The Arbitrage Opportunity Between Amazon and Google Ads

Marketplace sellers face a unique challenge in 2025. Amazon's shifting advertising strategy has created unprecedented opportunities for sellers who understand how to leverage Google Ads without destroying their profit margins. When Amazon reduced their Google Shopping ad spend by 50% in the US market, savvy sellers recognized the opening. But capitalizing on this arbitrage window requires more than just launching campaigns. It demands surgical precision in negative keyword management to ensure every dollar spent drives profitable traffic.

The economics are compelling. According to research from Affiverse, with 30% lower CPCs across major markets and Amazon's reduced presence, the competitive landscape has fundamentally shifted. But this opportunity comes with a critical requirement: protecting your margins through intelligent traffic filtering. This is where negative keyword tactics become your most powerful tool for profitable arbitrage.

Unlike traditional Google Ads campaigns, marketplace sellers operating in the arbitrage space must balance two competing pressures. First, you need volume to compete with larger brands. Second, you need precision to avoid the low-margin nightmare of broad, irrelevant traffic. The sellers who master this balance are the ones who build sustainable arbitrage businesses rather than cash-burning experiments.

Understanding the Amazon-to-Google Ads Arbitrage Model

Marketplace arbitrage works on a simple principle: buy products at wholesale or retail prices, list them on Amazon, and drive external traffic through Google Ads to capture sales at higher margins than Amazon's internal advertising allows. The key difference is that you control the traffic source, the landing page experience, and most importantly, the filtering mechanisms that determine which searches trigger your ads.

The traditional Amazon PPC model forces you to compete in a closed ecosystem where you have limited control over negative keywords and where Amazon's broad match logic can quickly drain budgets on irrelevant traffic. When you shift to Google Ads for external traffic to your Amazon listings or your own e-commerce site, you gain significantly more control over traffic quality. But with that control comes responsibility for margin protection.

The margin math is unforgiving. If your product has a 40% gross margin and you spend 20% of revenue on advertising, you're left with 20% to cover all other costs and generate profit. Even a 5% increase in wasted ad spend from irrelevant traffic can cut your net margin in half. This is why negative keyword mistakes cost e-commerce brands $250K+ per year. For marketplace sellers operating on thin margins, the stakes are even higher.

According to Amazon PPC best practices research from Amify, thorough keyword research and negative keyword implementation are crucial for campaign success. The same principles apply to cross-platform arbitrage, but with added complexity. You're not just optimizing within one platform. You're managing traffic flow between two ecosystems, each with different economics and conversion characteristics.

The Fundamentals of Margin-Protecting Negative Keyword Strategy

Protecting margins in marketplace arbitrage starts with understanding what type of traffic destroys profitability. Not all irrelevant traffic is created equal. Some searches are obviously wrong for your products. Others are subtly off-target in ways that generate clicks and even occasional conversions but at economics that don't work for your business model.

Blocking High-Volume, Low-Intent Search Patterns

The most dangerous traffic for margin protection is high-volume searches with low purchase intent. These queries generate massive click volume at seemingly reasonable CPCs, but they convert at rates too low to justify the spend. For marketplace sellers, common culprits include informational searches, comparison queries without buying intent, and overly broad category terms.

Consider a seller offering premium Bluetooth speakers priced at $150. Broad searches like "bluetooth speaker" might seem relevant, but they attract users looking for budget options at $30-50. Without aggressive negative keyword filtering for terms like "cheap," "budget," "under $50," "affordable," and "best value," you'll burn through budget on clicks that never convert because your price point doesn't match user expectations.

The solution requires building comprehensive negative keyword lists across three categories. First, price-related qualifiers that indicate your product is outside the searcher's budget. Second, quality indicators that suggest users are looking for a different tier of product. Third, intent modifiers that reveal research rather than purchase behavior.

Preventing Cross-Contamination Between Product Categories

Marketplace sellers often manage multiple product lines. When you run Google Ads campaigns for different categories simultaneously, cross-contamination becomes a margin killer. A search for "wireless headphones" might trigger ads for both your premium over-ear headphones and your budget earbuds. If the wrong product shows for the wrong search, you pay for clicks that don't convert or that convert to lower-margin products.

The fix requires campaign-level negative keyword architecture. Each product category campaign needs negatives that block keywords associated with your other categories. This seems simple in theory but becomes complex when managing dozens or hundreds of SKUs across multiple campaigns. The key is using negative keyword lists that can be shared across campaigns with similar characteristics while maintaining category-specific exclusions.

