Single-term review misses patterns

Reviewing search terms one by one works until you have hundreds of them. Waste stops being one obvious bad term and starts being a word that shows up across fifty mediocre ones — invisible at the single-term level, expensive in aggregate.

Break terms into n-grams

An n-gram is just a sequence of one, two, or three words pulled from your search terms. Slice every term into its word patterns and total the spend and sales for each pattern, and themes jump out: a single word quietly attached to a lot of wasted spend, or one that appears in your best converters.

Note — Example: the word "free" shows up across 40 different search terms, all high-ACoS. No single term looked alarming — but together they are bleeding the account.

Act on the pattern

Once a pattern is clear, act at the pattern level. A word that consistently drags performance becomes a negative across campaigns; a word that consistently wins becomes a theme you build more keywords around. One decision fixes dozens of terms at once.

Winning words vs. waste words

Scale winning n-grams

✓Build new keywords around them
✓Promote to exact-match
✓Check your listing covers them

Negate waste n-grams

–Apply as campaign negatives
–Re-check weekly as terms grow
–Watch for false positives

Master Sifu — Pair n-gram thinking with SellerMate’s search-term reporting to spot these patterns across the whole account, then apply negatives in bulk.

📖 Explore search-term reporting in the docs↗

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