What is Amazon Attribution and how it works?

Blog Content brief:

1. What is Amazon Attribution?
2. How to get started with Amazon attribution?
3. What metrics can you see?
4. How to setup Amazon attribution?

How to setup Amazon Attribution?

You can easily setup attribution tags by using the following steps:

• Register through either Seller Central or Vendor Central – first you need to register for the Amazon attribution program and get approved. Once approved, you can start building attribution tags for all traffic channels you use to drive traffic to your listing.
• Start creating attribution tags – this is done through creating “new orders”. You can choose to create attribution tags either manually or through using bulk files. By using bulk files, you can create up to 100,000 attribution tags at the same time.
• Choose which product you want to track – mark the products that you are doing special promotions for. In example, if you are promoting a discount, you’re doing on one of your listings, you’ll want to track those product’s performance in order to know how many visitors turned into shoppers by clipping the coupons.
• Choose the “publisher” – publisher here is known as a traffic channel, basically. So, with this level of settings, you are able to choose on a product level and traffic level to generate attribution tags.

What are some of the best practices when using Amazon Attribution?

Once you’re all setup and your campaigns are ready to go, they will start collecting the data and it’s time to take action again.

• Target the right audience – social media, especially Facebook, have always been one step ahead of the curve in defining audiences. Use their resources to narrow down audience definitions to the users that will be your potential shoppers one day.
• Improve conversion rates – by directing your external traffic to custom landing pages and storefront, you are able to improve conversion rates. The metrics from Amazon Attribution easily allow you to calculate what traffic source is contributing to the highest conversion rates on Amazon, and act accordingly.
• Ad copy split testing – having access to expand your product reach across social media, also gives you the opportunity to test out various ad creatives and learn how the audience reacts to each one. With continuous split testing, you will quickly find the winner copy and adjust your product listing creatives according to the conclusions from your social listening efforts.
• Use bulk operations to speed up the process – don’t handle this manually if you have hundreds of different campaigns across multiple traffic channels. Bulk files are also available here which makes the whole process a lot easier.

One of the most common obstacles sellers face when they are entering the Amazon marketplace is to get their product to rank and sell. If you’re new to Amazon advertising, this article will help you understand better how amazon ppc works and what ad type serves your goal best.

Before we dive into the specific ad types that are available on the Amazon advertising platform, we’ll answer some basic questions that are common among sellers that want to start with PPC.

What is Amazon PPC?

Amazon PPC is an advertising model where advertisers only pay for clicks from prospective buyers. To put this in simple words, you only pay for a click you get, you don’t pay for the amount of times your ad is shown in the search results page or on product detail page on Amazon. You need to have a seller’s account setup with Amazon in order to be eligible for amazon PPC advertising.

How does Amazon PPC work?

Every time a customer makes a search on Amazon, algorithm estimates what results will it show to them, based on relevancy of the product relative to their search. There is a difference between organic and paid results – paid results are the ones with the sign “sponsored” next to them, like in the below example:

In order to show your product in the sponsored section which usually gets all the premium placements, you need to enter the ad auction. Ad auction on Amazon means that every time when customers are searching on Amazon, a number of sellers are all bidding to show up high in the search results page. The one who bids a highest bid, usually wins the first place in the search results page.  Also, they usually pay less than what was his maximum CPC (cost per click) bid. Maximum CPC bid is the maximum amount of money that you are willing to pay for a click on your ad. Your max. CPC should be as close as possible to the suggested bid, because then your chances to win the ad auction are the highest.

The reason why Amazon is giving everyone a suggested bid recommendation is because average CPCs vary from one category to another.

One thing that can really help you win the ad auction aside from high bids is a high-quality listing. Learn how to optimize a product listing on this link. Having an optimized listing will send Amazon a signal that you are a serious seller and they will take that into consideration amongst other ranking factors.

How to setup Amazon PPC?

In order to begin, you will need a seller’s account on Amazon. Once you have that done and approved, you can go to campaign manager to setup your first campaign. Amazon has three main campaign types available:  sponsored products, sponsored brands and sponsored display.

