You have a campaign called AirFryer-KW-Exact with the keyword "weeknight chicken recipes" running at $0.95 bid. Over the last month it produced 14 orders at 22% ACoS. It's one of your best converters.
You also have an auto campaign — AirFryer-Auto — that's been picking up the same search term, "weeknight chicken recipes," and bidding on it through Amazon's broad matcher. That campaign got 47 clicks on the term, $58 in spend, and produced 1 order at 124% ACoS.
Both campaigns are bidding on the same search term. One is winning at 22% ACoS. The other is losing at 124%. The losing campaign's spend is being wasted — every dollar it spends on "weeknight chicken recipes" is a dollar competing against your own winning campaign in the auction, driving up your costs while contributing the worse-performing conversions.
This is a term conflict. The BulkSheet Pro Term Conflicts page finds them automatically.
How a winner is picked
For every search term that appears in two or more ad groups across your account, the engine ranks the ad groups by order volume, breaking ties on lowest ACoS. The top-ranked ad group is the winner.
Important: an ad group must have at least one order to qualify as a winner. If a term shows up in five ad groups and none of them has converted yet, there's no winner — and the engine doesn't recommend anything. There's no signal to act on. The whole term gets skipped this cycle.
The winner-selection rule is simple but consequential: orders first, ACoS as tiebreaker. An ad group with 8 orders at 35% ACoS beats an ad group with 5 orders at 18% ACoS, because order volume is the better signal of which ad group is actually doing the work of converting. ACoS only matters when orders are tied.
What qualifies a loser
Not every non-winning ad group is flagged as a loser. The engine has specific gates to qualify a loser, and they're more restrictive than the regular per-ad-group negate gates because the recommendation here is more targeted — you're negating a term that's actively converting somewhere in your account, just not in this ad group.
For losers with at least one order, two gates must both pass:
- Worse than the winner: the loser's ACoS is more than 1.5× the winner's ACoS
- Failing the target: the loser's ACoS is more than 2× the target ACoS for that ad group's SKU and campaign type
The "and" matters. A loser at 38% ACoS when the winner is at 12% would pass the first gate (3.2× the winner) but fail the second if the target is 30% (38% is only 1.27× of 30%). The engine wouldn't flag it — the ad group is doing okay against its own target, even if the winner is doing dramatically better.
Why both gates? Because consolidating traffic around the winner is only worth doing when the loser is meaningfully bad on its own terms, not just relatively worse than an unusually-strong winner. If the winner happens to be performing exceptionally and everything else is merely "fine," there's no clear case for negating the merely-fine ad groups.
For losers with zero orders, the gate is different: total loser spend must exceed the patience budget (7 times the account CPO times the target ACoS, with a $5 floor). This catches the case where a term is bleeding spend in one ad group without converting, even though it's been a winner somewhere else. Same logic as the regular per-ad-group negate — but applied within a term-conflict context.
What the recommendation actually does
When you select a term conflict in the Rec Actions tab and apply it, BulkSheet Pro queues a negative-exact keyword for that term in each of the loser ad groups. The winner ad group is untouched. Going forward, the loser ad groups stop bidding on the term entirely. The next time a shopper searches "weeknight chicken recipes," only the winner ad group is in the auction with that term — assuming no other ad groups are bidding broadly enough to catch it.
The effect is consolidation, not elimination. You're not blocking the term across your account. You're routing all of its traffic to the ad group that has earned the right to convert on it.
This matters for the math. A losing ad group at 124% ACoS doesn't just hurt by itself — it competes with your winning ad group, often driving up the auction price for the keyword while contributing poor conversions. Once the loser is negated, the winning ad group should see lower cost-per-click on the term (less internal competition) and pick up the impressions the loser was getting. The overall account ACoS on that term should drop, because all the conversions are now happening in the ad group that converts them efficiently.
Scope limits
Term Conflicts is Sponsored Products only. Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display campaigns are filtered out, because their attribution and ad-group structure work differently — a "term conflict" between SP and SB usually isn't a real conflict at the auction level, since they're competing for different shelf space.
Exact-match ad groups are also excluded from the analysis. If a term is running in an exact-match ad group, that ad group has already been intentionally built around the term. The conflict logic wouldn't add anything — and accidentally negating an exact-match keyword in the ad group that was built for it would be a bad outcome.
Excluded campaigns (those with a Campaign Rule set to Exclude) are skipped entirely. Term conflicts respect the same exclusion contract as every other rec engine.
Confidence and the Rec Actions tab
Term conflicts get a confidence tier just like every other rec type:
- High: winner has at least 2 orders AND total loser spend is at least $5 AND total loser clicks are at least 10
- Medium: winner has at least 1 order AND total loser spend is at least $2
- Low: otherwise
The Rec Actions tab pre-selects the high-confidence picks. Medium picks are visible if you switch to the All view but aren't pre-selected. Most cycles, you'll work from the high-confidence tab — the engine is conservative on purpose, because the consolidate-around-the-winner call requires real signal on both sides of the comparison.
The sort order
The page is sorted by total loser spend descending — the conflicts where you're losing the most money to internal competition show up first. This usually matches your intuition about what to fix: the highest-spend, highest-waste term conflicts have the biggest impact when consolidated, so working top-down through the list captures most of the value in the first few minutes.
What BulkSheet Pro won't do
It won't reassign a term to a different winner across cycles. Each cycle's Term Conflicts analysis is fresh — based on the data in this bulk sheet. If the winner ad group's performance degrades next month and a different ad group starts converting better, the engine will pick the new winner and recommend negating the old one. The recommendations follow the data; they don't have memory of what the winner was last time.
It won't flag conflicts in exact-match ad groups. Those are intentional structures. If two exact-match ad groups are bidding on the same keyword text — which can happen in larger accounts with redundant campaign builds — the conflict isn't surfaced here. You'd address that on the Keywords page directly.
It won't combine the winning ad group's data with the losers'. The engine isn't building a global model of "how this search term performs across the account." It's comparing per-ad-group performance to identify where the term is and isn't earning its keep. The math is local to each ad group.
It won't auto-pause campaigns that contain a lot of qualified losers. A campaign with 12 loser conflicts won't get a pause recommendation from this engine — pausing is handled by the Product Pauses logic with its own gates. Term Conflicts is specifically about per-ad-group term-level negations, not campaign-level decisions.
The cycle that follows
You apply 23 term-conflict negations from the high-confidence picks. Each one is a negative-exact on a specific term in a specific loser ad group. The winners are untouched.
A month later, Change Impact shows the effect. Most of the negated terms are now at $0 spend in their loser ad groups (the negative works as intended). The winner ad groups have picked up the impressions and orders — total order volume on those terms is roughly the same or higher, but concentrated in the ad groups that convert them efficiently. Account-level ACoS on the previously-conflicted terms has dropped meaningfully — the wasted-spend was the main reason their aggregate ACoS looked bad.
The work was small (23 selections, one click) but the impact compounds. Every month, conflict resolution is a small portion of the rec workload — typically 10-30 picks for an established account — but each one shifts traffic toward your most efficient ad groups. Over six months, the result is an account where every search term is converging on its best home.