Bottom Line: Amazon Attribution is a feature available with Brand Registry and Vendor Central that allows you to view activity such as purchases and add to carts on your product listing from external traffic. You can create multiple tracking links for different traffic channels, and conversion data will be available to you within your Amazon Attribution dashboard.
Amazon Attribution is a powerful new tool for Amazon sellers wanting to track and optimize performance off-Amazon traffic.
Getting accurate data has long been a pain point for brands driving traffic from outside Amazon.
Since you have no access to the code on your Amazon product page, and you can’t install Google Analytics or the Facebook pixel, you can’t track customers through your funnel from start to finish. Thus, optimizing your external marketing campaigns is difficult.
Amazon Attribution is a free tool, available to brand registered sellers and vendor central users, allowing them to measure the actual impact of traffic coming from channels outside of Amazon.
Read on to learn more about Amazon Attribution, how it works, and who can use it.
What is Amazon Attribution?
Amazon attribution allows you to track conversion metrics for your Amazon products from off-Amazon traffic sources.
This means you can see the actual return on investment from external traffic campaigns, for the first time.
For example, let’s say you’re running a product launch with Facebook Ads. By using an Amazon Attribution link, you can to see how many detail page views, add to carts and sales you received from this launch.
In Amazon’s words, this feature is designed to help you:
- Measure – the effectiveness of different publishers or channels.
- Optimize – your campaigns for maximum results.
- Plan – your future marketing strategies and business goals based on data.
Amazon Attribution is the first officially sanctioned attribution tool for Amazon sellers. The idea is for sellers to have the same level of insight and data available from internal traffic like PPC.
Select qualified sellers and vendors can use this tool to perform an accurate sales impact analysis and assess ROI from ad spend on social media, display ads, search ads, and other off-Amazon media.
Metrics Tracked
Currently, you can track the following metrics with Amazon Attribution:
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Detail page views
- Add to carts
- Purchase rate
- Sales
All these are viewable from within the Attribution dashboard, as well as via downloadable reports.
All metrics work off a 14-day last touch attribution window, meaning you will be able to attribute actions to a tracking tag as long as the action takes place within 14 days.
How it Works
Attribution works a lot like Facebook conversion tracking, Amazon Associates tracking, or just about any other kind of affiliate tracking. You’ll create a special tracking URL which will allow your Amazon account to capture details on what your users do after they reach Amazon.
As long as you’re registered with Amazon Brand Registry, you’ll be able to use Amazon Attribution. Just go into your Amazon Advertising Console, and navigate to the Amazon Attribution section.
In the console, you’ll be able to create as many tracking links (often referred to as tags) as you want, to track metrics for particular products, media channels and campaigns.
For example, you’re selling Product A.
You’ll add Product A in Amazon Attribution. Then you generate a tag to track your Facebook Ads for Product A.
Add that tag to the link you use to drive traffic in Facebook Ads, and you’ll get conversion data for this specific tag.
Repeat with a new tag for Google search ads, email, or any other media channels you want to track.
Then repeat the same thing for additional products.
You could also create a tag for certain situations. Let’s say you’re trying out a Facebook video ad (usually you run regular text/image ads). You can create a different tag and apply this only to the link in your video ad.
Then you’ll compare the conversion metrics and sales impact from the video ad against your other Facebook Ads to see whether the video ads provide more end conversions (by way of a more qualified audience) than regular image ads.
To learn more about driving traffic to Amazon and advertising on external channels, check out these guides:
Who Can Use Amazon Attribution?
Amazon Attribution is open to Seller Central and Vendor Central users in select marketplaces. Attribution is currently available in Amazon US and CA in North America, as well as the DE, ES, FR, IT and UK marketplaces in Europe.
Sellers need Brand Registry, as well as a professional selling account, in order to get access to Amazon Attribution.
How to Use Amazon Attribution
To get started, you just need to go to your Amazon advertising console. Along with tools to manage your Amazon PPC campaigns, you should have the option to use Amazon Attribution (if you are also brand registered).
Once you’re in the right place, you can start creating tags for your various traffic sources. As soon as traffic starts coming through your tagged links, you will be able to see insights and Amazon sales activity of people coming from these links.
You can create each tag individually, or you can use Amazon Attribution’s bulk upload feature to create tracking links at scale.
Creating an Attribution Tag
Here’s how to create an Attribution Tag – a tracking URL that will provide details on your customer’s activity on Amazon.
- In the Attribution dashboard, select the advertiser you’re creating the URL for.
- Click “New Order”.
- If you’re creating a link for Google, Facebook, or Instagram, you can select “Upload file to create order and tags”, and follow the instructions given.