Aside from different campaign types, Amazon also has different targeting options: keyword targeting, product targeting and audience targeting. Product targeting option is one of the most unique targeting options that you can’t find on any other platform. We will dive deep into each campaign type as well as targeting types to provide you in-depth understanding of the whole platform.

All campaigns have an option to choose the end date or choose to run it indefinitely. Choosing no end date means your campaign will run longer, and a longer timeframe can give you better insights on search terms and keyword performance to further optimize your campaign.

You can also assign a daily budget to your campaigns. Daily budget is calculated as an average daily spend of 30.4 days in a month. This means that – if you want to spend $1,000/month on Amazon ads, you should split that monthly budget by 30.4 and that way you will know how much to assign as a daily budget. Amazon uses average daily budgeting in order to prevent situations when advertisers run out of traffic just because they already spent their daily budget. Every day, the traffic varies, so some days you will spend even double than your average daily budget, and some days you will not even spend 10% of it.

Each campaign has an option to use different bidding strategies. There are three campaign bidding strategies: “Dynamic bids – down only”, “Dynamic bids – up and down”, and “Fixed bids”. You can learn more when to use each bidding strategy in this article here.

Sponsored Products campaign type

This campaign type was the first one to appear in Amazon PPC platform, in form of automated campaigns. You can choose to run your sponsored products campaign automatically or manually. Manual campaigns are good because you have maximum control over your placements, ad spend distribution and targeting. Auto campaigns are good because they contain maximum ad inventory (they consume as much ad space as possible), and also give you great insights into how Amazon is seeing your product. Once you collect some data in your search terms report from the automated campaign, you will much better understand how Amazon is positioning your product in the marketplace.

Ad placements that are offered through Sponsored products campaign types are in the search results, and in product pages. Some of the examples are here:

Manual sponsored product campaigns are the types that offer the same placements as automated campaigns, with the difference of being able to design your own targeting.

The power of manual targeting is in having complete control over where your ads will show up and who you will be competing against.

Keyword targeting through sponsored products ads allows you to rank higher in the search results page. On the other hand, manual product targeting allows you to choose which competitor you want to compete against. That way you get to choose your own placements, by either using category targeting, ASIN level targeting or refined category targeting. Learn more about product targeting options in this article here.

Sponsored Brands campaign type

This campaign type is very convenient for your own brand representation. Sponsored brands ads offer you a premium first place placement in the search results page, as well as some additional placements at the bottom of the page. Have a look at some examples:

Sponsored brands campaign are a combination of a visual aspect and precise targeting. You can also use keyword targeting as well as product targeting to build a sponsored brand ad. The beauty of Sponsored brands ads is that it offers a variety of ad formats and landing pages as well.

There are various combinations you can use: to promote your products from a landing page of your choice, or to feature a single product with an auto playing video. Your ads can lead to a product detail page or to the whole storefront, or to only a part of a storefront that represents a product line. Sponsored brands ads are the first ad type that allows custom images and videos in their creatives so they represent a very powerful tool for raising brand awareness for your brand and driving new customers. Sponsored brands campaigns are the only campaign types that allow you to measure the number of new-to-brand purchases. This is the number of first-time buyers for your brand, so you can easily understand the contribution of Amazon’s advertising platform to your brand’s expansion. New-to-brand purchases are one of the most commonly overlooked metrics in Amazon advertising, and they are one of the most important metrics for growing brands.

Just like in Sponsored products, Sponsored brands ads campaign type allows you to use negative targeting to prevent bad traffic from coming to your website. Negative keywords prevent your ads from displaying when a shopper’s search term matches your negative keyword. You can exclude irrelevant searches, reducing your advertising cost and making your campaigns more profitable.

Sponsored Display campaign type

This campaign type is one of the newest campaign types in amazon PPC. Sponsored Display ads are still being under-utilized because they are relatively new, but you can use them to drive sales growth for your account and take over more market share from competitors. Some of the most common placements of display ads right now are the product detail pages on Amazon. One thing that is also interesting about display ads is that they can also show up on Amazon’s partner websites. This is practically the only ad type that can show ads off-Amazon. Targeting types for sponsored display ads can be either Audience-based or product targeting (this is new). With audience targeting, the ads will show to shoppers who viewed the detail pages of your advertised products or similar products.

