What is Amazon Attribution & Should You Use It?

Article by: Orca Pacific Advertising Team

September 06, 2019

• Advertising

Are you advertising and marketing your Amazon product listings outside of Amazon? If so, it can be difficult to measure the impact of those marketing campaigns on your Amazon sales. Many advertising platforms give you the ability to place a tracking pixel on your website to properly attribute traffic and sales to particular ads and campaigns. However, those tracking tools can’t be implemented on your Amazon store and product listing pages. To address this issue Amazon has introduced Amazon Attribution, which is now available to 1P vendors and 3P sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry in the US with limited availability in the UK.

Before the launch of this reporting tool, if you were investing in off-platform display, video, search or social media campaigns to drive traffic and sales back to Amazon, you did not have visibility into key metrics (detail page views, sales, etc.) to know how your campaigns were truly performing. Amazon Attribution changes that by allowing advertisers to better track their off-platform campaigns driving to Amazon and measure ROI.

How Amazon Attribution Works

The Amazon Attribution Console brings together shopping and sales impact analysis across search, social media, display, and email media. The reporting gives advertisers a full picture of how their digital media channels are impacting consumer discovery, research and purchasing of their products on Amazon. Attributions on Amazon are collected by either placing a tracking pixel on advertisements or most recently announced, a click-based solution that allows for in-app measurement through social media.

Metrics

Amazon Attribution Console tracks the following metrics by campaign and ASIN:

• Amazon Detail Page views
• Add to Cart
• Purchases
• Sales

These metrics give advertisers insights into each stage of the customer journey in order to determine the activities that drive performance, and understand how to optimize campaigns to improve ROI and increase sales on Amazon.

Importance of Tracking Attribution

An attribution involves determining which marketing channel and/or campaign to credit for a detail page view and sale. You can use attribution metrics to optimize your ad spend, targeting and placement to improve overall ROI. In their announcement, Amazon provided a case study of a nutrition company that increased their year-over-year sales growth by 322% as a result of optimizing their adverting using Amazon Attribution. The insights they gained from analyzing attribution metrics included knowing which types of publications performed better than others, what audiences were more likely to convert, and what media placements had the greatest return. Using these insights, they were able to make strategic adjustments to their marketing campaigns to increase sales and improve ROI. You can do the same by tracking key attribution data through Amazon.

Why Send Ad Traffic Straight to Amazon?

You might be asking yourself why you would send off-platform traffic to Amazon in the first place. Why not send traffic directly to your own e-commence site? That’s a great question and one you should test in your advertising analytics. One of the advantages we have found with our clients is that sometimes visitors have a higher conversion rate on Amazon than on the client’s own website. The reason for this can come down to a customer’s trust and loyalty towards Amazon. The 2017 National Most Trustworthy Brands Survey from market research firm The Values Institute found that customers rated Amazon the highest retailer in meeting or exceeding their expectations and felt the most ‘joy’ from shopping at Amazon. This is due to Amazon’s customer service, reliability, and quick delivery times. You can leverage that loyalty by sending traffic directly to your Amazon product detail page and use Amazon Attribution to track if visitors convert at a higher rate.

Remarketing

While off-platform advertising and Amazon Attribution can play an important role in a full-funnel ad campaign, successful ad strategies targeting your product on Amazon lie within leveraging Amazon’s exclusive shopper data through the Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP). Did you know that Amazon is the first place almost half of US online shoppers go to make a purchase. Therefore, you can use AAP to display ads to visitors who have previously shown interest in your product when they are on Amazon and likely to buy.

How to Signup

Amazon Attribution is currently available to 1P vendors and brand registered 3P sellers in the US with limited availability in the UK. The program is still in beta and you need to request access by submitting a form on their website. Enrollment to the program is on a first-come, first-served basis.

Contact us for more info on Amazon Attribution or anything related to Amazon Advertising.