Amazon have just started rolling out the beta release of Amazon Attribution, a new marketing tool offering a deeper level of insights for Amazon sellers wishing to measure the impact of marketing activities both on and off the marketplace.
With the program still in its infancy, specifics details are a little lacking but from the case study provided by Amazon all indications would suggest that sellers are finally going to be gifted the ability to segment their inbound Amazon traffic by its source and campaign.
In the past, Amazon Seller Central offered a limited number of metrics to 3P sellers to monitor the performance of their products, include unit sales, sessions and conversion rate but no insights as to how the customers got to the product listings.
Sales and traffic generated by Amazon’s own PPC ad serving platform Amazon Sponsored Products offers a higher level of detail, allowing sellers to track their return on ad spend right down to a keyword level but in the absence of similarly rich performance data for marketing campaigns held off Amazon evaluation of which external activities are driving the most sales is mostly guesswork.
By contrast sellers with their own online store with a simple Google Analytics setup have long been able to track their sales and the on-site behaviour of their customers based on how they found the products, what marketing channels were used and even what search keywords led them there.
In a digital marketing environment where advertisers have long held the expectation that any marketing spend they commit to a campaign can be tracked, evaluated and given an accurate measure of return the lack of such transparency for marketing campaigns into Amazon has been a compelling argument against sellers utilising channels such as Facebook Ads and Google AdWords to drive traffic into their Amazon listings.
If the data provided through Amazon Attribution is truly as robust as many hope it will be, brands’ Amazon listings can finally be incorporated into a fully optimized, full funnel marketing strategy and be properly evaluated alongside their online stores, making it an interesting time not only for Amazon sellers but for all ecommerce and marketing professionals.
Enrolment for the current Amazon Attribution beta has closed, but Amazon has provided this link for sellers interested in participating in the future, and in the meantime we’ll be monitoring this one closely for any further details.