With product targeting on display ads, you have an opportunity to win more market share by appearing on your competitor’s product detail pages.

About the Author

Best CPA/CPC Techniques to Make Sure You’re Getting Your Money’s Worth

Are you a seller on Amazon looking to get the most out of their selling experience?
If so, you know that Amazon as a market of various products and categories can be an intensely competitive experience for most sellers. So you might be wondering what you can do to elevate yourself, distinguish your products and set yourself apart from the competition. To help you out, I’ll tell you about my favorite CPC/CPA techniques to improve your product’s visibility.

Let’s start.

What Are CPA and CPC Strategies?

CPA and CPC are both advertising strategies that you can use to grow your business on Amazon, and I’ve found them incredibly useful.

CPC stands for cost per click, which is the amount of money that you, the seller, has to pay every time your advertisement banner is clicked.

CPA stands for cost per acquisition or cost per action and is an advertising costing model where the advertiser pays for a specified acquisition. This acquisition might be a sale, a lead, a form submission or a sign-up. These actions represent a real lead for the advertiser.

Now CPA and CPC strategies are ways and methods that you can use to benefit from the CPA and CPC models. I’ve found that the best thing about these strategies is that they’re easy to use and they give your products a real boost if used right.

Let’s discuss them in more detail.

Optimize CPA/CPC Techniques to Maximize Conversion Rates

The best part about advertising through CPA/CPC techniques is that you only have to pay for the advertisements if someone either clicks on your ad (CPC) or if someone performs an acquisition, such as filling a sign-up page from your ad (CPA).

This allows for a lot of creative freedom. It means that you have the freedom to utilize CPA/CC in unique, innovative ways to boost your Amazon ranking, establish your credibility as a seller and bring more attention to your products.

Your conversion rate is affected by your sales rank, customer reviews, the quality of your photos, your pricing and a lot more. 

The good news is: you can optimize almost all of these factors using some CPA/CPC strategies.

Target the Right Keywords

Choosing the right keywords for your advertising campaign is an essential part of increasing your product’s visibility.

To make things easier for you, I’m going to split this into three parts, each part signifying the types of keywords you need to be targeting, step-by-step.

• Firstly, you need to use long-tail keywords. This means that if you’re selling something like wooden chairs, start with a very specific query, such as “handmade brown resin wooden chairs”. 
• These specific keyword queries will help launch your products initially. Next, go for more generic queries, such as “wooden chairs” or “handmade chairs”. This improves your visibility and Amazon learns to rank it in subsequent searches.
• For this final phase, go for the most popular and generic keywords you can find. As per my experience, running multiple campaigns and experimenting with different match types can help you find the keywords that work best for you.

However, there are some common mistakes that you need to look out for.

Commercial keywords and competitive keywords each bring their own set of advantages to the table.

Another tip that worked for many sellers was to use some not-so-direct/alternative keywords. This happened because people often come to Amazon searching for solutions, rather than looking for products.

One of the things that worked out well for me was to use Pixelfy Super URLs to boost my keyword ranking and gain a competitive edge. 

 Pixelfy Super URLs can help you increase keyword specific product rankings. When a sale is made through a Super URL, Amazon links the click and the search keyword. Afterward, Super URLs give information that Amazon needs to proceed with.

Once you’ve found the best keywords to display your brand the way you want, you’re considerably ahead of the competition.

Use Tracking Links to Get Higher Value for Money

If you’re using CPA/CPC strategies, obviously you want to get a higher value for the money you’re investing.

Here’s what that looks like:

Since CPC/CPA strategies only charge you if a potential customer clicks on your ad, or performs an action, these are likely the people who are most likely to be interested in your product now, or at some point.

To maximize the returns on your investment into CPA/CPC, ideally, you want to keep track of the people who looked at your advertisement and keep engaging with them multiple times.

This is important because then, you’re not losing out on potential customers, you’re following up with people who can be potential customers for you by tracking them.

Once you track people who clicked on your ads, you can hyper-target audiences that are similar to your initial audience in terms of demographics, likes, and interests.

