Your Grow tab looks exciting: three keywords ready for bid increases, two campaigns near budget cap with room to scale.

You apply them all. ACOS climbs two points the following week. Nothing looks broken — until you open search terms and find the same zero-order queries still spending $400/month.

Scaling before waste removal is the most common PPC mistake on Amazon. Optimize isn't the boring tab. It's the tab that makes every dollar in Grow actually work.

Why optimize is step one

Budget and bid increases multiply whatever structure you already have:

A 10% bid raise on a converting keyword buys more of a good thing
A 10% bid raise on a campaign bleeding through broad sprawl buys more of a bad thing, faster

Campaign-level ACOS can look acceptable while 15–25% of spend leaks through zero-order search terms. Fix the leak first; then Grow has a clean base rate to scale from.

In Simentri, the Optimize tab is your waste queue — action cards ranked by estimated monthly impact, not a flat export of every flagged row.

Add negative: the default waste lever

When it applies: A search term has meaningful clicks, spent money, produced zero orders — and diagnosis says the traffic is irrelevant or divergent intent, not a listing problem.

Before Simentri recommends Add Negative, it checks:

Click floor — default 10 clicks (Settings → Evidence floors)
Spend floor — default $3 in the 7-day window
Two-week pattern — one bad week often becomes Review, not auto-negative
Not a hero exact keyword — same phrase as your deliberate exact target → bid/listing review instead
Not protected — terms on your Protected Keywords list never auto-negate

Each card opens a Confirmation drawer with campaign, term, 7-day spend, estimated monthly savings, and Apply Now (connected) or Do in Amazon + Mark as applied (offline).

Lower bid: when the term still has potential

Negating kills traffic permanently. Lowering bid throttles it while you fix something else.

Simentri recommends Lower Bid when:

An exact hero keyword has enough clicks but zero orders — pair with listing review, not a negative
Broad/phrase ACOS is much worse than exact for the same root — reduce loose match efficiency
Diagnosis is check listing, route, or split intent — stop bleed while you restructure

Safe limits: never cut more than 50% in one step, never below $0.10.

Broad match sprawl: wrong queries on one keyword

This is one of the most expensive patterns on Amazon: a broad keyword pulls clicks from queries that don't match your catalog — wrong product shape, authenticity mismatch, or dual buyer intent.

Lowering the whole broad bid often hits converters still running on other queries in the same campaign.

Simentri playbook:

Open Optimize → Broad match sprawl panel for the campaign
Scan the 4-week table: clicks, orders, spend, intent badge (Wrong product, Authenticity, Dual intent, Converting)
Add Negative on divergent zero-order queries
Review head terms with dual intent — split campaigns, don't blanket-negate
Protect converters — rows with orders in the window stay live

The Evidence drawer includes a verification bundle you can use in Seller Central's search term report.

Placement waste: TOS, ROS, and Product Pages

Term-level negatives don't fix placement concentration — when 60% of spend sits in Product Pages at 2× your target ACOS while Top of Search converts.

After term waste is handled, Simentri may inject a placement modifier review: Evidence drawer shows the TOS / Rest of Search / PP mix table. Adjustment is manual in Seller Central today; the queue tells you where to look.

Tune sensitivity under Settings → Advanced → Placement waste.

Campaign-level waste: pause vs. term fix

Some problems aren't one bad search term — the whole campaign is structurally broken:

ACOS far above your pause threshold (~55% default) with meaningful spend
Multiple consecutive zero-order weeks at campaign level

Pause Campaign appears on Optimize or Restructure — not buried in a search term export.

Evidence floors: tune to your account size

Defaults (10 clicks, $3 spend) suit many accounts. High-volume sellers may raise floors to reduce noise; smaller accounts may lower click thresholds carefully.

Edit on Ad Insights → Settings → Evidence floors. Changes apply on the next weekly pipeline run.

What to do this week

Open Optimize before Grow — every week, no exceptions
Work top-down by impact — highest estimated monthly savings first
Run sprawl panel if you run broad or legacy auto-heavy structures
Confirm with Evidence — don't negate from memory

The bottom line

Optimize is not housekeeping. It's profit recovery — and the prerequisite for safe scaling.

Simentri ranks waste by dollars, gates aggressive negatives with multi-week logic, and keeps hero terms and protected keywords out of the negate path.

90-day free trial, no credit card required. You approve every action before anything changes in Seller Central.

Start your free audit →

Optimize First: Cut Waste Before You Scale Amazon PPC