How much did I spend on ads — and where did it go?

The search terms paying for themselves, and the ones quietly spending your margin.

You know your total ad spend. You know your total sales. What you do not know is which search terms are paying for themselves and which are quietly spending your margin on clicks that never convert. The answer is in Amazon's own reports, buried in tens of thousands of rows nobody reads to the bottom.

What we do about it

• Every customer search term that spent money, ranked by what it cost you and what it brought back.
• Wasted spend gets its own number: clicks that produced no order, on terms you have not blocked yet. That is a worklist, not a statistic.
• Words and themes are grouped, so you can see it is not one bad search term but a whole pattern of them.
• Ad spend is carried into your profit numbers, so a product's margin already has its advertising inside it.

A real moment

A campaign looks healthy: an acceptable cost of sale, steady volume, nothing to investigate. Underneath, a third of the spend is going to a search term describing a product you do not sell — close enough to match, never close enough to buy. It has been running for months, because at the campaign level nothing ever looked wrong.

A composite scenario, drawn from patterns we see repeatedly — not a named customer's result.