A really promising tool for manufacturers with a strong Amazon product presence that aims at improving media performance and increasing revenue through holistic ROI measurement.

Digital advertising keeps growing year after year and has become the main budget line of many marketers looking to achieve growth. The targeting, measurement and conversion capabilities of the media are enough to convince any advertiser to allocate a sizable portion of its overall marketing spend. But so far, precise attribution solutions were still lacking. Several tech companies have tried to fill the gap unconvincingly. There are no existing standards able to accurately attribute a conversion and the field can sometimes feel like a black box. The new attribution program being developed by the Seattle giant could end up satisfying the expectations from digital and data experts.

Why Amazon Attribution, the latest attribution solutions launched, even in beta version, is one of the tools to take your marketing media ROI to the next level within Amazon’s ecosystem

Amazon Attribution is an advertising and analytics measurement solution that gives marketers insights into how their non-Amazon media channels across search, social, video, display and email impact shopping activity and sales performance on the Amazon eBusiness platform.

With Amazon Attribution measurement, you can gain visibility into how these non-Amazon touchpoints help customers discover and consider your brand on the tech company’s platform. Using these advertising analytics and insights, you can optimise and plan your digital strategy based on what you know resonates with your customers and drives value for your brand on the marketplace.

Amazon Attribution’s tool helps you access full-funnel advertising analytics, from awareness to consideration to purchase, with metrics including clicks, detail page views, add to baskets and sales.

First learnings after an extended test of the product

We’ve had the opportunity to test drive the new Amazon Attribution platform on the account of Fisher-Price (Mattel Group), one of our clients that has a strong presence on Amazon. It is one of their top selling channels, so they wanted to understand the impact of the media campaigns on the sales happening on the retailer’s website.

For attribution purposes, we usually track cross channels and cross devices consumer journeys through ad servers and clients’ websites.

The new Amazon Attribution tool seems appealing at first because it claims to measure attribution from various channels (search, display, social media) and across different touch points directly on sales that occur within the firm’s ecosystem.

A well received addition to Amazon’s ad tech stack

The tool is currently free for sellers with a merchant center account and tracks attribution up to a 14-day window. It works via an impression pixel and a click command that can be integrated either on the ad server side or on the platforms (Google Ads, Mediamath, Facebook).

The tool is currently still in beta and there is no information on its wider implementation yet. The tool is meant to be used in combination with Sizmek’s ad server and integrated with the Amazon Advertising API. Indeed, The company founded by Jeff Bezoz acquired Sismek in 2019 and slowly integrated the adtech company into its existing suite of tools.

Using the new attribution tool and Sizmek’s ad server provides a full picture of the entire sales funnel and helps managing and optimising Amazon ad campaigns through a single report to measure sales impact (awareness, consideration, purchase) on and off the platform.

However, when switching to another ad server, managing campaigns becomes more difficult due to the lack of automated features.

Amazon Attribution : the missing solution to your digital marketing measurement efforts

This tool is long overdue as it is currently the only tool on the market that can provide a complete picture of the sales journey on Amazon: from the click on the ad, to the viewing of the product page, the add to the basket, the completion of the purchase and the final value of the purchase.

The tool provides three different types of reporting data:

  • performance report
  • keyword or creative reporting
  • Products report

Getting a clearer picture on attribution helps take a long under the hood and understand whether the products that are advertised are actually generating sales. It is an important decision-making solution for future acquisition campaigns.

Similarly to tracking by ad servers, Amazon Attribution is only valid on clickthrough rates on all channels (search, youtube, social media) to the exception of display, where impressions are also measured and taken into account. This means that the display channel can appear disproportionately high in relation to other channels.

A limited beta testing phase

Amazon opened its beta phase to a selected list of partners only. At Artefact, as one of its closest partners worldwide, we were fortunate to be included in this initial testing period. We have provided our feedback and are looking forward to a wider release of the solution.

The new Amazon Attribution tool seems long overdue for online merchants that aim to lower the acquisition costs and better track their ad spending. Sellers are also now able to optimise their sales channels thanks to cross-device Amazon reach measured using the company’s singular view of audiences across devices. It is definitely a welcomed addition to the firm’s limited suite of tools, especially in the context of the ongoing disappearance of third-party cookies.

Providing better opportunities for retailers selling on the Amazon ecosystem

We can expect upcoming improvements on this attribution service before it comes out of its beta phase. It is perfectly suited for volume online sellers that are currently using Sizmek Ad Suite. Users of Amazon Attribution can benefit from advanced insights into the accuracy of campaign and audience targeting strategies along with automation, control and unified reporting features.

In recent years, the Seattle company has immensely ramped up its ad offering and the opportunities for sellers to improve their targeting, measurement and ROI. The Seattle company can definitely be considered as an important player in the industry and an essential part of every marketer’s eBusiness and marketplace strategies.

At Artefact, we are constantly looking into road-testing innovative solutions from our tech partners that can help achieve growth and increase revenue for our clients. We will provide a follow-up to this first review of Amazon Attribution as soon as we have enough data and also a case study around our test program with Mattel.

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