Amazon Attribution: How to Track ALL of Your Conversions
January 26, 2021
When it comes to selling with FBA and tracking your sales from off-Amazon channels, you may be lost about which tools work the best to achieve this goal.
If you’ve ever attempted to drive external traffic to your Amazon FBA listings, you may already be familiar with how frustrating it can be to get a straightforward answer on how effective your digital marketing campaigns are. For many Amazon sellers, you are often left guessing whether someone actually made a purchase on your products listing page because they clicked on a Google ad or followed a page link on Instagram. Until now, Amazon never had any way of measuring your off-Amazon marketing efforts. Today, with the advent of a new tool still in beta, you can now track these important metrics to improve your conversion rates and any off-Amazon marketing you may be spending money and effort on. Before we dive deeper into how you can track your marketing efforts outside Amazon’s platform, we should start with the basics.
What Is Amazon Attribution?
Amazon Attribution allows brands and sellers alike the ability to track and measure individual search, social media, display ads, video, and email-based campaigns, all in one easy-to-use place directly within their seller central account. This allows sellers the chance to analyze how customers are finding, researching, and actually buying their products on Amazon within a few simple clicks in their dashboard. This measurement tool allows brands to track their marketing and advertising metrics across multiple platforms, all in one place. FBA sellers can now measure the impact of their off-Amazon-to-Amazon marketing insights utilizing this data to maximize their marketing return on investment (ROI) and sales efficiently.
Requirements for Amazon Attribution
This new Amazon attribution tool is currently available for FBA sellers enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry program, vendors, and agencies with clients currently selling products on Amazon’s platform. Eligible vendors and sellers alike can access their Amazon Attribution measurements through either the self-service console or other tool providers utilizing the Amazon advertising API integration. As of today, account holders in the United States, Canada, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom are the only eligible countries allowed to utilize this tool within their accounts.
Features of Amazon Attribution
For most Amazon FBA sellers who spend any amount of money on advertising outside Amazon’s platform, a primary concern they often have is ensuring these campaigns are profitable. As an ecommerce seller, any type of tracking data you can utilize is key to deciding what your budget will be to remain in the green vs. overspending on marketing that doesn’t produce a consistent return. Even if you are tracking your campaigns using tools such as Google Analytics, you may not be getting the complete picture of how profitable your efforts truly are.
It’s important to have performance metrics for the campaigns you run outside Amazon instead of spending money on Facebook or Google ad campaigns without proper planning. As an FBA seller, you want to make sure the channels you are spending money on are actually working. Before Amazon’s Attribution tool came along, it was very difficult to track the effectiveness of ad spend for any non-Amazon marketing campaigns.
With this new tool, Amazon Attribution allows you to:
Measure
The fact you can now measure which advertising channels are driving the most traffic and sales to your FBA listings is a huge win for sellers. Having detailed metrics on how much traffic is coming to your listings and from where is what makes this new tool so valuable to sellers, as you can now focus your efforts on channels driving the most traffic to your products. Instead of wasting money on one traffic channel over another, Amazon Attribution gives you a clear breakdown of where a customer who purchased your product came from to put more of your advertising spend to better use.
Optimize
Amazon Attribution makes a big difference in optimizing your marketing and sales funnels, as you can now track your customers throughout the entire buying journey, not just where they originated. These metrics give you valuable insight into your buyer’s journey, should most of the traffic drop off somewhere in your funnel. You are given a glimpse into which strategies are working and which are not based on your campaign’s performance so you, as the seller, can focus on those that are working and reassess the ones that aren’t.
Plan
This tool is not only great for sellers looking to track important metrics like the source of customers, but Amazon Attribution also gives you insight into how to plan your marketing strategy. You may end up discovering that most customers who buy one product within your listings come from a brand-new channel you were spending minimal effort on optimizing. With this new information, you may find it beneficial to brand your product in a new strategy on this platform and build awareness campaigns you previously might have never thought to explore. With this new information, you may discover untapped potential in planning a more long-term marketing strategy to optimize your marketing funnel and thus gain new customers for your sales funnel, which will produce more conversions.
Metrics You Can Track with Amazon Attribution
Access to key metrics allows you to gain better insight into what your traffic is doing, what converts the best, and how to better plan your overall marketing strategy.
Attribution provides you with insight into the following metrics:
- Number of purchases attributed to each ad channel
- Click-through rate
- Impressions
- Detail page views
- Add to carts
- Total sales
What makes this new Amazon Attribution tool even sweeter is that you can download all these reports to share with the rest of your team. With this data now at your disposal, you can optimize your ad campaigns across multiple external sources such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even your email marketing campaigns.
