Let’s face it, trying to drive traffic to your Amazon page from external sources can be frustrating. Basically once a potential client clicks the link to your page through your ad, blog post, or landing page, you are pretty much in the dark about what they do once they land on Amazon. This is because before Amazon attribution, customers who aren’t directed to your page through Amazon PPC are all lumped into the same category.
For instance, if you made 100 sales last month and 30 of those clients were directed to your page through Amazon PPC, that leaves 70% of your business that could have come from any one of a multitude of different external marketing channels. Including search, social, video, and email. Not knowing where your business is coming from makes it hard to maintain a marketing budget and make decisions on which marketing streams to eliminate and which ones to optimize.
That has always been the case with external marketing channels. At least it was the case until Amazon introduced Amazon Attribution.
In this article, we will tell you everything you need to know about Amazon Attribution, how it can benefit your business, how to use it, and more.
What is Amazon Attribution?
Amazon Attribution is a tool that allows you to track the traffic driven to your amazon page through external channels, other than Amazon PPC.
Not only does this provide you with valuable insight into your business, but it also allows you to make empowered decisions around what marketing channels you choose to invest in. Where before you only knew if the traffic came from Amazon PPC or not, now you can see how much traffic your Amazon Facebook ads, emails, blog posts, Amazon Google ads, etc drive to your page. With that information at hand, you can see which channels are worth proceeding with, which ones are worth optimizing, and which ones to discontinue.
Ultimately, Amazon Attribution is an analytical tool that provides insight into how effectively non-Amazon marketing channels drive external traffic to Amazon.
This is a tool that sellers have been waiting years for but why? What can Amazon Attribution do for you?
Why do you need Amazon Attribution?
Amazon Attribution is an important tool because it gives you the opportunity to finally attribute sales to your external marketing channels. Now, when you make a sale through your Amazon page, you can see exactly what route that customer took to get to your page.
This is important information because it lets you track your customers throughout your entire sales funnel, stop the ads that aren’t working, invest further into the channels that are working, and boost your return on investment from these ads.
Amazon attribution is able to provide these metrics by using tracking URLs. These URLs allow Amazon to track your customer’s actions from the time they click your ad which you can then view on an easy-to-use dashboard.
That’s not all Amazon Attribution does. In addition to URL tracking, Attribution allows you to see how customers interact with your product. You are able to see metrics like clicks, page views, and how many times a product has been added to cart.
Additionally, Amazon Attribution lets you see the behaviors of your customers once they reach your page. Do they add products to their shopping carts, browse through additional items, or leave without shopping altogether? These are important questions you can now get answers to with Amazon Attribution.
Amazon Attribution also provides sellers with the opportunity to use different tags for each marketing channel. In this next section, we will take a look at attribution tags and how to use them.
What Are Amazon Attribution Tags?
Attribution tags can be a helpful tool in identifying what advertising channels your customers are responding to, among other things.
Amazon defines attribution tags as “parameterized URLs that measure click-throughs and attribute conversions and sales of their product on Amazon”.
All of that technical speak just to say that Attribution Tags are links to your product page that Amazon can track.
In order to take advantage of these tags you simply generate the URL in your Amazon Attribution account. Then you place that URL in your blog posts, on your socials, in your ad, email or any other avenue you use to drive traffic to your page. Once a customer clicks on that URL, Amazon is then able to track all of their moves, providing you with valuable metrics to help run your business effectively.
Once you have set up your Amazon Attribution account, it is pretty simple to begin generating URLs. It’s as easy as:
- Choosing the advertiser name you want to generate the URL for
- Select “New Order”
- Select “Upload a File” if you are creating a Google Ad, then follow the instructions. For anything else, select “Set up and Order”.
- Select the product you are linking to from your list of products.
- Proceed to scroll down the page and give the order a name and ID to make it easily identifiable then select “Continue to Line Items”.
- From the drop-down menu, select where you want to place your link.
- Select “Click-through URL”
- On your Amazon page, copy the URL for the specific product you want to advertise and paste it in the Click-through URL box.
- Hit the “Create” button and a URL will be generated for you.
From there you simply copy the URL and past it into whatever channel you previously selected in the drop-down menu. Now you can track all the traffic that comes to your page!
What Does Amazon Attribution Track?
Once you have your Amazon Attribution tags in their respective places (ie: paid ads, social, email, blog posts etc.) you can begin tracking valuable information including:
- Detailed page views. This is the number of people who have visited your Amazon page through that specific link.
- Add to Cart. Know how many of those visitors added something to their cart, whether they bought it or not.
- Purchases. Know exactly what each customer purchases and where they were directed to your page from.
- Impressions. This shows you how many times your ad was viewed, even if it was not clicked on.
- Purchase Rate. Understand which of your products sells the best and how often customers are buying.
This information is so important to help you know which off-Amazon marketing ventures are worth continuing and which to discontinue. For instance, if you begin noticing that a lot of your customers are being driven through your Facebook links but not so much from your email marketing links, this might be a sign to discontinue your email marketing channel and optimize your Facebook ads.
Creating a positive ROI on your off-Amazon marketing efforts is the best way to positively affect your business through Amazon Attribution.
How to Set up Amazon Attribution?
Now that you understand all the ways that Amazon Attribution can help grow your Amazon business, you are probably wondering how much does it cost and how you can take advantage. Well, good news for small business owners as Amazon Attribution is currently being offered for free! You can get started here by filling out a signup form. Once you have been approved for Amazon Attribution you can get started creating tags and using them to track movement on your page.
Benefits of Using Amazon Attribution.
If for some reason, you still don’t see how this tool can help your business, let’s review some of the most obvious benefits.
First, Amazon Attribution helps you identify which of your off-Amazon marketing channels are the most valuable, and which are not worth investing in. In the past, it has been hard to calculate your return on investment for your external marketing channels, especially if you have more than one. Attribution gives you a clear picture of which ones are profitable, which ones may need some tweaking, and which need to be eliminated.
Another benefit to using Amazon Attribution is that it allows you to better optimize your existing campaigns. If you notice that your traffic is coming from one demographic more than others, you can use that information to optimize your other marketing channels to appeal to the easily convertible demographic.
That means that you can more intelligently leverage traffic from off of Amazon. That’s especially helpful if you’re in a highly competitive category, like supplements on Amazon. There’s only so much search volume on Amazon itself that everyone is vying for. So being able to leverage external traffic is where you can get an edge.
Finally, when you are able to direct your marketing channels in the right directions, this inevitably converts to more sales, which is kind of the point in the first place!
Conclusion
Operating your Amazon page with blinders on is a thing of the past now thanks to Amazon Attribution. It used to be that you could make use of every external advertising avenue possible but you were never sure which ones were paying off, so to speak. Now, not only can you see where your traffic is coming to your page from, but you can see what they are buying, thinking about buying, and much more
Now that you’ve seen how easy Amazon Attribution is to use, all the ways it can benefit your business, and how it can help increase profitability, all that’s left is for you to sign up and take advantage of all these benefits while it’s still free!