Adding negative keywords in bulk

The operation that protects your spend

If bid adjustment optimizes the money you spend, negative keywords stop you from spending money you shouldn't. Every campaign accumulates wasted spend over time — search terms that triggered impressions or clicks but never convert, queries from shoppers who weren't your target, accidental keyword overlaps with unrelated products. Negative keywords cut that waste. And like everything in bulk operations, doing them in batch is dramatically faster than the UI.

This article walks through the bulk-sheet structure for negatives: where they live, the two scopes (campaign-level vs. ad-group-level), the two match types (negativeExact and negativePhrase), how to derive negatives from your search term reports, and common mistakes.

What negatives actually do

A negative keyword tells Amazon "do not show my ad on searches matching this term, regardless of what other keywords would have triggered it." For example, if you have a Keyword campaign with "air fryer" (broad match) and you add "toaster oven" as a negative exact, your ad won't show on a search for "toaster oven" even though the broad-match "air fryer" might otherwise have matched.

Negatives are subtractive — they prevent impressions that would have happened. They never cause impressions; they only block them.

The two negative match types

Unlike positive keywords (exact, phrase, broad), negatives have only two match types:

• negativeExact: Blocks searches that exactly match the negative phrase, with allowances for plurals and minor variations. Use this when you want to block one specific search term — "toaster oven" blocks "toaster oven" but not "toaster oven recipes."
• negativePhrase: Blocks searches that contain the negative phrase anywhere in the query. toaster oven negativePhrase blocks "toaster oven," "toaster oven recipes," "best toaster oven," etc. Broader than exact; use when you want to block all variations of a term.

There is no "negativeBroad" — Amazon doesn't offer broad-match negatives. negativePhrase is as broad as negatives get.

Campaign-level vs ad-group-level negatives

Negatives can be added at two scopes:

• Campaign Negative Keyword: Applies to every ad group within the campaign. Useful when a term should never trigger any ad from this campaign, regardless of which ad group it would have hit.
• Negative Keyword (ad group level): Applies only to the specific ad group you place it in. Useful when one ad group should block a term but another ad group should still serve on it.

For most negatives, campaign-level is the right scope — if "toaster oven" is irrelevant to your air fryer business, it's irrelevant in every ad group. Ad-group-level negatives are useful when you've separated your campaign by match type or theme and want negatives that apply to only one segment.

The bulk sheet structure for negatives

Negatives are their own entity types in the Sponsored Products Campaigns sheet:

• Campaign Negative Keyword: rows with Entity = "Campaign Negative Keyword"
• Negative Keyword: rows with Entity = "Negative Keyword" (ad-group-level)

For Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display, the equivalents are on their respective sheets. The structure is the same idea.

Try it: build a negative keyword bulk sheet

Use the builder below to generate a ready-to-upload bulk sheet from a Campaign ID, scope choice, match type, and keyword list. The output is a fresh .xlsx file with one Negative Keyword row per term — drop it into Seller Central's upload page.

Building a Campaign Negative Keyword row

To add a campaign-level negative, you create one row per (campaign, keyword, match type) combination. Required cells (per Amazon's spec, R35 of the Config sheet):

• Campaign ID — the real Amazon-assigned ID of the campaign (from your downloaded bulk sheet).
• State — usually enabled.
• Keyword Text — the negative term, e.g., toaster oven.
• Match Type — negativeExact or negativePhrase.
• Operation — Create (since you're adding new negatives).
• Entity — Campaign Negative Keyword.
• Product — Sponsored Products.

Other cells (Ad Group ID, Bid, Product Targeting Expression, etc.) stay blank. Negatives don't have bids — they're block rules, not targeting.

Building a Negative Keyword (ad-group-level) row

Similar, but with one more required cell:

• Same as above, plus:
• Ad Group ID — the specific ad group this negative applies to.

And Entity is Negative Keyword instead of Campaign Negative Keyword.

The typical workflow: from search term report to negatives sheet

Most negatives come from analysis of your Customer Search Term Report (which lives in the Reports section of Seller Central, not Bulk Operations — separate workflow). The standard workflow:

1. Pull the Customer Search Term Report for the last 30–60 days. This shows what shoppers actually searched, broken down per ad group and keyword, with impressions/clicks/spend/orders.
2. Filter for waste candidates. Search terms with significant spend and zero orders. The exact threshold depends on your average CPC and ACoS target, but a starting heuristic: "search terms with 10+ clicks and 0 orders, OR 5+ clicks and an ACoS over 100% if they did convert."
3. Decide negativeExact vs negativePhrase per term. If the term is "toaster oven" and you also want to block "toaster oven recipes," "toaster oven reviews," etc., use negativePhrase. If the term is something specific like "purple air fryer" and you only want to block that one phrase, use negativeExact.
4. Decide campaign-level vs ad-group-level scope. If the term should be blocked across all ad groups in the campaign, use Campaign Negative Keyword. If only one ad group, use Negative Keyword.
5. Build the negative rows in a fresh bulk sheet or a copy of your downloaded sheet. One row per (campaign or ad group, negative term, match type) combination.
6. Upload.