- Otherwise, hit “Manually create order and tags”.
- Now choose the product listing(s) you want to track with this tag.
- Under “Order Settings”, choose a name and an ID to help identify the traffic source/campaign.
- Choose the Publisher (traffic channel) you’re promoting your product on.
- Add your product listing URL under “Click-through URL”.
- Hit “Create”, and you’re done.
Why is Amazon Attribution So Valuable?
With any form of paid advertising, tracking performance metrics and profitability is a must. These metrics tell you what return you’re getting from your ad spend, giving you the information to optimize your ad campaigns, double down on high-performing channels, or cut low-performing ones.
Without Amazon Attribution, there are few ways you can measure the impact of your external traffic campaigns.
If you’re giving out promo codes, you can match the number of people who clicked on your ad against the number of coupon redemptions.
If you use a landing page tool (like LandingCube) you can also get analytics data like page views, coupon claims and clicks through to Amazon.
These metrics are a start (and they are better than nothing), but they don’t give the full picture of how your traffic is performing.
It’s also important to be able to see the on-Amazon activity of shoppers from external traffic channels. This is where your main conversion event takes place, so having this data gives you a much better picture of your ads’ ROI.
Additionally, being able to access analytics on each step of your customer’s journey lets you understand exactly which part of your funnel needs to be improved.
Here’s an example: you’re getting a really good CPC on Facebook Ads, but very few sales on Amazon.
With Amazon Attribution, you’ll be able to see the number of detail page views on your Amazon listing, the number of add to carts, and the number of purchases (as well as the clicks on your Facebook Ad, of course).
This lets you identify the biggest drop-off point in your funnel. You can then act on the data shown to fix up the area in the funnel that is leaking the most potential customers.
Limitations of Amazon Attribution
Amazon Attribution is still in Beta, so there may be some growing pains to be noticed here and there. It’s a good idea to keep a close eye on metrics right now, to notice if something seems off.
Attribution tags work only as long as the link that takes someone directly to Amazon has the tag. So you’ll have to make sure that the final link in your pre-Amazon funnel is the one with the attribution tag.
As an example, if your funnel looks like this:
Facebook Ad -> Landing Page -> Amazon
Your Attribution tag should be included in the link from the landing page to Amazon, as this is the link that will be picked up as the referrer URL by Amazon.
Also, while you can track conversions and other key metrics from external traffic using Amazon Attribution, you unfortunately can’t retarget people the way you can with the Facebook Pixel (such as retargeting people who added an item to their cart but didn’t purchase).
It’s unlikely Amazon will ever allow this, as it would provide a way for sellers to divert customers to their own site.
That means retargeting, which is a powerful targeting method for paid ads, is only possible if you have an in-between step such as a landing page in your funnel.
Amazon Attribution and the Brand Referral Bonus Program
Starting 2021, Amazon US sellers can actually get paid to use Amazon Attribution.
They can do this through the Brand Referral Bonus Program. This is a program set up by Amazon that rewards sellers for driving external traffic, through credits on seller fees for sales sent from outside Amazon.
All you need to do is sign up for the program through your seller central account, here. Once approved you’ll be credited a portion of your seller fees for your external traffic sales, as long as these sales come through an Amazon Attribution link.
If the tracking and measurement features Amazon Attribution allows wasn’t reason enough to use it, the Brand Referral Bonus certainly is, giving you savings on your external traffic costs (which you can reinvest into driving even more traffic).
Learn more about the Brand Referral Bonus Program
Amazon Attribution Case Studies
An official case study from Amazon claims nutrition company Premier Nutrition saw Amazon sales growth of 96% quarter-over-quarter and 322% year-over-year for their Premier Protein lines after implementing Amazon Attribution in combination with their marketing initiatives.
In another case study, cookware manufacturers and suppliers Meyer Group Ltd made a revenue increase of 54% and decreased CPA by 48% on traffic driven from Facebook and Google.
Pet food brand “I and love and you” also implemented Amazon Attribution in their business, and discuss the improvements it has made to their advertising measurement in the video below.
Amazon Attribution – In Summary
Analytics is vital for marketers to assess and optimize the performance of their campaigns. Unfortunately, with Amazon being a black hole for reporting, that puts businesses whose sales funnels end on Amazon and begin somewhere else at a disadvantage – until now.
While it’s still limited beta, Amazon Attribution is an exciting solution for sellers and vendors running marketing campaigns across different media channels. The brand attribution and product attribution features provided by Amazon can only be beneficial when driving traffic to products on Amazon.
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