Amazon Attribution: The Amazon Tool for External Marketing Activities

1. What is Amazon Attribution?
2. Who can use Amazon Attribution?
3. Why should I use Amazon Attribution?
4. What reports and statistics are available at Amazon Attribution?
5. Summary and conclusion

Many sellers and vendors use external traffic as a measure to make visitors outside of Amazon aware of your product listing and generate sales. There is often a problem with measurability, because the visitors acquired in this way and the resulting sales cannot be analyzed more precisely.

Meanwhile, Amazon presents the new tool "Amazon Attribution", a possibility to do exactly this analysis. Amazon would like to support its sellers in using external traffic sources even more efficiently. But there are still significant limitations.

What is Amazon Attribution?

The new tool provides information about whether customers have made a promotion or purchase from Amazon after clicking on an external ad (e.g. on Google or Facebook).

Technically, Amazon Attribution works on a tagged basis. These are extensions of the linking URL. Amazon can use these tags to identify from which source a user came and analyze their activities on Amazon.

Amazon explains that Amazon Attribution can be used to capture traffic from various ad formats (display, search, social & video) and from email marketing campaigns.

Who can use Amazon Attribution?

Currently, only US and UK participants can use Amazon Attribution. However, it is expected that the feature will be rolled out to other countries once the trial period is complete.

For example, if you sell through the Amazon Vendor Program in the USA or UK, you can register for Amazon Attribution via a form. Sellers can do this directly in Seller Central.

After the activation the mentioned functions are available.

Why should I use Amazon Attribution?

Amazon itself cites dog food manufacturer Premier Nutrition as a case study to show how helpful Amazon Attribution can be. The company is said to have multiplied its ROI in a very short time because - according to the CEO - investment decisions in external forms of advertising were optimized.

Even though the case study cannot be applied 1:1 to every salesperson, the key advantage of Amazon Attribution is clear: In the future, it will no longer be possible to advertise "on suspicion" but rather to evaluate exactly which ads perform and which traffic sources do not generate additional sales.

With the data evaluated by Amazon Attribution, it is easy to measure the success of advertisements. By using a variety of tags, performance can be measured at the campaign level, allowing detailed analysis to be made and any external Amazon Marketing actions to be reviewed.

In summary, Amazon Attribution provides the following benefits:

• Evaluate different external traffic sources
• Increased ROI through targeted optimization
• Targeted and cost-efficient development of new target groups

With Amazon Attribution it is possible to better control budgets and plan external marketing activities more efficiently. Anyone who has previously shied away from using external ads to promote their own products due to the lack of measurability now has the necessary tool at hand.

What reports and statistics are available at Amazon Attribution?

Currently the following values can be analyzed with Amazon Attribution:

• Clicks on the product detail page
• Shopping carts
• Sales

A detailed overview is provided by Amazon on its information page for developers.

Summary and conclusion

Amazon Attribution has the potential to become a powerful Amazon Marketing tool for Amazon vendors. External marketing actions, which until now have been more of a black box, can be subjected to a more detailed analysis.

Although the program is currently only available in two markets (Vendor: USA & UK, Seller: USA), a further roll-out is expected.