Your Complete Guide to Amazon Attribution

If you’re selling on Amazon, chances are you use multiple channels to advertise your products and store. If so, you’ll understand that consolidating your customer data across all channels can be a time-consuming process. Amazon Attribution is a solution to this problem. It allows sellers to understand what’s driving engagement outside of the platform.

Couple Amazon Attribution with an Amazon advertising software like Merch Jar for a complete picture of the impact of your marketing strategies. Merch Jar adjusts your Amazon ad bids automatically based on the parameters you set. And, it automatically pauses poor performing ads when they go below your set threshold.

With that in mind, let’s have a look at the ins and outs of Amazon Attribution and how to effectively use the service to optimize your marketing campaigns.

What is Amazon Attribution?

When it comes to selling on Amazon, Amazon ad management is different to managing ads from other channels, like social media. You need a way to connect your off-Amazon ads with your Amazon seller channel. Amazon Attribution is that solution.

Amazon Attribution is a service that Amazon has made available to certain Amazon sellers. Using tags, it allows you to track touch points in an Amazon buyers (or potential buyer’s) journey across marketing channels outside of Amazon, such as Facebook and Google Search.

It works by a seller creating a tag for their Amazon product, which is a unique link that sellers can use in their various marketing methods like social media posts, marketing emails, and Google Ads. The Amazon Attribution software then gathers data so sellers can see how effective (or ineffective) each marketing method is at converting customers.

The analytics gather data like impressions, clicks, page views, and add-to-carts. With this information, sellers can learn what kind of content resonates with their buyers and drives the best results.

Why is Amazon Attribution Worth Considering?

Amazon Attribution allows sellers to refine and optimize their marketing campaigns and track their ACOS. But there’s more. Here are three reasons why Amazon Attribution is worth considering:

• Reach the right audience: Amazon Attribution is essential for reaching the right audience. For example, if one of your products gets a lot of clicks but no purchases, your ad content might be targeting the wrong audience. In this case, you’ll need to compare these with analytics from your successful marketing content to understand what works for your audience and what doesn’t.
• Partial fee rebates: When you sign up to Amazon Attribution, you can get access to Amazon’s Brand Referral Bonus program. Sellers who enrol on this program receive partial rebates of their seller fees when they make sales through the Attribution links.
• It’s free: Amazon Attribution is completely free. Aside from providing detailed insights into your customer's journey, this is one of the most compelling reasons to work with Amazon Attribution.  

How to Use Amazon Attribution

Amazon Attribution should be used as part of a wider marketing strategy. While it’s true that analytics outside the Amazon platform provide valuable information on where your customers are coming from and what kind of content entices clicks, you also need to consider your in-Amazon marketing tactics.

Merch Jar is a comprehensive solution that helps users make the most of their Amazon ad budget. It helps sellers build winning Amazon bidding strategies by facilitating keyword and bid automation. With this, sellers can target the right keywords consistently, saving them hours of time to focus on other areas of their business.

Our Bulk Actions feature also enables sellers to run ad operations for hundreds of thousands of products simultaneously. So if you’ve got a large product catalogue, you can bypass Amazon Bulksheet’s 1000 product limit.

Now let’s get into how to use Amazon Attribution effectively:

Eligibility Check

Your first step in using Amazon Attribution is to check you’re eligible. Currently, it’s available in select countries only. These are:

• U.S.
• Canada
• Mexico
• Germany
• Spain
• France
• Italy
• The Netherlands
• Portugal
• UK
• Egypt

You can access Amazon Attribution if you’re a professional seller in one of the above countries and are:

• Enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry
• A vendor
• A KDP author
• An agency whose clients sell on Amazon

Create an Attribution Tag

After you’ve signed up to Amazon Attribution and set up your account, you need to create your tags. These will enable you to track your marketing efforts outside of Amazon.

• Select the advertiser’s name you wish to create the tag for.

• Click on “New Order”.

• Now, you can generate a link for your marketing campaigns. For a link for a Google Ad, you must ‘Upload a file’ and then follow the steps you’re given to complete the process.

For links for other marketing channels, like Facebook, select ‘Set up an order’.

You’ll be greeted with a list of your products. Select the one you want to generate a link for by clicking on the ‘Add’ button next to the product.

• You must now scroll down to the ‘Order settings’ where you’ll name the order and give it an ID. Select ‘Continue to line items’.

• Select your publisher from the drop-down menu. This is the channel where you’ll place your link, for example Facebook.

• Next, add the URL that you want the links to lead to in the ‘Click-through URL’ box. You can do this by heading to Amazon, finding your product, and copying and pasting its URL into the box.
• Now click on ‘Create’.