For example, if you sell both phone cases and laptop cases, your phone case campaigns should have "laptop," "macbook," "chromebook," and similar terms as negatives. Your laptop case campaigns should block "iphone," "samsung phone," "smartphone," and related mobile device terms. This prevents budget bleed between categories and ensures each campaign's spend goes toward its intended products.

Strategic Competitor and Brand Negative Keywords

Bidding on competitor brand terms is a common tactic in Google Ads, but for marketplace sellers, it's often a margin trap. When users search for specific brand names, they typically have high intent for that exact brand. Trying to redirect them to your generic or alternative products generates expensive clicks with low conversion rates.

The exception is when you actually sell the branded product they're searching for. If you're an authorized reseller of Brand X products and someone searches for "Brand X wireless earbuds," that's profitable traffic. But if you're selling an unbranded alternative and bidding on "Brand X" terms hoping to steal traffic, you're likely destroying margin faster than building revenue.

Your negative keyword strategy should include all major competitor brands unless you specifically sell those brands and have campaigns dedicated to them. This prevents accidental triggering on brand terms through broad or phrase match keywords. It also protects you from Google's increasingly aggressive broad match logic that might decide your "wireless headphones" campaign is relevant to "Bose wireless headphones" searches.

Implementing Cross-Platform Negative Keyword Tactics

The real power of marketplace arbitrage comes from applying lessons learned on one platform to improve performance on another. Your Amazon search term data is a goldmine for building Google Ads negative keyword lists, and vice versa. But the implementation requires understanding how match types and filtering work differently across platforms.

Using Amazon Search Term Data to Build Google Negatives

Amazon provides search term reports showing which customer searches triggered your sponsored product ads. This data reveals the gap between intended targeting and actual search behavior. Every irrelevant search term that generated clicks on Amazon is a candidate negative keyword for your Google Ads campaigns.

The challenge is scale. Manually reviewing Amazon search term reports and then adding those terms to Google Ads campaigns is time-consuming and error-prone. This is where automation becomes critical. By systematically extracting low-performing search terms from Amazon and cross-applying them as negatives in Google Ads, you prevent repeating the same margin-destroying mistakes across platforms.

The process works in reverse as well. Your Google Ads search term reports reveal queries that seemed relevant based on your keywords but proved unprofitable. These terms should be added as negative keywords in your Amazon campaigns to prevent similar waste. According to Search Engine Land's guide on cross-platform PPC strategies, developing synchronized negative keyword lists across platforms is essential for maintaining consistent ROI.

Coordinating Match Types Across Platforms

Amazon and Google handle match types differently, which creates complexity when applying negative keywords across platforms. Google Ads offers exact, phrase, and broad match negatives. Amazon's match types include exact, phrase, and broad, but the logic for how they filter searches varies.

The safest cross-platform approach is using phrase match negatives for terms you want to block universally. Phrase match works similarly in both Google and Amazon, blocking searches that contain the negative keyword phrase in the specified order. This creates consistency in your filtering logic across platforms.

For platform-specific nuances, maintain separate negative keyword lists. Your Google Ads campaigns might need more aggressive broad match negatives to counter Google's expansive broad match keyword logic. Your Amazon campaigns might need more exact match negatives to prevent blocking valuable long-tail variations that Amazon's algorithm serves effectively.

Building Automated Synchronization Systems

Manual cross-platform negative keyword management doesn't scale. When you're running dozens of campaigns across both Amazon and Google, keeping negative lists synchronized and updated becomes a full-time job. The solution is automation that applies consistent negative keyword logic across both platforms while respecting platform-specific differences.

This is where tools like Negator.io provide critical leverage. Instead of manually combing through search term reports on both platforms, AI-powered analysis identifies negative keyword candidates based on your business context. The system learns what types of searches are profitable for your specific products and margins, then automatically suggests negatives across all campaigns and platforms.

The key advantage is context-awareness. Generic negative keyword tools apply rules-based logic: if CTR is below X or conversion rate is below Y, add as negative. But this approach misses business context. A term might have low conversion rate but high average order value, making it profitable. Or a search might convert well but only to low-margin products you're trying to de-emphasize. Context-aware automation considers these nuances, protecting margins rather than just optimizing surface metrics.

