term Report shows you both.
How to pull it: In Amazon Ads, go to Reports, then Advertising Reports, then select Search Term as the report type. Set your date range to the prior 14 to 30 days. Download the CSV.
What to look at first: Sort by spend, descending. Find the queries spending real budget with zero or low orders. These are candidates for negative keywords. Then sort by orders, descending. Find the queries that are actually converting. These are candidates for harvesting into their own exact match or phrase match campaigns with dedicated bids.
A weekly Search Term Report review is the single highest-return activity in Amazon PPC management. The full framework for tracking and acting on wasted spend covers the complete cleanup process. For understanding how these findings connect to your keyword structure, the keyword match types guide covers the discovery-to-harvest workflow.
2. The Placement Report
This report breaks your performance down by where your ads appeared on Amazon: top of search (first-page results), product pages (competitor and related product listings), and rest of search (everything else). Each placement has a different buyer intent and a different conversion rate.
Top of search is where buyers with high purchase intent click. They searched for something specific and your ad was the first thing they saw. Conversion rates here are typically the highest of the three placements. Product pages attract buyers who are still comparing options. Conversion rates are usually lower, and ACoS is often higher. Rest of search is catch-all and tends to perform least efficiently.
How to pull it: In Amazon Ads, go to Reports, Advertising Reports, and select Placement as the report type. Set the same date range as your Search Term Report so the data is comparable.
What to look at: Compare ACoS and conversion rate across the three placement types for your most important campaigns. If top-of-search is significantly outperforming product pages, you can apply a placement bid modifier to push your bids higher for top-of-search. If product pages are underperforming badly, a negative placement modifier reduces spend there.
This report is worth reviewing monthly rather than weekly. Placement performance patterns change slowly, and overreacting to short-term fluctuations with bid modifiers creates instability. A 30-day sample is more reliable than a 7-day one for this kind of structural decision.
3. Campaign Performance
The Campaign Performance view is not a downloadable report in the same way as the other two. It is the main dashboard view in Amazon Ads: all your campaigns, with impressions, clicks, spend, sales, ACoS, and ROAS for each. This is where you get a fast read on account health without going into the granular data.
What to look for: Campaigns with high impressions and low clicks have a listing or relevance problem. Campaigns with high clicks and low orders have a conversion problem. Campaigns with high spend and high ACoS are the ones to investigate with the Search Term Report. Campaigns with consistently low utilization (spending much less than their budget) may have a bid or targeting problem.
Sorting by ACoS, descending, gives you a fast list of campaigns that need attention. But ACoS alone is not enough context. A high-ACoS campaign running on a product with thin margins needs different action than a high-ACoS campaign on a product with a 70% margin. Always cross-reference with the product's actual economics before making a structural change.
The campaign structure guide covers how to organize campaigns so the Campaign Performance view stays readable as your account grows. The 10-point PPC audit uses this view as one of its primary inputs.
Building a weekly review routine
The three reports work together as a weekly cycle. Campaign Performance gives you the daily summary, the 10,000-foot view. The Search Term Report is the weekly deep dive. The Placement Report is the monthly structural check.
Harbor Kitchen uses this three-report cycle across all 14 of their active campaigns. The 30-minute weekly Search Term review consistently surfaces three to five negative keywords to add and one or two terms to harvest into manual campaigns. Over six months, that weekly practice reduced wasted spend by moving budget from irrelevant queries to the terms that actually converted.
The reports tell you what is happening. The actions you take based on them are what change the account. Build the review into a fixed weekly slot, make the actions immediately rather than adding them to a list, and the compound effect shows up within 60 to 90 days of consistent practice.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most important Amazon Ads report? The Search Term Report is the most actionable for most accounts. It shows every search query that triggered your ads, with clicks, spend, and conversions for each. It tells you where your budget is actually going, where to add negative keywords, and which search terms to harvest into manual campaigns.
How often should you pull Amazon Ads reports? Weekly is the right cadence for most accounts. Pull the Search Term Report weekly to catch wasted spend before it accumulates. The Placement Report benefits from a monthly review since placement patterns change more slowly. Campaign Performance can be checked daily at a summary level.
What is the Amazon Placement Report? The Placement Report breaks your ad performance down by where your ads appeared: top of search (first page), product pages, and rest of search. It shows conversion rate and ACoS at each placement. Most accounts find significant performance differences across these placements, which informs whether to apply placement bid modifiers.
Where do I find the Amazon Ads Search Term Report? In Amazon Ads, go to Reports, then Advertising Reports, then select Search Term as the report type. Set your date range (14 to 30 days is a useful window), select the campaigns you want to analyze, and download. The report is a CSV file. Sort by spend to find where your budget is going first.
Once you know what your reports are telling you, Off Hours lets you act on it with rules: pause the campaigns your Search Term Report flags, boost budgets on the hours your placement data identifies as peak, and set ACoS guardrails grounded in your actual performance data. Start a free 14-day trial.