What is Amazon Attribution? How to understand the customer journey, optimize your advertising, and increase your sales
Running ads on Amazon is one thing, but deriving success from those ads is quite another. Ultimately, the best campaign featuring Mike Tyson as the hero won’t do you any good if it doesn’t resonate with your target audience – for example, if you sell pink nail polish for little princesses.
Admittedly, this example is a bit extreme, but the relevance of audience-targeted advertising is undeniable. This is where Amazon Attribution comes into play for you as a marketplace seller. With this program, you have had the opportunity for some time now to gain important insights into the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. Let’s take a closer look at this service.
What is Amazon Attribution?
The Amazon Attribution program is part of Amazon Advertising (also known as Amazon AMS) and provides you with insights into the effectiveness of your advertising efforts that you run outside of Amazon. This can include email campaigns, social media advertising, or even Google Ads.
This analysis tool is primarily about determining the share that your ads on non-Amazon channels contribute to the sales of a product and comparing different advertising platforms, ads, and formats.
Additionally, the success of posts, blogs, and other organic marketing actions can now also be tracked to your sales.
Amazon Attribution is based on three strategic pillars.
Pillar #1: Evaluate
If you want to successfully advertise outside of Amazon, you need to analyze the effect of these advertising activities. This falls under the first pillar.
Amazon Attribution shows what Facebook Ads, Google Ads, etc. really bring you. This allows you to see which advertising formats resonate with your customers and on which platforms they are active. It may well be that Facebook Ads bring immense success to other online retailers, but your specific target audience does not respond to them at all or only minimally because they prefer to use TikTok. Continuing to invest money in this advertising platform would be unprofitable.
Pillar #2: Optimize
Now that you know which channels and formats resonate with your target audience, it’s time to optimize – the second pillar of Amazon Attribution.
With the help of on-demand advertising analyses, campaigns can even be optimized while they are running. This allows you to significantly increase their impact and efficiency.
This step is primarily about targeting the online campaigns to the audience. The versatile analyses from the Amazon Attribution model will assist you in this.
Pillar #3: Plan
The third pillar allows you to plan your future marketing activities. Through Amazon Attribution, you learn which of your target audiences and strategies provide the maximum return on investment (ROI). Additionally, various landing pages enable you to gain diverse information about your customers and their purchasing behavior. This also provides insights into which formats resonate best with your target audience.
Through the Amazon Attribution Console, reports can also be downloaded that contain information about Amazon conversions. Conversions include, for example, views of the product detail page (also known as detail page views, or DPV), adding products to the shopping cart, and completed purchases.
Amazon Attribution does not provide information on how well posts on other platforms perform, but rather how they influence your customers’ purchasing behavior by clicking on your ads and reaching your product pages or brand stores. If you are interested in likes and interactions on social media, you should consider acquiring an appropriate social media tool. Additionally, the insights are limited to customer movements and traffic outside of Amazon.
Who can use Amazon Attribution?
In Germany, all professional sellers who have registered their brand in Amazon’s Brand Registry can currently use the tool. Agencies also have access to this service. To access the program, you can either use the self-service console or a specific tool for Amazon Attribution that is connected to the Amazon Advertising API.
However, the console is not available for all marketplaces. It can be used in Europe (except for the Netherlands and Sweden) as well as in the US and Canadian marketplaces.
What does Amazon Attribution cost?
The analysis tool is currently available for free. Interested sellers can access Amazon Attribution through the self-service console or via Amazon Ads partners. By the way, you will receive the Amazon Attribution link to your console via email after you register.
How does Amazon Attribution work?
Amazon Attribution uses tags to track the behavior of customers who clicked on your ad outside of the marketplace. You need to append this tag to the target URL of your ad. Now Amazon can attribute the behavior to a specific ad. By the way, Amazon Attribution also tracks how customers behave who do not purchase your products. This allows you to precisely understand at which point in the customer journey potential shoppers drop off and work on these weaknesses.
Essentially, the principle of Amazon Attribution is similar to that of UTM parameters used by Google Analytics for tracking.
What KPIs can you measure with Amazon Attribution?
If you want to use Amazon Attribution, you will track specific KPIs. These metrics will tell you how a particular ad, platform, audience, etc. performs. These include, for example, …
After logging into the Amazon Attribution Console, users need to create a folder where the campaigns will be stored. Then, users can add the products (or their ASINs) that should be advertised and tracked.
The tool then creates the URL tags that you need to specify along with the target URL in the Amazon-external ads so that customers can be tracked accordingly. However, you should only use the tags if the link directly leads to the corresponding product detail page.
Before you start, you should consider what exactly you want to track with Amazon Attribution. Should all Facebook Ads have the same tag and all Google Ads a different one? Then you can easily compare these two platforms. However, you may also want to analyze individual ad formats separately to see how they resonate with your target audience. In that case, you will need to use different tags for the respective ads.
What does access to Amazon Attribution bring you?
The online giant claims that this tool will push your sales and maximize ROI. In a case study by Premier Nutrition, they even report a sales growth of 96% compared to the previous quarter and 322% compared to the previous year through the use of Amazon Attribution.
Whether you will triple your sales is another question. However, the fact is that the additional data should empower you to draw precise conclusions. This way, you can find out what attracts your customers or what holds them back from making a purchase decision. With this knowledge, you can leverage your strengths and address your weaknesses. Both will lead to higher sales figures.
A nice side effect is that your campaigns optimized based on the data from Amazon Attribution will indirectly lead to a better organic ranking. The more customers visit and convert on your product pages, the better the Amazon algorithm evaluates your performance and ranks you higher accordingly.
Best Practices: Increase Sales with Amazon Attribution
Conclusion
With Amazon Attribution, the online giant has created a way for sellers to track the effects of advertising campaigns outside the marketplace. Automatically generated tags are appended to the target URL used in the advertisement, allowing the program to track the actions of potential customers.
If you advertise outside of Amazon, Amazon Attribution is a must. This way, you can ensure that your advertising reaches your target audience. You can build on top performers and eliminate weaknesses. To do this, draw insights from the behavior of your target audience. At what point in the customer journey does the conversion drop off? This reveals a lot about your optimization opportunities. In the long run, this approach will generate more revenue and increase the ROI of your online campaigns.
Frequently Asked Questions
Amazon Attribution is an analytics tool that allows marketplace sellers to track their advertising efforts on platforms outside of Amazon. This enables the measurement of KPIs such as impressions and click-through rates of an ad, or purchases attributed to an advertisement.
“ADS” typically stands for “Amazon Advertising” or “Amazon Advertising Services.” Amazon’s advertising platform allows advertisers to promote their products and brands on the Amazon website to increase visibility, target customers, and boost sales. There are various types of ads that can be run through Amazon Advertising, including Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display Ads. These ads appear on different pages within the Amazon website, but there are also Amazon services that enable advertising on external websites and platforms.
Currently, access to the Amazon Attribution Console is free.
In Germany, all professional sellers who have registered their brand in Amazon’s Brand Registry can use the tool. Agencies and third-party providers also have access and can, for example, track their clients’ Amazon advertising.
The program creates so-called tags for each product to be advertised, which are then appended to the target URL of the advertisement. This makes it possible to track impressions, clicks, product page views, purchases, and more.
Image credits in the order of the images: © Sutthiphong – stock.adobe.com / © Junsei – stock.adobe.com / © Jelena – stock.adobe.com