Advanced Negative Keyword Tactics for Marketplace Arbitrage

Once you've mastered basic negative keyword hygiene, advanced tactics separate profitable arbitrage operations from ones that merely tread water. These strategies require more sophisticated analysis but deliver disproportionate margin protection.

Seasonal Negative Keyword Rotation

Consumer search behavior changes dramatically across seasons and events. A negative keyword that makes sense in January might block valuable traffic in December. Marketplace sellers need dynamic negative keyword strategies that adapt to seasonal intent shifts. This is particularly critical for sellers in retail categories with peak season dynamics.

For example, searches containing "gift" or "present" might be low-converting research queries in March but high-intent purchase searches in November. Your negative keyword strategy should recognize these patterns and adjust filtering accordingly. This requires maintaining seasonal negative keyword lists that activate and deactivate based on calendar periods.

The same principle applies to product lifecycle stages. New product launches might tolerate broader traffic initially to build awareness and gather data. Mature products with established conversion patterns should have tighter negative keyword filtering to maximize margin efficiency. As products move through their lifecycle, negative keyword strategies should adapt accordingly.

Margin-Tiered Negative Keyword Filtering

Not all products in your catalog have the same margin profile. Premium products with 60% margins can tolerate more aggressive traffic acquisition. Budget products with 20% margins require surgical precision. Your negative keyword strategy should reflect these different margin realities through tiered filtering.

High-margin campaigns can use fewer negative keywords, allowing broader traffic to capture more volume. The margin cushion absorbs the cost of some irrelevant clicks. Low-margin campaigns need extensive negative keyword lists that block any questionable traffic. You can't afford expensive exploratory clicks when working with razor-thin margins.

This approach requires segmenting campaigns by product margin tiers rather than just by product category. Your campaign structure should have dedicated campaigns for high-margin products, medium-margin products, and low-margin products, each with appropriately tuned negative keyword lists. As explained in research on e-commerce PPC management strategies, smart product segmentation based on margins is essential for maintaining profitability in competitive auctions.

Geographic Negative Keyword Customization

Search terminology varies significantly by geography. A term that indicates low purchase intent in the US might signal high intent in the UK. Product terminology differs across regions, creating opportunities for more nuanced negative keyword strategies based on geographic targeting.

Marketplace sellers shipping internationally should maintain geography-specific negative keyword lists. Terms containing local slang, regional brands, or country-specific product names can be negative keywords in some geographies but valuable traffic sources in others. This level of customization prevents leaving money on the table in some markets while burning budget in others.

The implementation requires campaign structures that separate geographies, allowing different negative keyword lists per region. This adds complexity but pays off in margin improvement. A seller shipping both to the US and UK might find that "cheap" as a negative keyword makes sense in the US where it indicates low-quality seekers, but in the UK, "cheap" is more commonly used neutrally to mean good value, making it worth testing rather than blocking universally.

Scaling Your Arbitrage Business Without Margin Erosion

The ultimate test of negative keyword strategy is whether it allows you to scale ad spend without proportional margin erosion. Many marketplace sellers hit a ceiling where additional spend brings diminishing returns and falling profitability. Breaking through this ceiling requires negative keyword tactics designed specifically for scale.

Preventing Broad Match Budget Bleed at Scale

As you scale campaigns, Google's broad match logic becomes simultaneously more powerful and more dangerous. The algorithm finds new search queries that technically relate to your keywords but often at the edges of true relevance. Without aggressive negative keyword management, broad match at scale destroys margins faster than it builds revenue.

The solution is preemptive negative keyword lists built before scaling, not after. Identify all the ways broad match could go wrong for your product categories and add those terms as negatives before increasing budgets. This prevents the expensive learning phase where you pay for irrelevant clicks to discover what doesn't work.

For example, if you sell noise-canceling headphones and plan to scale your "headphones" campaign from $100/day to $1,000/day, add negatives for all the related-but-wrong headphone categories before scaling: "gaming headphones," "kids headphones," "sports headphones," "sleep headphones," etc. This prevents your budget increase from funding broad match experiments that were never going to work for your product.

Automated Search Term Monitoring at Volume

At small scales, manually reviewing search term reports weekly is feasible. At large scales with thousands of clicks per day across multiple campaigns and platforms, manual review becomes impossible. You need automated systems that monitor search terms in real-time and flag negative keyword candidates before they cause significant margin damage.

