Up until recently, it was not possible to track external traffic to your Amazon listing. External channels of advertising may be better than Amazon Ads for your company. But it was not possible to track traffic from other channels to your Amazon listing. Most companies use multi-channel advertising. But it can’t be used effectively if they don’t have the tools to track customer interaction and conversion rates from all the channels. If you can’t attribute your sales to a particular channel, you won’t be able to optimize your marketing strategy. This is where Amazon Attribution comes in.
What is Amazon Attribution?
Amazon Attribution is an analytical tool that helps give marketers insight into how their non-Amazon marketing channels across search, social, video, display, and email impact Amazon shopping and sales performance. With the introduction of Amazon Attribution, it is now possible for brands to understand how consumers discover, research, and buy their products on Amazon.
Who can use Amazon Attribution?
Currently, Amazon Attribution is in its BETA version and is only available for sellers registered with Amazon Brand’s Registry in North America and Europe. Brand-registered sellers can check their eligibility and register here and third-party professional vendors can sign-up here.
Why use Amazon Attribution?
Measure
With Amazon Attribution, you are able to measure the impact of each of your multi-channel marketing.
Prior to the introduction of Amazon Attribution here’s how the scenario would play out. Suppose you sold 100 products on Amazon and you deployed on and off Amazon marketing strategies. You’d effectively be able to point out that you sold 40 of those products through Amazon Ads. Whereas, the rest 60 would be a mix of various off-Amazon marketing ads.
Now, with the help of Amazon Attribution, you can track exactly which channel reached the customer and how they arrived at the purchasing stage.
Optimize
When you can measure each of your marketing channels, you can then decide which ones work for you and which ones do not. You can optimize the channels that get you the most conversion rates and cancel the ones that don’t perform relatively well. This helps in allocating your resources effectively and cutting down on your marketing budget.
Plan
Amazon Attribution allows marketers to effectively plan ahead and avoid “off the top of their mind” decisions regarding planning a marketing strategy. You can now develop future marketing campaigns based on the following key conversion metrics that Amazon Attribution provides:
Click-through rates
Ad impressions
Detailed Pageviews
Add to carts
And most importantly total sales from each ad channel
Why you should drive external traffic to your Amazon listings
Amazon is the world’s biggest shopping site and it is getting difficult for sellers to get visibility for their products. You can increase your visibility through the advertising options that Amazon provides which are: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display. You can use Rocketium to effortlessly create brand-compliant Amazon ads. This can reduce your turnaround time and cost to create ads for Amazon.
With the involvement of a huge number of sellers, the prices of these Amazon Ads are quite high and can be expensive for some brands. An alternative for such brands could be to advertise through Google Ads or Facebook Ads or any other external channel that suits the brand and drive that external traffic to the Amazon listing.
Moreover, Amazon seems to favor listings that drive external traffic to Amazon. So as long as your external traffic leads to sales conversions on Amazon, you can expect to see your organic keyword ranking improve as well.
As of March 2020, 63% of consumers worldwide start searching for products on Amazon. But this doesn’t mean you should completely rely on customers to find your products all on their own. You should actively search for new customers by placing ads outside Amazon. Couple this with the ability to track your external traffic to Amazon with Amazon Attribution. Voila, you can now know how the rest of your customers research the products you are selling.
How to create an Amazon Attribution tag
After setting up your Amazon Attribution account, you need to create an Attribution tag. An Amazon Attribution tag is a tracking URL for your product listing. Essentially, the tag tracks a customer’s entire product search journey, starting from when they clicked on your external ad and ending when they reach your Amazon listing. All you need to do is add the tracking URL to your external marketing campaign.
Once you have set up your Amazon Attribution account, Amazon gives you the following steps to set up the Attribution tag:
Choose the Advertiser name you want to create the tag for.
Click on the New Order button.
In the “creation method”, there are two options. Select Upload a file to create a tag for Google or Facebook/Instagram ad.
Click on Manually create order and tags for creating a tag for other campaigns. (Amazon has a video tutorial for this)
Add a product or products from your product listing that you would like to track
In the Order settings, give a relevant name to your Attribution tag and an external ID to make it easier for you to track multiple tags.
Click on continue to line items, and choose the publisher you’ll be advertising on
Under the click-through URL, give your product listing page URL. Then click the create button.
And there you go, you’ve created your Amazon Attribution tag. Then all that’s left for you to do is simply paste the URL with the Attribution tag in the final URL or click-through URL section of the advertising platform of your choice.
How to effectively implement Amazon Attribution
To really be able to optimize external channels and leverage the data that you are receiving from Amazon Attribution, you need to have a proper structure for how you set it up.
One of the ways you can do this is to set up an “order” for each platform. For example an “order” for Google and a separate order for Facebook and another “order” for any other channel that you use.
In each of the orders, you can then set up line items for each of the targeting types for that channel. For example, for Google, you set up an order for Google then you add a line item for “branded” and another line item for “non-branded”. You can then use the “branded” tag for branded campaigns and the “non-branded” tag for non-branded campaigns on Google.
Strategies to optimize external advertising efforts
Inevitably you would need to create loads of banners for each of your products if you are going to advertise on any platform of online advertising. Using a creative automation tool can help you create custom and unique banners at scale. This can help optimize your marketing budget while creating unique images related to your products.
Optimize Ad placements
When advertising on Facebook, your ad placement has a huge impact on advertising costs. You can log in to Facebook ads manager and use the Breakdown menu to uncover your top-performing ad placements and break down your campaigns according to placements.
Optimize ad schedule
Google, Facebook, and almost all of the online advertising platforms provide analytics on when your audience interacts with your ad. You can take the performance data from previous campaigns to discover the best time for advertising. You can even set campaigns on a custom schedule to reach your prospects at the time of highest potential.
One of the key parts of ad optimization is figuring out what works.
Google and Facebook provide A/B tests to test various things such as:
Ad design
Ad copy ( especially the headline)
Call-to-action buttons
Unique value proposition
Final Thoughts
Amazon Attribution provides powerful insights into how the customer reaches your Amazon listing. With the data provided throughout the customer’s product search journey, you can optimize your marketing strategy like never before which can drive more conversions.
Rethin Vipinraj 