For typical accounts running for several months, the first negative-keyword cycle reveals dozens to hundreds of waste terms. After the initial cleanup, subsequent cycles produce 5–15 new negatives per month as new waste accumulates.

Strategic considerations

A few things to think about before adding negatives:

• Negatives are forever (until you remove them). Once added, they keep blocking that search term until you archive the negative. A term that wasn't converting last month might convert next month after a product photo change or holiday season. Periodically audit your negatives for ones to remove.
• Negatives apply at the campaign or ad group level, but search terms appear under specific keywords. The Customer Search Term Report shows you the relationship between the keyword you bid on (broad match "air fryer") and the actual searches it triggered ("toaster oven"). The negative goes on the campaign or ad group, not on the keyword that triggered it. The triggering keyword still works for other queries.
• Don't negate too aggressively at first. Adding 200 negatives in your first cycle can over-restrict the campaign and cut into legitimate traffic. Start with the worst offenders (10+ clicks, 0 orders) and let the campaign recover for a couple of weeks before adding more.
• Negative phrase can over-block. A negative phrase of "kids" intended to block "kids' air fryer" also blocks "air fryer for kids," "kids parents air fryer," etc. Sometimes you want this. Sometimes you don't. negativeExact gives you tighter control if you only want to block specific phrasings.
• Brand negatives are different. If you want to stop showing on competitor brand searches, the right move is sometimes a negative — but Amazon also offers separate brand exclusion features for Sponsored Display. Choose the right tool.

Common mistakes when adding negatives in bulk

• Wrong Match Type capitalization. negativeExact works. NegativeExact, negative-exact, negative exact, and Negative Exact all fail. The exact strings are camelCase with no spaces or punctuation.
• Wrong Entity value. For campaign-level, Entity must be exactly Campaign Negative Keyword with the space. For ad-group-level, just Negative Keyword.
• Trying to add the same negative twice. Duplicate (campaign, keyword text, match type) combinations fail. If you're not sure whether a negative already exists, check the downloaded bulk sheet first.
• Negating a phrase that's also in your positive keywords. If you have air fryer as a positive exact keyword and you add air fryer as a negativeExact, the negative wins — your ad never shows on "air fryer." Be careful that your negatives don't accidentally block your real intent.
• Adding ad-group-level negatives without the Ad Group ID. The row needs both Campaign ID and Ad Group ID. Missing the Ad Group ID makes Amazon ambiguous about scope; the row fails.
• Leaving the Bid column populated. Negatives don't have bids. If you accidentally fill in a Bid value, Amazon may warn but typically ignores it. Cleaner to leave it blank.

Removing negatives (archiving)

To remove a negative keyword, set its Operation to Archive. You'll need the Keyword Id (the real Amazon-assigned ID for that negative entity — visible in your downloaded bulk sheet). State usually doesn't matter for archive, but set it consistently.

Removing a negative usually starts showing the term again within a few hours of upload propagation.

Negative product targets

Briefly: negative product targets work similarly to negative keywords, but block product placements rather than search terms. The Entity is Negative Product Targeting or Campaign Negative Product Targeting (similar split for ad-group vs campaign scope). The expression syntax is the same as positive product targeting — asin="B0XXXXXXXX".

Use cases: you've been getting placements on competitor ASINs that don't convert well, or you want to exclude a specific category from your category targeting. Add the offending ASIN or category as a negative product target.

The negative-keyword cadence

How often to add negatives:

• Initial cleanup: When you start using negatives systematically. Expect 50–200 negatives in the first cycle for a campaign that's been running for months without them.
• Monthly: Pull a fresh Customer Search Term Report, identify new waste, add 5–20 new negatives. Tied to your overall optimization cycle.
• Event-driven: Sometimes you'll spot a single high-spend non-converter and want to negate it immediately rather than waiting for the monthly cycle. A 5-minute one-off bulk upload covers this.

Most well-managed accounts converge over 6–12 months on a stable set of 100–500 negatives per campaign, with small additions and occasional removals each cycle.

Next steps

Negative keywords pair naturally with:

• Search term harvesting — the flip side. Both processes look at the Customer Search Term Report. Converters get promoted to positive keywords; non-converters get added as negatives. Many sellers do both in the same monthly cycle.
• Bid adjustments — sometimes the right answer to a high-spending term isn't a negative but a lower bid. Article covers when to do which.
• Bulk pausing — for entities that have failed across multiple cycles, pausing or archiving the whole entity is cleaner than accumulating negatives forever.

And like every operations article: BulkSheet Pro automates the negative-keyword workflow end-to-end — reads your search term reports, applies your decision rules (impressions threshold, ACoS threshold, etc.), generates the negative-keyword rows. Try it free →