This way, if you pay for every click you get on an ad, you also get to see who clicked on your ad and keep following up with them, instead of just waiting for more clicks and engagements.

When it comes to CPA/CPC, the best tracking method I’ve used is through Pixelfy, which I will talk more about, later in this article.

Be Smart – Advertise Similar Products with the Same Ad Group

If your product has multiple variations, or if you are selling products that are similar to each other, I’ve found that it can be risky to run individual campaigns for each of them.

Why? The answer is simple. It has to do with Amazon’s listing policy.

If your products are very similar to each other, there’s a good chance that they will be listed as child ASINs.

In that context, I’d advise you to avoid running multiple campaigns for them, because they might end up competing with each other for ads and it’ll cost you a heavier sum as well.

The best thing to do here is to group similar products in the same ad group.

So for example, if you’re selling three different flavors of potato chips, instead of making individual ad groups for each flavor, make one campaign and sell them as a pack of three, instead of individual pieces.

This brings you some useful benefits. 

One, trust me when I say that most viewers love packaged deals, so that gives you an instant boost in popularity.

Two, this increases your average order value (which is the average amount people spend on one order they place with you) and improves your visibility.

And three, it prevents your ad campaigns from competing amongst themselves, and all your products enjoy the same benefits of the CPC/CPA.

Use Your Ad to Score a Higher Amazon Ranking

You can use your CPA/CPC campaigns to improve your Amazon ranking and grow your product visibility over time.

Here are some things you need to look out for.

Firstly, you should make sure that your keywords are included in your product listings. This will help your product ranking once people search for the keywords you’re using.

Secondly, Amazon advertising allows you to add “negative keywords” in your listings so that your ads don’t show up for irrelevant searches.

For example, if you’re selling boat shoes, but not flip flops, you should add flip flops as a negative keyword to make sure a flip flop search doesn’t take users to your advertisement.

Keep a keen eye on the keywords that the best performing competitors in your product category are using.

There is a good chance that if you identify the most popular keywords and start using them, you’ll find that you’re able to compete with the top sellers for visibility a lot more comfortably.

Moreover, when it comes to keywords, Amazon basically checks the number of times a particular keyword is searched by users and assigns a rating to the keyword. The higher the rating, the more likely Amazon is to promote your products, based on the ranking of your specified keyword.

Pixelfy’s Super URLs now also come with the option of targeting these clickers specifically (sending them links), through a process called super targeting.

Super URLs can help you increase keyword specific product rankings. When a sale is made through a Super URL, Amazon basically links the click and the search keyword. Afterward, Super URLs give information that Amazon needs to proceed with.

This helps boost your Amazon ranking considerably.

Track the Clickers – Build Retargetable Audiences

One of the most important things for a seller to do is to build retargetable audiences.

Let’s look at what that means.

Once you start selling, you need to figure out what demographic of people your products and ads appeal to the most, and one of the best ways to do that is to track your audiences.

As per my experience, I’ve found Pixelfy’s Super URLs to be the best of their kind, and here’s why: These links are constructed so that they have a pixel embedded within them, that tracks everyone who goes to the hyperlinked website. 

When you target audiences with a Super URL, you’ll get a list of clickers that can be retargeted later with each click. 

This is important because once you track your clickers using the Super URLs, you can target audiences similar to your original audience on different networking sites, such as Facebook.

Through this procedure, you can create custom and lookalike audiences, which fit into the demographic that your products are most popular with. You can even retarget customers to solicit reviews and responses.

All of this isn’t possible with normal links. It’s mildly unfair that big sellers and companies on Amazon hog all the attention and keep it to themselves. Once you start building retargetable audiences using Pixelfy, you’ll boost your chances of competing with them.

Your CPA/CPC campaigns will benefit hugely if you start retaining customers that click on your advertisements.

Wrap Up

By now, you know how to:

• Use Pixelfy to boost your keyword ranking and build retargetable audiences through tracking people who click your links, under the CPA/CPC framework.
• Target the right keywords that increase your chances of visibility by a significant margin.
• Strategies that help you advertise more efficiently using CPA/CPC, especially if your products are similar to one another.