How to Use Amazon Attribution
The Amazon Attribution feature is still in beta and only available to brand-registered and professional third-party sellers or vendors in specific countries, as mentioned earlier. If you are one of these sellers or vendors that qualify for this tool within your Seller Central account, the first step is to fill out a sign-up form or register. After you get your Attribution account set up, you can start adding individual products to the campaigns you’d like to start tracking. Once you have set up your account, you will need to create your individual Amazon Attribution tag for the items you wish to track.
What is an Attribution tag?
Your Amazon Attribution tag is the tracking URL that works like a Facebook or Google tracking pixel. Basically, the tag “attaches” to your customer’s entire search journey, starting from when they initially clicked on your ad or link and ending when they reach your listing page where they make a purchase (or drop off, which is also tracked).
The only thing you have left to do is paste the tracking URL into your external marketing campaigns to begin the tracking process. The tag will start generating the data you need to make informed decisions on your advertisements based on this customer behavior. You can then generate these URLs and put the links in your advertisements, blog articles, emails, or any other content you want to utilize to drive traffic to your product listing pages.
How do I create an Attribution Tag?
If you’ve already acquired Brand Registry 1.0 or 2.0 as an FBA seller, you can log in to your Seller Central account to register. Vendors also have the option to fill out the signup form.
After you’ve been approved and set up your account, you can create an attribution tag quite easily following these steps:
- Select the advertiser name you would like to create the tag for.
- Click on the “New Order” button.
- If creating a Google Ad link, select “Upload a file,” and follow the instructions.
- For all other links outside Google, choose “Set up an order.”
- Pick a product from your product listings, and “Add” it.
- In the Order Settings section, select a name (or attribution tag) and ID, and click on “Continue to line items.”
- From the Publisher drop-down menu, choose where you want to post the link from a list of options.
- Under Click-through URL, provide your product listing page URL, and select “Create.”
That’s it! You’ve now created your first Amazon Attribution tag.
Why Should Your Store Be Using Amazon Attribution?
While there are still plenty of ecommerce platforms available for sellers to choose from, Amazon has become very competitive due to being such a large platform that people all over the world trust. With more customer traffic comes more sales, so finding out what is converting this traffic the most or where your off-Amazon advertising spend is best spent can only help your business grow. Instead of relying on keywords and organic rankings, sellers are realizing the value of placing paid advertisements on their products outside of Amazon. If your listings are optimized, why not utilize other platforms to gain new potential in growing your sales outside of this one platform alone?
One benefit to driving off-Amazon traffic to your listings is that you can funnel these customers much easier than relying on sponsored Amazon ads alone. This strategy is also a great way to shorten the buying journey, as you are gaining traffic that wasn’t exposed to advertisements for your competitors. What are a few other benefits to utilizing this feature within your FBA business model?
Track Everything
You can track exactly where visitors are coming from. Facebook ads, Google ads, email: This can all be tracked and is highly valuable as an FBA seller when performing any type of paid advertising outside of Amazon’s platform. This also wasn’t available before Attribution.
Find Out What Works Best
Amazon Attribution gives you all the necessary data to make an educated decision on which marketing channels are working best for your store and which ones you should focus less energy on.
Learn More about Your Customers
More data means you learn more about your customers. Where they like to hang out, what copy they respond the best to, and whether your written or video advertisements are converting better…the list goes on.
Remarket Using Amazon DSP
Amazon DSP is a demand-side platform that enables advertisers to programmatically buy display, video, and audio ads both on and off Amazon. Using the data collected from Amazon Attribution, you can now focus your marketing efforts on the channels that mean the most to your business and drive more sales utilizing effective marketing tools, all in one place.
Why Should You Drive Traffic from External Sources?
Because there is such a big share of the market to gain on platforms such as Google and Facebook, advertising on these platforms opens up your products to consumers that might never have found it previously. When you advertise on these external platforms outside of Amazon alone, you are given leverage, which you can then use Amazon’s brand name to close the deal or complete the conversion in a trustworthy fashion. If you have done the work correctly and built up a trust factor with your traffic, this audience should have no issues with completing a transaction and proceeding to the checkout stand on Amazon’s platform.
People know and trust Amazon and Prime Delivery, and this is a huge advantage over some independent e-commerce brands found on the market today. Another way to boost product launches is by diversifying your traffic so you’re not reliant on one source. Amazon FBA sellers also enjoy that they don’t have to compete with other products in the Amazon listings, sending traffic straight to their storefront. Obviously, you’re doing all of this to increase your sales and, meanwhile, boost your listing in the Amazon rankings. This is not only great from a business owner’s standpoint, but you may also gain more value by increasing your chances of getting a bestseller badge or maybe an Amazon Choice Badge. If you have seen a recent increase in your page traffic or sales revenue and are interested in what you could demand from a profitable exit, head to our valuation tool to see just what you could gain if you exited your business today. Not only could you walk away with a large capital gain from your FBA business, but you also could use this capital to acquire an even larger FBA business and really start to see the needle move in your favor when implementing this new tool into your arsenal.
