Have you ever tried driving traffic to your Amazon product from external sources? If so, you may know the struggle that can be endured when attempting to work out where the traffic from each channel goes, like a magic roundabout with customers coming and going from every direction.
In this case, you may have experienced a seemingly random number of product orders with little knowledge of which marketing strategies have contributed the most. To put this into context, let’s pretend that you received 500 orders in a month on Amazon, 200 of which were from organic traffic and 100 were from PPC traffic. This leaves 200 unaccounted for orders from external sources.
Whilst you may be able to get a good, ballpark idea of which media have generated the most attention, from the ads’ impressions and clicks etc, there has – until now – been no way of being sure.
Hence you could have a misconceived idea of which channels are actually boosting your sales and which are wasting your time and money. In this sense, the sales funnel becomes permeated, with customers slipping through holes like a sieve and randomly appearing in your orders list.
Amazon Attribution is a relatively new Amazon tool which aims to address this dilemma for sellers, making the roundabout a little less roundabout.
What is Amazon Attribution?
Amazon attribution is a free tool which allows you to track and monitor the success of your non-Amazon marketing efforts.
Whilst seller central allows you to analyse the success of your PPC campaigns, Amazon Attribution has a parallel role in providing detailed insights for external marketing campaigns. campaigns
The tool offers insight into how non-Amazon channels such as display, search, social media, video media, and email marketing impact sales on Amazon.
How it works
Amazon Attribution uses parameterized URLs called ‘Attribution Tags’. Essentially, these tags are similar to pixels, tracking where the customer is going after they have clicked on your link.
Using this tracking URL, you can place this Amazon attribution link in your ads, emails, blog articles, or any other digital medium you use to drive customer traffic to your listing.
What Can You Track?
Once you have set up your non-Amazon Attribution Tags, the tool lets you track a plethora of actions that people take after clicking on the tag. These include:
- click-throughs
- impressions
- detailed page views
- purchase rate
- add to cart
- total sales
Amazon Attribution Features
Alongside being a URL tracking tool, the solution also has numerous other features that can be utilised by sellers. Some of these are detailed below:
1. Analytics based on the full-funnel
Before the tool existed, sellers were in the dark about whether external traffic converted or not. Now they have access not just to conversion rates from each media channel but also to their full-funnel journey.
This includes metric insights like clicks, detailed page views and how many times customers add your product to their basket.
2. On-Demand Amazon Conversion Metrics
Similarly to Campaign Manager on Seller Central, you can monitor each external traffic campaign on Amazon Attribution too. Alongside enabling you to be thorough in your evaluation of your marketing efforts based on particular ad campaigns, these are also updated in real-time.
As a result, marketers can optimise their ad campaigns faster, improving efficiency.
3. Customer Insights
Amazon’s team has gone above and beyond with this beta solution. Not only does it allow you to centralise your marketing campaigns, but it also answers questions about your customers that you may not have even asked yet.
For example, you can determine whether customers add products on Amazon to their basket straight after landing on their display page; if along the journey they found another product they preferred; whether they bought anything at all.
4. Separate Tracking for Different Advertising Channels
Within the Amazon Attribution suite, you are presented with the tab ‘Channels/publishers’.
This section provides you with a run down of the performance in each channel, divided by their Attribution Tags.
The beauty of this feature is that you can create different tags for every marketing channel: Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, blog posts, social media posts.
There is no limit on tags, if you can market it, you can tag it!
Benefits of Using Amazon Attribution
1. Encourages Out of the Box Marketing Strategies to Drive More Sales
The solution encourages sellers to think bigger with their marketing, not just limiting it to Amazon Advertising platforms.
With this in mind, it makes sense that you are able to monitor all of these channels in one place. Amazon Attribution therefore allows you to be more outwardly thinking about where you can pick up traffic.
2. Customer Tracking Abilities
As previously mentioned, the tool also allows you to follow a customer along the decision making process that takes them from first becoming aware of your product to having it arrive at their doorstep.
3. Funnel Analytics
On top of the wealth of data you are now exposed to about your customers’ journey, you are also able to analyse your funnel with more clarity, the metaphorical holes in the sieve are plugged.
From detailed page views to purchase rate, you are able to track the strength of each section of the funnel.
Never lose sight of what your aiming for and regularly review where and why people are dropping out of the funnel. Is it down to your messaging, pricing, or something else entirely?
4. Identifying Valuable Marketing Channels
Without Amazon Attribution, it can be very difficult and time-consuming to calculate the ROI of non-Amazon marketing efforts and measure the impact of them.
Now, you are able to easily compare and identify your best performing channels in order to focus your efforts where they are most deserving.
You may also choose to use omni-channel marketing techniques such as cross advertising on other channels to drive more sales to your Amazon store pages.