The challenge is distinguishing between genuinely bad search terms and terms that simply haven't converted yet due to small sample size. Automated systems need statistical rigor to avoid premature negative keyword additions that block potentially profitable traffic. They also need business context to recognize when a search term aligns with your target audience even if early performance metrics look weak.

This is where context-aware AI tools prove their value at scale. Instead of rules-based automation that applies the same logic to all search terms, AI-powered systems analyze search queries in the context of your products, pricing, target audience, and margin requirements. This prevents both false positives (blocking good traffic) and false negatives (missing bad traffic) that plague simpler automation.

The Scaling Blueprint: From $100/Day to $10K/Day

Successful scaling follows a predictable pattern when negative keyword management is handled correctly. You start with tight targeting and extensive negative keyword lists. As you gather performance data, you selectively expand into new keyword territories while maintaining aggressive negative keyword filtering in each new area. The key is expanding thoughtfully rather than broadly, ensuring each expansion maintains or improves margin efficiency.

The blueprint detailed in scaling from $100/day to $10K/day without proportionally scaling waste demonstrates this approach in action. Each stage of scaling involves expanding into new keywords or platforms while applying learned negative keyword intelligence from previous stages. You're not just adding budget to existing campaigns. You're systematically expanding reach while maintaining margin discipline through increasingly sophisticated negative keyword management.

For marketplace sellers doing arbitrage, this might mean starting with Google Shopping campaigns for your highest-margin products with the tightest negative keyword controls. As those campaigns prove profitable, you expand to text ads, then to additional product categories, then to new geographies. Each expansion carries forward the negative keyword intelligence from previous stages while adding new category-specific or geography-specific negatives.

Measuring Success and Continuous Optimization

Effective negative keyword management requires metrics that go beyond surface-level performance indicators. Click-through rate and conversion rate matter, but for margin protection in marketplace arbitrage, you need metrics that directly tie to profitability.

Cost Per Margin Dollar: The Ultimate Metric

Traditional PPC metrics focus on ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) or CPA (Cost Per Acquisition). For marketplace sellers operating on tight margins, these metrics miss critical nuance. A 4:1 ROAS sounds great until you realize your product only has 30% margin, meaning that 4:1 ROAS leaves you with minimal profit after ad costs.

The metric that matters is Cost Per Margin Dollar: how much are you spending on ads to generate one dollar of gross margin? If your product sells for $100, costs $70 to source and ship, and generates $30 gross margin, you need ad costs under $30 to break even. If you're spending $25 in ads per sale, you're generating only $5 net margin per transaction. That might be acceptable, or it might be unsustainable depending on your other business costs.

This metric focuses your negative keyword decisions on margin protection rather than vanity metrics. A keyword might have strong CTR and decent conversion rate, but if it primarily drives sales of your lowest-margin products, it's harming overall profitability. Your negative keyword strategy should prioritize blocking traffic that looks good on surface metrics but destroys margin in reality.

Tracking Prevented Waste from Negative Keywords

Most PPC reporting focuses on what happened: clicks, conversions, cost, revenue. But negative keyword management is fundamentally about prevention. You need metrics that estimate what didn't happen because your negative keyword filtering worked. This is harder to measure but critical for understanding the value of your negative keyword strategy.

One approach is calculating estimated prevented waste based on historical data. Before adding a negative keyword, note how much it was costing per conversion (or that it wasn't converting at all). After adding it as a negative, calculate how much you would have spent if that term had continued triggering ads at the previous rate. The difference is prevented waste attributable to that negative keyword.

Aggregated across all your negative keywords, this metric demonstrates the cumulative value of your negative keyword management. Many marketplace sellers find that prevented waste exceeds 20-30% of total ad spend, meaning effective negative keyword management is worth more than most optimization tactics. As highlighted in analysis of the hidden cost of irrelevant traffic, the money lost to poor filtering compounds rapidly at scale.

Building a Continuous Learning System

Negative keyword management isn't a one-time setup task. Search behavior evolves, new competitor brands enter the market, seasonal patterns shift, and your product mix changes. Your negative keyword strategy needs to evolve accordingly through systematic continuous learning.

The most effective approach is weekly review cycles that analyze new search term data, identify negative keyword candidates, test those additions, and measure the margin impact. This creates a feedback loop where your negative keyword lists become progressively more sophisticated and effective over time. The compound effect of continuous improvement in negative keyword filtering often delivers more margin expansion than any other single optimization tactic.

