What is Amazon Attribution and How to Use It

If you’ve ever tried driving traffic from external sources to your Amazon listings to increase sales, you’ll know how frustrating it can be.

Like a digital Bermuda Triangle, once your potential customers click the link in your ad, blog post or landing page, and crossed into the Amazon ecosystem, you were pretty much left to guess whether they actually followed through and purchased.

That is until Amazon rolled out Amazon Attribution. Amazon Attribution allows you to track external traffic to Amazon to see if it converts into sales or not once that traffic hits Amazon. Better yet, Amazon also introduced a Brand Referral bonus that gives sellers a 10% referral fee on any sales sent to Amazon (more on that below as well). 

In this article, I’ll talk through what Amazon Attribution is, why you need it, and how it works.

How Does Amazon Attribution Help Track External Traffic Sent to Amazon?

The biggest problem with tracking your Off-Amazon-To-Amazon marketing campaigns (before the Amazon Attribution program was around that is) is that buyers that didn’t arrive at your listing from Amazon PPC were lumped into the same pot.

So if you made 200 sales, and you knew 75 were from Amazon PPC, you were left with 125 buyers who could have come from paid ads, organic, or could have found their way to your listing from, well, anyway, there was no way you could tell.

And if you couldn’t attribute a sale to a specific piece of off-Amazon marketing there was no way to tell if it was working, or which part of your sales funnel needs to be optimized.

Why You Need Amazon Attribution

The clue’s in the name: Amazon Attribution allows you to finally attribute sales to your off-Amazon marketing.

So now, when someone buys, you know exactly what path they took to get to your listing.

This is huge because this data allows you to track Amazon customers throughout your entire sales funnel, kill ads that aren’t working, optimize the ones that are, and increase your overall ROI on ad spend.

What is the Brand Referral Bonus?

Amazon around 2022 introduced the Brand Referral Bonus. The Brand Referral Bonus gives you a 10% referral fee for any sales sent to Amazon from Amazon attribution links. So if you send Amazon $1000 in sales you get back $100 from Amazon. 

This 10% is actually pretty considerable when you consider that Amazon gives only a fraction of this for using its Amazon Associates program (i.e. their affiliate program). The catch is that you can only use Attribution links for your own products. However, the naysayers would also argue that the 10% referral bonus is still 5% less than the average 15% referral fee you need to pay when selling something on Amazon. 

Brand referral bonuses get credited automatically to your Amazon attribution links (i.e. there's no additional steps you need to take) and will be deposited directly into your Seller Central account. 

Who Can Use Amazon Attribution and How Much Is It?

Right now, Amazon Attribution is open to any third party or first party seller on Amazon that is brand registered. Amazon Attribution is part of the advertising console on Amazon.

You can access Attribution by going to Seller Central -> Advertising -> Amazon Attribution.  

How Amazon Attribution Works

Paid platforms like Facebook and Google Shopping allow you to track potential customers by using a pixel.

Dropping this code on your website means they can follow them from your ad to your website and report back to you every action they take.

But that only works if you own the website. And Amazon owns Amazon, and they ain’t letting you anywhere near their website with your dirty spying pixel.

Amazon Attribution works slightly differently.

Rather than giving you a pixel they give you what Amazon call an “Attribution Tag.”

What’s an Attribution Tag?

In the words of Amazon, “Attribution tags are parameterized URLs that measure click-throughs and attribute conversions and sales of their products on Amazon.”

What that means is, an Attribution Tag is essentially a link to your product listing that Amazon can track.

You can generate that tag (or URL) in your Amazon Attribution account.

Then you simply place that link in your ad, blog post, email, or whatever, just like you would a regular link to get people to your listing.

Except now, when anyone clicks on it, Amazon can track them and let you know a number of actions that they take.

How to Create an Amazon Attribution Tag

 

Creating Attribution tags is pretty simple, albeit a little convoluted at first.

Step 1 – Create New Amazon Attribution Campaign

First go to https://advertising.amazon.com/attribution/ (Seller Central login required)

Hit the “Create Campaign” button.

Step 2 – Create Your Amazon Attribution Campaign Name and Choose Products

Generally, I have one campaign per product group. You could organize however you want though, i.e. one Campaign per sales channel such as having a campaign for all of your Facebook campaigns and products.

After you click Create campaign, on the next screen, click “Create Manually” (unless you actually want to bulk upload your campaigns, which you probably don't want to). 

Then scroll down and enter the name of your campaign. Don't worry about External Id. Next you'll have to pick the products you want to create the links for. Again, I typically do one product per campaign.

Step 3 – Choose Your Channel & Amazon Link

The next step is where things start to get a little confusing.

For the Ad group name you can enter whatever name makes sense for you.

For Publisher pick the best approximation of where you're sending traffic from, i.e. Google, Facebook, etc. It doesn't really matter what you choose here though. It's just a traffic parameter and won't really affect anything except granularity in reporting. 

Again, under Channel choose the best approximation. And again, it doesn't really matter how accurate your choice is. 

The box below the Publisher drop-down says “Click-through URL.” This is the URL of the product you want to send people to. Alternatively, if you don't want to send traffic directly to an Amazon Product Display Page you could send them to an Amazon Store page and, in this case, you'd send them to that link. 

Assuming you're sending them to a product page, go to Amazon, search for your product, click on the listing, copy the URL from your browser, paste it into the Click-through URL box and hit the yellow “Create” button.

And, voila, you have now created your first Amazon Attribution tag.

Simply copy and paste that longgggg link into your Facebook ad (or whatever publisher you choose from the drop-down menu) and you’re now ready to track anyone that clicks that link.

What Metrics Does Amazon Attribution Let You Track?

Once your paid ads, blog posts, social posts, emails, etc, containing your “Attribution tags” are up and running, you’ll be able to track the following actions that people take as tracked by those tags, by campaign and by ASIN:

• Amazon Detail Page views (i.e. how many people clicked through to your listing)
• Add to Cart
• Purchases

This means you’ll know exactly which of your off-Amazon marketing efforts are driving the most people to your listing, which of them are generating the most sales, and which are duds that are losing you money.

Related Listening: E189: Advanced Amazon A9 SEO Strategies

Conclusion

If you're sending external traffic to Amazon then you should definitely be using Amazon attribution for your links not only for the tracking but the 10% referral bonus.

This data will help you measure the impact of search, social, display, email, and video media channels on your Amazon sales.

You can then take those insights to take the guesswork out of what is and isn’t working in your off-Amazon digital marketing and optimize where necessary to increase your ROI.