Harvest, negate and unnegate

Three actions on a search term, and they are the manual equivalents of the Import and Negation rules.

Adding negatives in bulk

Select the ad groups you want protected, paste what you want blocked, and the dialog sorts out where each entry can go.

Keywords and ASINs go in separate boxes because not every ad group accepts both.

Why there are two boxes

Sponsored Brands decides at creation time whether an ad group targets keywords or products, and Amazon rejects a negative of the wrong kind. So the dialog splits your selection — 39 groups take Keywords, 11 groups take ASINs — and routes each list only to the groups that can accept it.

That is also why an Automation rule sometimes skips a target for unsupported targeting: same constraint, same reason. See Why didn’t my rule run?

Entering the list

Paste one entry per line. The counter under each box shows entered and valid, so a malformed ASIN or an empty line is visible before you apply rather than after.

From selected search terms

In Search terms — the Search Terms view or Term Groups — select rows and choose Add negation. The dialog lists the negatives your selection would create, each with its type, destination and number of source rows, in three groups: Will add, Skipped with the reason for each, and Already blocked by other negatives. That last group is not ticked; tick a row there to add the negative anyway. You can untick any row before you apply. One send takes up to 500; open Add negation again for the rest.

• Scope is Ad Group or Campaign. It is fixed to Ad Group when the selection includes an ASIN.
• A search term that is an ASIN — B0 followed by eight letters or digits — becomes Negative Product Targeting. The other terms take the Negative Exact or Negative Phrase you choose under Text Search Term.

Match type

Negative Exact blocks the query you name. Negative Phrase blocks anything containing it, and catches queries you have not seen yet.

Phrase is wider than people expect. A phrase negative on a common word blocks every query that contains it, including the ones you wanted — worth checking the phrase is not inside terms you are still earning on.

Amazon accepts at most 4 words for Negative Phrase and 10 words for Negative Exact. A longer entry does not count as valid in the paste box, and from selected search terms it is marked Not supported with Too many words, so it is never sent.

How the App decides two terms are the same

Negative coverage is matched by Amazon-style close variant, not raw text. For example, hibiscus teas can cover hibiscus tea with either match type, and a Negative Exact dandelion and root tea can cover dandelion root tea.

Negative Phrase is stricter. A phrase tea to stays tea to; it does not shrink to tea, which would cover every term containing that word. The same comparison is used when adding a negative and when removing one, so the two directions cannot disagree about which term is covered.

Removing negatives

The same workflow in reverse, and worth doing more often than most accounts do.

A negative you added six months ago is still running, and it stopped producing evidence the moment you added it — the term has no traffic on that ASIN by definition, so nothing will ever tell you the block was wrong.

Use the negation filter to list what is blocked, then check whether the same query is still earning across the rest of its Product Group. If it is, the block was in the wrong place.

To remove one, select rows and choose Remove negation — in Search Terms, Term Groups, or Performance › Keywords, Ad Groups or Campaigns. The dialog lists the live negatives in that scope; tick the ones to remove. Apply removes them on Amazon right away, and whatever they were blocking can get impressions again.

Harvesting

Promoting a converting search term into its own keyword or product target, so you can bid on it deliberately instead of relying on a broad match to keep finding it.

By hand, select rows in Search Terms or Term Groups and choose Add as keywords. The dialog lists each keyword or ASIN with its type — Exact, Phrase or Product target — its destination and a bid you can change. Under Send to, choose:

• Ad Group the App picked — created on Amazon now. A term with no matching ad group goes to Campaign Builder’s Creation proposals instead.
• Campaign Builder › Destinations — nothing is sent; the terms wait in Creation proposals until you choose an ad group or create a campaign.

Terms that cannot be added are listed under Skipped with the reason, such as Already targeted or No Product Line bid cap. Select at most 500 rows at a time. A target created this way cannot be rolled back automatically.

This is worth doing when you have a specific term in mind. At any scale, an Import rule does the same job continuously and prices the new target from what the term already cost while it was converting.

Doing this by hand or by rule

	By hand	By rule
Best for	A specific decision you have already made	The same decision, repeatedly, at scale
Evidence	Whatever you looked at	A stated Data Window and scope, recorded
Record	The change is logged	The change and the reasoning are both kept

Working by hand first is a reasonable way to learn what a rule should be configured to do.

Considerations

• Blocking a term does not move its traffic anywhere. If you want the demand to keep converting somewhere better, harvest it first, then negate the source.
• Negatives you add here are direct edits and are not subject to Automation’s safeguards. The 365-day orders safeguard protects rules from negating a converting term; it does not stop you.
• Everything applied here is recorded. See Change History.