All these techniques are tried-and-tested strategies that can give a significant boost to your Amazon business. 

If you still have any questions or if you try out any of these strategies, let me know in the comments below!

Sources

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/the-top-7-ppc-strategies-for-2019/553720/

https://www.sellerapp.com/blog/advanced-amazon-ppc-strategy-revealed/

https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/cpa-marketing/#cpa-marketing-tips-best-practices

https://www.whitesharkmedia.com/blog/google-ads/lower-cpc-google-ads/

https://www.wordstream.com/ppc

Thinking outside the box – why more and more sellers choose to source from India

Lately in our community circles we’ve discussed different sourcing options, and more and more sellers are exploring options for sourcing from India. We decided to share our take on the current situation, because we believe that thinking outside the box is always a way to get ahead of the competition.

There are two main reasons why sellers are shifting their focus from Chinese suppliers to sourcing from India:

1. Trump tariffs on China imports – it’s no-one’s fault in this case. Suppliers from China since last August are trying to adapt to the new situation with pricing. Some of them are trying to keep the business levels even while slowly increasing prices. Some of them were forced to raise prices because their businesses would be unprofitable otherwise. Some of them are maintaining the same pricing but heavily degrading the product quality. In any case, there are no winners to this game, because China also answered on tariffs through suspension of US agricultural imports (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-05/china-asked-state-buyers-to-halt-u-s-agriculture-imports). Among many of the affected businesses, there are Amazon FBA sellers, slowly losing their patience to play with ever-changing rules of the game.

2. More and more Chinese sellers on Amazon – we felt this on our own skin. As soon as we developed the product mould for our new PL product, the next day it was available on Alibaba.com even though we signed an exclusivity contract. We then had to fight for our rights with our own supplier and eventually won. But who needs this kind of uncertainty and mistrust? Amazon sellers are slowly beginning to accept the fact that Chinese sellers are taking over the Amazon platform more and more each day, and have two major advantages to do that: highly developed logistics and shipment systems; and pricing advantage. They can afford to use dumping prices to win the buy box, and are doing it at a large scale.

Every seller should keep in mind that sourcing from India is going to be a bit different because the Indian manufacturers don’t yet possess the versatility and infrastructure that you can expect when working with Chinese suppliers. So, not every Amazon category can fully benefit from sourcing in India, although we’re expecting to see this change in the upcoming years as Indian manufacturing picks up popularity.

Here are some additional advantages from sourcing from India:

• You minimize your business risk by diversifying your sourcing partners
• Indian suppliers are usually willing to accept smaller minimum order quantities
• English is their official second language so there are no language barriers as high as when working with Chinese suppliers
• Domestic availability of raw materials – a lot of the materials used for production are available locally in India, in high quality: cotton, silk, jute, marble, metal, wood, bamboo and others.

Sellers have also experienced some of the main disadvantages of working with Indian suppliers:

• Finding and vetting suppliers is a lot more difficult because there is no unified directory like Alibaba.com that brings them all together in one place. You will need to make a lot more effort to reach the right suppliers, some of which include: visiting trade shows in person, agents and the like.
• Suppliers don’t always understand FBA – especially the small suppliers don’t understand FBA so you will be in charge of providing them with guidance around: certifications, labeling, logistics and similar.
• Limited logistics support leaves sourcing from India convenient for more experienced sellers. For example, Chinese suppliers can quote you a DDP price for the shipment and manage all aspects of the shipping process. They can even buy a customs bond on your behalf, and also be the importer of record. But that’s not the case in India. Freight forwarders will expect you to be
• the importer of record, and know the certifications needed.

Differences between sourcing from India and China to keep in mind

Production scale

Chinese suppliers usually posses the machinery and workforce to pull off large scale orders, while Indian factories are mostly small and midsized. For most private label brands, the manufacturer would be a smaller factory, out of which many are family operated businesses.

Product categories

Chinese suppliers are able to cover all product categories while Indian manufacturing landscape is still developing and limited. However, Indian materials are distinctive in high quality which makes them great for certain product categories. Here are some of the categories that we feel are perfect for sourcing your product in India: home décor & gifts, kitchen and tableware, furniture, furnishings (cushion covers, rugs), jewelry, apparel, accessories, textiles, organic cotton, leather, eco-friendly products, and foods (especially superfoods, tea, coffee, spices).