For agencies managing multiple marketplace seller clients, this continuous learning can be systematized across accounts. Patterns identified in one account's search term data can inform negative keyword strategies in similar accounts. Cross-account learning dramatically accelerates the optimization curve, helping new clients avoid expensive mistakes that older clients already learned from.

Common Negative Keyword Mistakes to Avoid in Marketplace Arbitrage

Even experienced PPC managers make critical errors in negative keyword management when transitioning to marketplace arbitrage. These mistakes stem from not fully appreciating how margin pressure changes negative keyword prioritization.

The Over-Blocking Trap

In reaction to wasted spend, some sellers become too aggressive with negative keywords, blocking terms that seem questionable but might actually convert profitably. This is especially dangerous with long-tail searches that have low volume but high specificity. A search like "bluetooth speaker for small apartment" might seem too specific to bother with, but it could represent a highly qualified buyer.

The fix is setting clear thresholds for negative keyword additions. A search term should accumulate meaningful click volume (typically 20+ clicks) before being evaluated for negative keyword status. Prematurely blocking terms based on insufficient data reduces your addressable audience and can cap growth just as you're starting to scale.

There's also danger in blocking terms that indicate research behavior during the customer journey. Someone searching "bluetooth speaker reviews" might not convert immediately, but they could return later through a branded search after reading reviews. Blocking all review-related searches might improve short-term metrics while harming long-term customer acquisition. The solution is more sophisticated attribution modeling that recognizes multi-touch customer journeys.

Platform-Specific Blindness

Applying Amazon negative keyword strategies directly to Google Ads without adaptation is a common mistake. The platforms have different user intent, different auction dynamics, and different search behaviors. A negative keyword list that works perfectly on Amazon might be wrong for Google and vice versa.

For example, Amazon searches are almost always bottom-funnel purchase intent. Someone searching on Amazon is ready to buy, so you can be more aggressive about blocking any search that doesn't perfectly match your product. Google searches span the entire funnel from awareness to consideration to purchase. Applying Amazon-style aggressive negative keyword filtering on Google might block valuable mid-funnel traffic that would eventually convert.

The solution is maintaining platform-specific negative keyword strategies while sharing learnings between them. Certain categories of negatives apply universally (competitor brands you don't sell, price qualifiers outside your range, quality tiers you don't serve). Others need platform-specific tuning based on different user behavior and intent patterns on each platform.

Ignoring the Power of Protected Keywords

As you build extensive negative keyword lists, you create risk of accidentally blocking valuable traffic through overly broad negative keywords. A negative keyword like "wireless" added at the wrong level could block "wireless headphones" searches that are exactly what you want. This is where protected keywords become essential.

Protected keywords are terms you explicitly mark as valuable, preventing them from being blocked by broader negative keyword additions. If "wireless headphones" is a core term for your business, marking it as protected ensures that future negative keyword additions won't inadvertently exclude it from triggering your ads. This safeguard becomes increasingly important as your negative keyword lists grow more extensive.

Many marketplace sellers learn this lesson the hard way, noticing sudden traffic drops after negative keyword additions and discovering they accidentally blocked important terms. Building a protected keyword list from the start prevents these expensive mistakes and allows more confident negative keyword management without fear of collateral damage to valuable traffic sources.

Tools and Automation for Marketplace Seller Negative Keyword Management

Managing negative keywords across Amazon and Google Ads campaigns at scale requires the right tools. Manual management simply doesn't scale beyond a certain point. Here's how to build an effective toolset for margin-protecting negative keyword management.

Leveraging Native Platform Tools

Both Google Ads and Amazon Advertising provide built-in tools for negative keyword management. Google Ads offers shared negative keyword lists that can be applied across multiple campaigns, reducing duplication and ensuring consistency. Amazon provides search term reports that reveal which customer searches triggered your ads, though the interface for managing negatives is less sophisticated than Google's.

The limitation of native tools is that they're platform-specific and require manual analysis. You can see that a search term performed poorly, but determining whether it should be a negative keyword requires understanding your business context, margin requirements, and strategic priorities. Native tools show data but don't provide intelligence or recommendations.

For marketplace sellers starting their arbitrage journey, native tools are sufficient for basic negative keyword hygiene. As you scale beyond a few campaigns or move into multi-account management, you'll quickly hit the limits of manual platform-by-platform negative keyword management.

