Amazon Attribution: How to Track Off-Amazon Traffic to Your Listings

Amazon Attribution is a free advertising tool created by Amazon that allows brand-registered sellers to measure the performance of their external advertising efforts. This tool provides sellers with detailed analytics and insights so you can get a better understanding of which non-Amazon marketing channels work best for your business.

With Attribution, you can easily measure the impact and ROI of display, search, social, video media, and email marketing. With that data, you’ll gain valuable insights into how your customers discover, research, and purchase your products on Amazon. 

Keep on reading to learn more about how Amazon Attribution works, key reasons why you should be running external campaigns for your Amazon listings, and how to get set up with Attribution’s tracking tags.

 

How Amazon Attribution works

Any seller who uses Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands Ads knows how important it is to frequently check in on ad campaigns to ensure they’re performing profitably. As a seller, you rely on the data Amazon gives you in order to make decisions about keywords, bids, and overall budget. But you may not be getting the full story about your marketing efforts. 

It’s crucial to have performance data for the campaigns you run outside of Amazon, too—instead of blindly throwing money at a Facebook or Google ad, you want to make sure those channels are actually working for you. Before Attribution was available, it was very difficult to track the effectiveness of an off-Amazon campaign.

Amazon Attribution allows you to:

Measure 

Understand which advertising channels are most effective at driving traffic and sales for your Amazon products. 

Here’s how things would typically go down before Attribution: if you ran on- and off-Amazon ad campaigns one month and sold 200 products, you’d be able to correctly attribute the, say, 100 sales arising from your PPC sponsored ads. However, the origins of those remaining 100 customers would remain a mystery. 

If you’d had access to a tool like Amazon Attribution, you’d have been able to see exactly where those other 100 customers came from, including the path they took to purchase the product. 

Optimize

Determine which audience strategies increase the your campaign performance, so you can focus on the external ad campaigns that are working and stop the ones that aren’t. 

Back to our example: with Attribution, you would’ve been able to make the informed decision to cut out channels that were low-performing and amped up those that drove more conversions, thereby optimizing your campaigns for the following months and saving yourself a chunk of change.

Plan ahead

Learn the kinds of messaging and imagery your customers respond best to, so you can develop a marketing style for your business and plan for future ad campaigns. 

Attribution provides all of the conversion metrics you need:

• Click-through rate
• Impressions
• Detail page views
• Number of purchases attributed to each ad channel
• “Add to Carts”
• Total sales

It gets even better: you can review all of this data in downloadable reports.

Armed with this information, you can fully optimize ads on multiple external sources, such as Facebook, Google, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, and even email marketing.

  

Why you should drive external traffic to your Amazon listings

As Amazon becomes increasingly competitive and sponsored ad costs rise, you need to figure out other ways to bring qualified traffic to your listings. More traffic = more sales, but don’t expect mountains of organic traffic. Instead of relying on customers to find your products on Amazon all on their own, you should actively search for new customers by placing ads outside of Amazon. If your listings are fully optimized and already have a decent conversion rate, we recommend that you start now.

A great benefit to driving outside traffic versus relying on sponsored ads within Amazon search results is that you can funnel customers directly to your Amazon storefront—which is free from ads for your competitors’ listings. 

Boost your best seller rank

Again, if you have a decent and consistent conversion rate on your Amazon listings, your overall sales will likely increase with an influx of traffic. Sales velocity is a crucial factor in Amazon’s A9 algorithm—which is what Amazon uses to rank products within search results—so the more sales you make, the higher your product will rank.

Improve your keyword rankings

Amazon seems to favor listings that drive external traffic to Amazon. So as long as the traffic that your external campaigns bring to Amazon also boosts conversions, you can expect to see your organic keyword rankings improve as well. 

Get more information about your customers

With Amazon Attribution, you’ll gain valuable insights into how and where your customers shop. We already know more than 50% of consumers start their search for products on Amazon; now you can find out how the other half researches the items you’re selling.

Earn up to a 10% referral bonus

On July 15th, 2021, Amazon announced the launch of the Brand Referral Bonus program in which brands can earn up to a 10% referral bonus on all sales driven by external advertising. 

According to Amazon: “The Brand Referral Bonus program credits brands an average of 10% of sales from traffic you have driven to Amazon … The bonus is provided as a credit on your referral fees.” 

Using Amazon Attribution, Amazon will know which sales are eligible for a referral bonus and bonuses will be credited to your account two months after the sale is made. This program will save brands money on referral fees to help accelerate the growth of your off-Amazon marketing efforts. 

The bonus you receive will depend on the product category your product falls under. To view your estimated referral bonus rate or to learn more about the Bonus program, visit the Brand Referral Bonus program help page.

 

How to set up Amazon Attribution

Currently, Amazon Attribution is still a beta program and only available to brand-registered, professional third-party sellers or vendors. 

If you are one of these sellers or vendors, the first step to getting started is to fill out a sign-up form or register through Seller Central. After you set up your Attribution account, you can then start adding the products that correspond to the campaigns you’d like to track.

Creating an Attribution Tag

The attribution tag is a tracking URL that works similarly to a Facebook or Google tracking pixel. Essentially, the tag “sticks” to a customer’s entire product search journey, starting from when they clicked on your external ad and ending when they reach your Amazon listing, where they may or may not make a purchase. 

The only thing left to do is to paste the tracking URL into your external marketing campaign. For example, if you are running a Facebook ad, you will paste the Amazon Attribution link in the “URL Parameters” section. The tag will start generating the data you need to make informed decisions on your ads based on customer behavior. 

Once you’ve signed in to your Amazon Advertising console, navigate to Amazon Attribution. Amazon also offers a video on the detailed steps on how to set up the attribution tag.

1. To create a new campaign, click on the “Create Campaign” button.
   
   
2. Choose your creation method. You have the option to create a new campaign manually or to create multiple tags in bulk.
   
   
3. If creating a campaign manually, the next step will be to name your campaign and choose the product.
   
4. Now you’ll want to create a new ad group. In this section you will name your ad group, choose an ad publisher (such as Facebook or Google Ads — lots to choose from), channel (this is the type of ad such as video or display ad) and the destination URL.
   
5. Click “Create” in the top right corner.
   
   
6. Your attribution tag is now created. Make sure to use the attribution link Amazon provides in your ads so Attribution can correctly measure your ad performance.
   
   

Now you are ready to properly measure your off-Amazon advertising efforts! Click “Go back to campaigns list” to view all your current Attribution campaigns.

Get started today

Why wait to gain powerful insights into your customers’ buying habits? Amazon Attribution is currently free to use for vendors and brand-registered sellers in North American and European Amazon marketplaces. Set up your account and discover how you can optimize your external marketing campaigns and drive more conversions.

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