Language barrier

Communication with Indian suppliers in English is incredibly easier than with Chinese suppliers as English is their official language. When working with Chinese suppliers you need to invest extra efforts into overcoming the language barrier. There will always be some English-speaking person in a factory in China, but engineers, assembly line managers and similar roles often won’t speak English. This can sometimes cause trouble in product development and making sure that safety & quality standards are satisfied.

Workforce

There is one basic difference in labor market between China and India – China is a socialist society and Indian society is democratic. This requires just a little bit more understanding of local culture to be able to organize your workflow accordingly. Indian workers strive to achieve better work-life balance than Chinese workers. Also, unlike China, labor unions in India are active and often are negotiating better rates for their workers as well as better working conditions.

Infrastructure

In terms of infrastructure, still nothing beats China. India lacks developed infrastructure, with its main problems being during the monsoon season in June and July when many businesses have disruption in transportation. This is not a rule but it can happen, and it’s just one thing to keep in mind. With China, you will always have a Chinese New Year when the factories are closed for a whole month, and you have to plan your orders ahead to stay in stock. With Indian suppliers you just have to be precautious and not order too much (or any) inventory during the monsoon season.

Let’s say you want to find Indian suppliers. How do you get started?

We already mentioned that working with Indian suppliers is going to be a little bit different from Chinese suppliers as the whole process is not yet so streamlined. Getting access to the best Indian suppliers is going to require a little bit more effort and knowledge from you, but it can also be extremely rewarding.

There are two main ways in which currently Indian suppliers:

• Third party sourcing websites, such as Alibaba.com, Indiamart.com and Globalsources.com. Alibaba and Globalsources still have Chinese suppliers as their main focus but you can filter out by country of origin and easily find Indian suppliers. This has proven to be a good method to identify some of your prospects, but it can still be difficult to vet suppliers that way especially if you’re working with them for the first time.
• Sourcing at trade shows, the most relevant exhibition for Amazon sellers is to attend the IHGF Delhi Fair (held in October this year http://ihgfdelhifair.epch.in/ ) where you can meet some of the best suppliers for these categories: houseware, Christmas and festive décor, home furnishings, fashion jewelry and accessories, furniture, carpets and rugs, gifts, bathroom accessories, lamps and lighting, garden decorations. The fair is open only to foreign buyers or buying agents in India. All exhibitors are export-focused and generally have a good understanding of import requirements of various countries. Most of them do not understand Amazon FBA requirements though. Some of the main advantages of visiting trade shows to find suppliers include: getting new product ideas, speeding up your sourcing process, you are able to touch and feel the product quality without waiting for samples, establish a high-quality relationship with your suppliers, talk to manufacturers directly.

India Sourcing Trip (https://www.indiasourcingtrip.com/), organized by Meghla Bhardwaj can significantly speed up your learning curve, and enable you access to best sourcing experts who would be your mentors in this process. Through their experience and knowledge, you will also be able to step up your sourcing game with Chinese suppliers too. One of the main advantages that Amazon sellers pointed out about this trip is, that they made lifelong friendships with fellow sellers from this trip. 

Goodbye Amazon Giveaways

Today is the last day that Amazon offers giveaways to users. After October 17^th, giveaways as an option will no longer be available for sellers. Product launches have become a little harder now that we can’t count on the giveaways option.

Promotional giveaways were a great option to create a buzz and reward your audience while growing your followers and customers. The customers also loved it because Amazon giveaways were a great way for them to meet new interesting brands or items, free of charge.

What will happen next? What can you do instead of giveaways? Well, considering that Amazon removed the giveaways, as a first replacement you can try are external tools such as https://rebatekey.com/ . Make sure to use them properly because explicit asking for good reviews on both platforms is considered a prohibited practice.

We expect that Amazon will soon introduce something better than giveaways that serves the same purpose. When they give up one feature, it’s usually because they have something bigger up their sleeve.

Amazon Product Photography 2019