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It’s hard to succeed if you don’t know what’s working or not. 

As an eCommerce seller, being able to accurately tie your advertising and marketing efforts to the actual sales generated is invaluable. Not only does it provide accountability and help assess return-on-investment, but it reveals what combination of initiatives, messages and channels drive transactions.  

This concept of connecting the dots from initial outreach to eventual conversion is known as attribution. For online brands, unlocking those capabilities often separates profitable strategies from wasted budgets.  

Amazon Attribution is an important component of that strategy.

In this post we’ll explore exactly what attribution does, how to leverage insights to optimize efforts, and why getting attribution right can give you an edge on your competition. 

What is Amazon Attribution? 

Amazon Attribution is an analytics tool available to brand-registered sellers that tracks and measures the impact of external, non-Amazon marketing channels on driving sales back to the Amazon marketplace. 

It grants sellers granular visibility into performance metrics allowing them to gauge which initiatives taking place outside of Amazon – whether social media ads, influencers, email activities – successfully result in site conversions or product purchases attributed back to that specific channel. 

Essentially, Amazon Attribution enables a clear understanding of the external efforts most efficiently delivering business results – that way, brands can optimize accordingly.

Why Does Amazon Attribution Matter? 

At its core, marketing attribution means allocating credit across the combination of touchpoints influencing desired outcomes such as site visits, ads-to-cart and purchases. 

In many cases, it takes a variety of marketing efforts to get a buyer over the finish line. 

For multi-channel sellers, connecting those touch points becomes difficult across domains. And without sound attribution, the inability to accurately quantify marketing return-on-spend or optimize elements wastes considerable resources and time. 

If you’re an Amazon seller that’s been using Sponsored Products, or Sponsored Brands Ads you know that it’s critical to constantly use the data available to an Amazon seller to make ongoing adjustments. If you’re using Facebook or Google ads – outside of Amazon – attribution gives you that power. 

Who Can Use Amazon Attribution?

Amazon Attribution is available to vendors, professional sellers, and KDP authors enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry. It has functionality for ad campaigns originating off of Amazon. It’s also available to agencies such as Canopy Management and their online-selling partners. 

Users access Amazon Attribution through a self-service console or as part of custom-built dashboards implementing the Amazon Ads API.

Amazon Attribution is currently available in nine countries, including the US, Canada, and Mexico in North America.  

3 More Reasons to Drive Outside Traffic to Your Amazon Listing

Data transparency isn’t the only reason that you’d want to add Amazon to your own marketing strategy.

Here are three more good reasons: 

Throw a Bigger Marketing Net

Amazon’s marketplace becomes more competitive every day. Successful online sellers often speak about the value of product differentiation. But, differentiation also extends to HOW you market your product. 

Instead of waiting for prospective customers to find you, placing ads off of Amazon will exponentially widen your marketing funnel. 

Importantly, driving outside traffic allows you to point customers directly to your Amazon storefront —where aggressive competitors can’t reach them. 

Get Amazon’s Flywheel Turning

Few things on Amazon are as impactful as Amazon’s Best Sellers Rank (or BSR). The BSR is an Amazon metric that indicates how your product is selling compared to other items within the same product category in the Amazon store.

This is where the Amazon flywheel effect comes into play. By broadening your marketing efforts, and drilling down into highly-informative data, you’re likely to increase sales. In turn, that increases sales velocity, a crucial component of Amazon’s ranking process. 

With each successive iteration of the Amazon algorithm, there appears to be an increase in Amazon tipping the scale in favor of listings that drive external traffic to Amazon. With that additional rank will come more sales, and better product rank on Amazon. 

All of that increased visibility will bring with it a corresponding lift in rankings for your principal keywords. If your product is able to consistently convert, your organic keyword rankings will improve as well. 

Earn Money From Amazon 

Bonus money from Amazon, what’s not to like? 

For sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry and selling in Amazon’s US store, Amazon has rolled out a bonus for sales generated from non-Amazon marketing efforts. 

Amazon’s Brand Referral Bonus is an opportunity to earn, on average, a 10% bonus of the sales price on sales generated from sales originating OFF of Amazon.

Under the program, sellers receive the same credit for any of their products purchased by the same customer in the subsequent two weeks.

How This Canopy Management Partner Took Advantage of Amazon Attribution 

Surviveware had been working with Canopy on their PPC advertising for over two years and had seen particular success with Sponsored Display Ads. That led them to wonder, “Are there even more ways to target off-Amazon audiences and bring them back to Amazon?”

Like most Amazon stores, Surviveware was missing out on opportunities to bring back shoppers who previously viewed their pages but left Amazon before they purchased their product.

As detailed in this case study, over that 1-month period, Canopy was able to drive more than $64k in sales. With only a $6k ad spend (much lower than the $35k/month commitment that Amazon’s own DSP management service requires), that’s a 10.4X return on ad spend!

And the best part?

Just over 70% of total sales were new-to-brand!

That’s thousands of new customers who, with the help of DSP’s ability to dig into attribution models and unmatched retargeting capabilities, know just where to go the next time they need to restock their first-aid kit or prep for a new adventure.

The Right Amazon Agency Can Transform Online Selling

You don’t want to remain locked outside without access to critical data.

What separates profitable brands from those just getting by often boils down to being able to access actionable analytics. Attribution presents that opportunity – quantifying the ROI on each marketing element.

Reliable campaign intelligence informs future strategies, promotional budget decisions, and helps online sellers uncover connections between assumption and outcome. At the same time, it helps shine a light on customer segmentation insights that increase relevancy.

There’s no questioning the value of attribution. Brands that leverage attribution are able to elevate their businesses because of the measurable increase in efficiencies at every level. 

But, for increasing numbers of (very) successful Amazon sellers, the total package involves reaching out to an Amazon Agency for help. 

Canopy Management is a full-service marketing agency for Amazon and Walmart sellers. Our team consists of former Amazonians, multi-million dollar sellers, and award-winning experts. 

When you consider the many ways that Canopy Management can help you grow your business, you’ll see why selling on Amazon is much easier “under the Canopy”:

• Strategic Growth Planning
• Listing Copywriting Optimization
• Listing Photography
• Product Videography
• Advertising Management
• Customer Service
• Demand Side Platform (Amazon DSP)
• Amazon Posts
• Full Service Management
• Amazon Review Aggregation