Amazon Attribution: how advertising off-Amazon helps your keyword ranking
There has never been a better time to advertise your Amazon listings OFF Amazon.
Advertising ON the eCommerce behemoth is the most competitive it’s ever been. And at the same time, thanks to Amazon Attribution, it’s now easier to track sales that come from other sources, like social media.
Here’s the e-Comas guide to boosting your sales while saving on ad spend, using Amazon Attribution.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
What is Amazon Attribution?
Amazon Attribution is a system put in place by Amazon to help increase external traffic to the platform.
That includes a free tool in Amazon Ads to measure your traffic from other online platforms, such as Facebook, Google and email campaigns.
Historically, Amazon sellers had no accurate way of knowing what proportion of their sales came from non-Amazon sites.
Now, thanks to Amazon Attribution, you can not only recognise when sales have come from an external source, you can factor the external sources directly into your Amazon marketing plan. And you’ll still be able to measure your success.
How does it work?
Amazon Attribution is accessed through Seller Central.
Amazon gives you Attribution Tags, which are links to your product listings on Amazon.
You place the relevant link in your Facebook or Google advert – or your blog post, or your email campaign, or whichever external digital marketing it is – and Amazon will then be able to track who has clicked on it.
Amazon will feed that insight back to you via reports in the Amazon Ads console.
What’s in it for Amazon?
It might seem counter-intuitive for Amazon to promote advertising on other websites.
But Amazon is so huge, with so many products competing for the same advertising spots, that on-Amazon advertising is becoming unsustainably expensive, especially for popular keywords.
Amazon has recognised that making it easier to measure advertising for your Amazon listings on Google and other sources opens up the number of prime advertising spots sellers can bid for.
As well as helping sellers advertise lucratively and therefore drive conversion on Amazon, this also widens Amazon’s pool of potential customers, bringing in more organic traffic from other sources.
Amazon Attribution in action
“Amazon values external traffic to the point where your listings can benefit from it organically,” says Nella Argenziano, e-Comas’s Head of Advertising.
“As Amazon Cost Per Click (CPC) costs rise, growing and maintaining presence for key search terms might not be sustainable. So how do we address this? We can increase external traffic instead.”
Nella gives us the example of a retailer on Amazon with a product price of $14.
The average CPC for their product’s main keyword was $1.20.
The average number of clicks to conversion was 7.
That meant each order brought in by that keyword was costing $8.40 – a TACOS of 60%.
It was obviously unsustainable to keep spending on this keyword in an effort to appear at the top of search placement on Amazon.
The seller, working with e-Comas, had two choices:
- Stop spending on the keyword in the hope that less expensive ones gained popularity.
But this would risk losing visibility and being left with unsold units.
Or:
- Repurpose some of the spend from Amazon to Google Ads, creating campaigns that would drive external traffic to the Amazon listing.
We went for the second option.
The results
Out of the $1,000 we were spending each month, we redirected $200 to a Google Ads search campaign with that one very expensive keyword, applying the following:
- Headlines and description containing the keyword in question
- Targeting the keyword in Exact Match
- Ensuring the Attribution tag was set up correctly.
The result? Within two weeks our keyword rank went from >40 to 16.
As a consequence, organic sales for this product increased, bringing down Ad Reliance and decreasing overall TACOS.
Nella says: “We applied this strategy across all the keywords that were difficult to own. It wasn’t always as successful, because other keywords might have already been targeted through competitors’ Google Ads campaigns.
“But Amazon Attribution is now a fundamental part of our strategy to grow a brand’s profitability.”
Ask our e-Comas experts how to maximise your off-Amazon advertising with Attribution. Contact us today!