By using this technique you will be able to not only identify what channel is proving most effective but also whether your advertising is driving those sales or your standard channel comms strategy.
5. Optimisation
As you are able to identify which channels are working and which aren’t, you can either stop spending on those ads that are just wasting it and that have very few conversions and increase spend on channels that are generating higher conversion rates. This, theoretically, should ensure an increase in your ROI on ad spend.
The other thing you can do is review the messaging on those ads that aren’t performing quite so well as you can see that the conversions aren’t happening.
Maybe you aren’t being clear enough in your advert or the item you are dropping your customer into isn’t the right one. Should you instead be dropping them into your brand level page rather than a specific product details page?
Think about the customer journey and what is likely to help the customer most and what is just going to confuse them and make them hit that home button on the Amazon site. That’s the last thing you want them to do.
Costs of Amazon Attribution
Fortunately, Amazon Attribution is currently available for free. This is great news for sellers, as it is such a powerful tool that can improve all-round conversions.
For many this approach is both easier and quicker to set up than pixel tracking which has a lot of restrictions for building up remarketing audiences.
As such Amazon Attribution campaigns may be far better suited to situations where you may be considering pixel tracking to build up an audience.
The Importance of External Traffic to Listings
Skipping the Competition
With over 350 million products on Amazon, competition is higher than ever.
Hence, external marketing channels are pivotal in standing out and avoiding the hustle and bustle of the Amazon marketplace by taking a potential customer straight to your product detail page.
And don’t forget to also signpost these customers to your other products that may also be relevant during the sales cycle. Recommend other products that will compliment their recent or planned purchase.
Increase Sales
Using external sources, you can theoretically gain customers from anywhere.
Whether it be Tiktok, a blog you have written, your mum’s friend’s dog’s Instagram post or Facebook Ads, you are able to amalgamate a substantial number of people viewing your product.
As long as you have good, persuasive content and ultimately a good product, you should see an increase in sales due to this increase in traffic. The internet is your oyster – or something like that. And we all want more sales right?!
Improve Rankings
Amazon seems to favour sellers who capitalise on external traffic. We can only assume this is because you are moving a user from the infinite possibilities of the internet and bringing this traffic to Amazon.
Therefore, as long as the traffic you bring onto your product detail page leads to conversions, your organic keyword ranking should improve also.
Make sure that you are sending relevant traffic to the right pages to drive your sales. The more relevant the page the better chance of converting that page viewer.
Boost Best Seller Rank
The influx in sales mentioned above can be more beneficial than just gaining you a larger number of orders.
Sales velocity is an essential contributor to Amazon’s A9 algorithm which determines where your product ranks on search terms. Hence, the more sales you make, the higher you should rank.
The higher you rank, the more sales you should make. You can see a pretty nice cycle forming here. Get that Amazon flywheel working for you and you are onto a winner!
Earn a Brand Referral Bonus
As of July 15th 2021, brands are able to earn a 10% referral bonus on all sales made as a result of external marketing.
Using the Amazon Attribution tool, Amazon is able to determine which of your sales are eligible for this referral bonus, which is credited to your account two months after the sale is complete.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to get money back from Amazon! They don’t do that very often!
The bonus received is dependent on your product’s category. If you would like to see your estimated referral bonus rate, visit the Brand Referral Bonus program help page.
How to Set Up Amazon Attribution
If you are a vendor, you will have to fill in a signup form for Amazon Attribution Beta. If you are a brand-registered seller you can register here.
Once you have logged into the Amazon attribution dashboard, you can set up an Amazon attribution tag relatively easily.
Here are the instructions:
- Select the advertiser name you choose to create the attribution tag for
- Click on the ‘New Order’ Button
- If you’re planning to create a link for Google Ads, then select ‘Upload a file’ and follow the given instructions.
- If you want to create a link anywhere else other than a Google Ad, you can choose ‘Set up an order.’
- Pick an item of your choice from your product listings, and ‘Add’ it.
- In the ‘Order Settings’ section, give a relevant name (or attribution tag) and ID, and click on ‘Continue to line items.’
- From the Publisher drop-down menu, you can choose where you want to post the link from a list of available options.
- Under the Click-through URL, give your product listing page URL. Then hit the ‘Create’ button.
And that’s it!
Work with the experts
Consider inviting our Amazon experts to set up and run these types of campaigns on your Amazon advertising account.
You would save yourself a considerable amount of time learning all these techniques whilst implementing them (and potentially making mistakes in the process) and gain the benefits of a team who love getting into the details with this kind of advertising.
We would love to hear from you if this is something that you would be interested in. Just book a call!
Still not sure about whether we have the expertise to run your account. Why not take a look at our case studies and see what we have achieved for our other clients on both Amazon PPC and DSP managed accounts.
You can also read about what our customers think of the work that we have done for them too over on Trustpilot. Our results speak for themselves.