AI-Powered Negative Keyword Automation

The next evolution in negative keyword management is AI-powered automation that analyzes search terms in the context of your business rather than applying generic rules. This is the gap that tools like Negator.io fill. Instead of spending hours manually reviewing search term reports on both Amazon and Google, AI analyzes queries using context from your business profile and keywords to determine what should be added as negatives.

The key advantage is context awareness. The AI understands that a search term might be relevant for one product category but not another, or profitable at one margin level but not another. This nuanced decision-making mimics what an expert PPC manager would do manually but at machine speed and scale. You get negative keyword suggestions that protect margins rather than just optimize for surface metrics.

For agencies managing multiple marketplace seller clients, this automation is transformative. Instead of each account manager spending hours per week per client on negative keyword management, the AI handles the heavy lifting across all accounts simultaneously. Account managers review and approve suggestions rather than doing the analysis from scratch. This scales margin protection across entire client portfolios without proportionally scaling labor costs.

Building an Integrated Workflow

The most effective approach combines native platform tools, AI automation, and human oversight in an integrated workflow. The AI does the heavy lifting of analyzing search terms and suggesting negatives. Human experts review suggestions to catch edge cases and apply strategic judgment. Native platform tools execute the approved changes across campaigns.

This workflow ensures speed, accuracy, and strategic alignment. The AI prevents obvious negative keyword candidates from burning budget while humans learn from the suggestions. The human oversight prevents over-blocking valuable traffic while learning accelerates AI performance over time. The integration with native tools ensures execution is seamless without manual importing and exporting of keyword lists.

For marketplace sellers serious about arbitrage as a sustainable business model, investing in this integrated workflow pays for itself quickly through prevented waste and margin protection. The time savings alone often justify the investment, but the real value is in the compound effect of consistently better negative keyword management across all campaigns and platforms.

The Future of Marketplace Arbitrage and Negative Keyword Strategy

The arbitrage opportunity between Amazon and Google Ads won't last forever in its current form. As more sellers recognize the opening and competition increases, margin pressure will intensify. The sellers who win long-term will be those with the most sophisticated negative keyword management.

Google's continued expansion of broad match and automation means negative keyword management will become simultaneously more important and more complex. The platform's AI will serve your ads on increasingly diverse searches, requiring more sophisticated filtering to separate valuable expansion from margin-destroying waste. Manual negative keyword management will become completely unfeasible at competitive scales.

Amazon's advertising evolution will also pressure arbitrage economics. As Amazon develops more sophisticated external traffic attribution and potentially restricts or penalizes external traffic sources that compete with their internal advertising, marketplace sellers will need to adapt their strategies. Those with refined negative keyword intelligence will be best positioned to pivot to whatever the next arbitrage opportunity becomes.

The underlying principle remains constant: in any form of marketplace arbitrage, margin protection through intelligent traffic filtering is the difference between sustainable profitability and eventual burnout. Negative keyword management is the core competency that enables everything else. Master it, automate it, and continuously improve it, and you'll have the foundation for long-term success in marketplace arbitrage regardless of how platform dynamics evolve.

Conclusion: Your Action Plan for Margin-Safe Marketplace Arbitrage

Marketplace arbitrage between Amazon and Google Ads offers compelling opportunities in 2025, but only for sellers who approach it with margin discipline. Negative keyword management isn't a nice-to-have optimization tactic. It's the core competency that determines whether your arbitrage business generates sustainable profit or burns through capital chasing unprofitable volume.

Start by implementing the fundamentals: comprehensive negative keyword lists for price qualifiers, quality indicators, and intent modifiers that don't match your products. Build cross-platform synchronization so learnings from Amazon inform Google strategy and vice versa. Segment campaigns by margin tiers so high-margin products can pursue volume while low-margin products maintain surgical precision.

As you scale, invest in automation that provides context-aware negative keyword management rather than rules-based filtering. The compound effect of consistently better negative keyword decisions across thousands of daily clicks is what separates marketplace sellers who scale profitably from those who hit a ceiling. With the right negative keyword tactics, Amazon-to-Google Ads arbitrage becomes a sustainable competitive advantage rather than a short-term opportunistic play.

The sellers who master margin-protecting negative keyword management in 2025 will build arbitrage businesses that thrive regardless of how platform dynamics shift. Those who neglect it will find their margins cannibalized by irrelevant traffic long before they reach meaningful scale. The choice, and the difference between success and failure, comes down to how seriously you take negative keyword strategy.