Amazon will then generate your attribution tag, and you’re done!

Use Your Attribution Tags

Once you’ve got your attribution tags, you need to apply them to your campaigns. For social media ads, for example, you’ll go into your ad manager and copy and paste the tag in the URL fields of the appropriate ads.

If you’re using your tags for social media posts, you’ll simply copy and paste your tag in the field where it asks for an Amazon ASIN or Store URL.

Explore Reporting Options and Metrics

Amazon Attribution gives you access to a dashboard that provides visual reporting. From your dashboard, you can access all your campaign data and switch between different campaigns. You can also customize it with the metrics you choose.

Within your dashboard, you’ll  find the option to download your reports. These download as Excel files. You can set these reports to generate as you need them, either on demand or in advance.

There are four report types you can access:

1. Campaign reports: These give you daily metrics on all your campaigns. Through the summary option, you can quickly gain a bird's-eye view of your best and worst performing strategies.
2. Channel publisher reports: With these reports, sellers can identify which publishers or channels perform the best. They’ll then know which channels to invest the most time and money in.
3. Keyword and creative reports: These reports can be generated for campaigns launched with bulk creation. View the performance of creative campaigns and keyword campaigns. The summary report will show you which tactics were the most successful.
4. Product reports: The product reports give you detailed views of how well products perform. Compare promoted products with non-promoted products, and generate reports based on product attributes like color variations or size.

Optimize and Refine Your Campaigns

The whole point of gathering and analyzing data is to optimize your campaigns. To make use of this fact though, we need to understand how to use data to your advantage.

Take a ‘test and learn’ approach to pinpoint successful tactics and refine them as you learn. Testing your campaigns will help you pick components from successful campaigns and tie them together to make an even better campaign.

Here’s an example of this in practice:

Example 1:

You run a promotion for one of your Amazon products. You have two ad variations, one with a specific time-bound message like ‘one day only’ and one with a vague time-bound message like ‘deal ends soon’. From this test you discover the specific time-bound message drives higher conversions.

To delve even further into the possibilities, let’s combine this with another example.

Example 2:

The product you’re promoting has two unique features. We’ll call them ‘Feature 1’ and ‘Feature 2’. In a different campaign, you create two ads, one focusing on Feature 1 and the other focusing on Feature 2. The ad focusing on Feature 2 leads to stronger engagement.

Now for future product campaigns you understand the type of language that encourages the best results, i.e specific time-bound messaging, along with the feature that most appeals to your audience, i.e Feature 2.

Continue to refine your tactics by tracking engagement associated with different elements like wording, images, CTAs, and channels. Perfect your combination of elements to craft the perfect marketing campaigns for your Amazon business.

It’s essential to change just one element at a time so you know what factor is influencing the decision. For example, if you run the exact same ad on Facebook and Google, and you get better results from Google, you know for sure that’s the driving factor, as opposed to a different image or CTA.

Amazon Attribution Best Practices

• Create different ad groups and tags for each strategy: Do you want your ads to drive awareness, conversions, or considerations? Create a separate ad group and tag for each strategy and for each product. For example, you might decide you want to increase awareness and conversions for a product. Your ‘awareness’ ad group would have one tag and your ‘conversion’ ad group would have another, allowing you to test them both simultaneously.
• Keep your goal in mind when choosing your URL: If your goal is to increase brand exposure, for example, you might want your URL to lead to your storefront. On the other hand, if you want to increase conversions for a specific product, you could add a URL that leads to the product detail page instead.
• Create different tags for each element: This includes different ads, links, and buttons. This allows you to gather insights at a really granular level for very precise data.
• Bulk upload: Create multiple tags at the same time using Amazon Attribute’s ‘bulk upload’ feature. With this, you can measure the success of 8,500 Facebook and Instagram ads, and up to 100,000 Google keywords.
• Check your traffic regularly: Keep an eye on the traffic coming from each tag. Consider checking them weekly for optimum results.
• Enrol in the Brand Referral Bonus program: Don’t forget to enrol in this program to benefit from traffic referral bonuses.

Get Amazon Attribution Ready

If you're marketing your business on multiple channels outside of Amazon, Amazon Attribution is the best way to measure the results. The free platform allows you to keep track of clicks, purchases, and page views that come from each tag you generate. This gives you a complete picture of your entire campaign.

While Amazon Attribution is great for optimizing campaign success through different channels, what about optimizing your in-Amazon ads? Merch Jar is an Amazon ad software with which sellers can save time and money through automation and keyword refinement. Register today to start creating winning ad campaigns.

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