Driving external traffic to your brand’s Amazon listings can be a great way to reach more customers, increase your rankings, and grow your sales.

While there’s no denying the upside, the downside is that, historically, this has been a very big pain point for marketers looking to build successful campaigns.

Why?

Because measuring the effectiveness of your off-Amazon efforts took you into muddy waters, and this is something that needs to be crystal clear. Otherwise, what’s stopping you from continually pumping resources into initiatives that were just wasting your time and money?

(Spoiler: not much, and it showed.)

It was a widespread problem, and the frustration for the lack of attribution clarity (outside of PPC) was very real.

Luckily, a beta program has completely changed the game and, for the first time, brands can now access key performance information about their marketing efforts for outside traffic sources as well as on Amazon.

Keep reading to learn more about how the Amazon Attribution program works, the benefits for brands, and how you can enroll.

What is Amazon Attribution?

The Amazon Attribution program allows brands to closely track their off-Amazon-to-Amazon marketing channels. The Amazon-proclaimed “analytics measurement solution” gives direct insight into how your search, social, video, display, and email marketing efforts impact your customers' shopping activity and your Amazon sales performance.

Amazon identifies three ways that brands can leverage the program:

Measure: Discover which advertising channels are the most effective at generating sales.

Optimize: Use the console’s on-demand attribution reporting to optimize your campaigns for maximum sales impact.

Plan: Learn which strategies increase your ROI and use them to build stronger marketing plans for the future.

In a nutshell, you’ll finally be able to see how customers use your off-Amazon media channels to find, research, and buy your products on the marketplace. Armed with that knowledge, you can then continue to build more effective campaigns based on real numbers, not guesswork. Eureka!

Who Can Use it and How Much Does it Cost?

Amazon Attribution (beta) is available for professional sellers enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry in addition to vendors and agencies. In North America, it’s accessible for sellers in the US and Canada, while current European countries supported are Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and the UK. At this time there is no cost to enroll. You can access the console through the Amazon Advertising portal or the Measure Non-Amazon Ads page under the Advertising menu in Seller Central.

How Does the Program Work?

Once you’ve registered and created an Amazon Attribution account, you can start right away. The console revolves around the use of attribution tags, or tracking URLs, that are tied to a product listing so you can monitor and measure customer activity. You can create a tag for each of your non-Amazon advertising media, including search ads, social ads, display ads, video ads, and email.

How to Create an Attribution Tag

Here are the basic steps for creating an Amazon attribution tag. You can find more detailed instructions within the console.

Start by choosing the advertiser that you want to create a tag for (i.e. your brand).
Select “New order.”
To create a tag for a Google Ad or Facebook/Instagram, select “Upload file to create order and tags” and follow the instructions provided.

To create a tag for other campaigns, select “Manually create order and tags” and follow the instructions (there’s also an instructional video that you can watch).
Add the product you want to link to and track from the products shown on the page (you can use the search bar and dropdown to quickly run a search if you have a large catalog).
Go to “Order settings” to name the attribution tag and create an optional external ID for easier tracking.
Click “Continue to line items” to complete the remaining steps (you're so close!).
Lastly, create a line item name, select a publisher from the available options shown, and add in your click-through URL, or your listing’s URL.

Once you hit the “Create” button, Amazon will generate an attribution tag for you to add to your ad campaign.

What Metrics Can Be Tracked?

Attribution reports are available for download, and you can also view information directly within the console. These detailed reports include key traffic and conversion metrics, including:

Click-through rates
Impressions
Product page views
Purchase rates
Add to carts
Total sales

By the way, if you’re interested in product-level reporting, have you seen the latest metric that you can track? Amazon recently made mention of it inside the Attribution console. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this one for sure!

Will You Give Attribution a Try?

Successful brands are always looking for ways to improve their advertising ROI. When employed correctly (the console really doesn’t do any favors for novices — it may be worth working with an experienced advertiser), Amazon Attribution can be very effective for doing so. The newly uncovered clarity into your brand’s customer journey and how your marketing media impacts each stage can help you set up more winning campaigns that bring in bigger numbers now and in the future.

If you plan to participate in the Brand Referral Bonus Program, you'll need to enable Amazon Attribution first.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the program! Do you plan on using it? If you currently do, have you seen any big results? Let us know!