Mar 17th 2022
Resources
- Facebook Ads for Amazon [Video Course]
- Drive Traffic To Amazon [Ultimate Guide]
- Get More Amazon Reviews [Ultimate Guide]
For Amazon sellers, external traffic – meaning traffic you send to your products from sources outside Amazon – has been a powerful tool for some time now. Off-Amazon traffic offers a range of powerful benefits, including increased ranking power, more brand recognition, and the ability to own your traffic source and build a customer list.
The issue stopping many sellers from driving their own traffic, however, is cost. It’s true that many of the most powerful external traffic channels, such as Facebook Ads and Google Ads, can be expensive, particularly when you’re first starting out. As such, a lot of sellers can’t afford to invest in the long-term benefits of external traffic, and decide to stick with Amazon PPC, which is more profitable up front.
Now, Amazon is introducing a new program that is going to totally change the game. It’s the Brand Referral Bonus program, which incentivizes sellers to drive their own traffic, and makes it much easier to be profitable when you’re running paid ads or any other kind of external traffic.
In simpler terms, Amazon is essentially going to pay you to drive traffic.
Read on to learn more about the Brand Referral Bonus program, and how to start using it.
Further reading: we created a complete, top to bottom guide on using external traffic to grow your Amazon business. Read it now: How To Drive Traffic To Your Amazon Listing: A Step-By-Step Guide
The Brand Referral Bonus Program
The new Brand Referral Bonus program (launched July 15 2021), gives brand-registered Amazon sellers a rebate on seller fees for traffic they drive from outside Amazon.
The bonus is an average of 10% on product sales that sellers drive themselves. This 10% is taken off the referral fee for that sale – so instead of paying 15% to Amazon as a referral, you only pay 5%.
You’ll also receive the same bonus when customers you send to Amazon make additional purchases from your brand within the next 14 days – it’s not only their initial purchase that gets credited back to you.
To join the program, go to https://sellercentral.amazon.com/brand-referral-bonus
Brand Referral Bonus Program Eligibility Requirements
This program does not apply across the board for any sale coming from external traffic. There are two requirements to earn the 10% Brand Referral Bonus.
First, you need to have a brand that’s part of Amazon Brand Registry. Resellers, or sellers that don’t have an officially registered brand will not be able to benefit from this program.
Second, you need to send traffic using Amazon Attribution. This is a tool that’s offered to brand registered sellers to allow tracking and reporting on external traffic – essentially, Google Analytics but for Amazon external traffic.
Amazon Attribution is how Amazon identifies traffic you have driven yourself. If you get sales from external traffic that don’t come through an attribution link, you won’t get the referral bonus.
How to Register Your Brand with Brand Registry
The first step to start getting referral bonuses is to register your brand.
This is a must these days if you’re selling branded products on Amazon, as it allows access to all the powerful tools on offer from Amazon, including Amazon Attribution (which we’ll move on to in the next section), Amazon Stores, Sponsored Brands, A+ Content, and Amazon Brand Analytics.
Go here to view Amazon’s official documentation on brand registry, and to apply for entry. To register your brand you’ll first need a trademark, which can take some time, so you’ll want to begin the process of getting your trademark as soon as possible.
Learn more about Amazon Brand Registry in this post
How to Start Using Amazon Attribution
Once you’re brand registered, you can start using Amazon Attribution.
Even without the Brand Referral Bonus program, Amazon Attribution is incredibly powerful for the data it gives you on your external traffic campaigns. It’s the only way you can get clear data on how many sales came from your external traffic, which is crucial information for understanding whether your ad campaigns are successful or not.
You can register for Amazon Attribution here. At the time of writing, Attribution is available for Amazon US, CA, DE, ES, FR, IT and UK.
Once registered and accepted, you can create tracking links for all your external traffic channels (Facebook Ads, Google Ads, email, website, etc). If you’re sending traffic through a landing page first – for example, a Facebook Ads funnel that leads to a landing page with an email optin, then to Amazon – you’ll want to make sure that the last link leading to the Amazon listing is the link with the Amazon Attribution tag, to ensure that the tracking data is not lost and you get the 10% bonus from Amazon.
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