4 ways to amplify your holiday marketing with Amazon Attribution

October 12, 2020

By Mili Mehta
Content strategist

This year, Amazon Attribution can help you kick off your holiday marketing strategy by offering unique insights about how your non-Amazon digital marketing across channels, creatives, and landing pages impacts how your audiences engage with your brand on Amazon. With access to Amazon Advertising reporting, including detail page views, Add to Carts, and sales metrics, Amazon Attribution can help identify the tactics that drive value for your brand on Amazon. Use these insights to optimize your peak period campaigns for key shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Here are four strategies you can test during the lead up to holiday to help you understand how to improve the performance of your marketing campaigns during the rest of the season:

1. Maximize channel impact

Amazon Attribution can help you find key trends from your non-Amazon holiday marketing campaigns. You’ll get insights to help you plan future campaigns for both your paid and organic digital marketing strategies.

After the holiday season last year, we looked at performance across all channels measured using Amazon Attribution and identified a few key trends. For one, email campaigns using Amazon Attribution measurement outperformed the average performance for all non-Amazon campaigns measured by Amazon Attribution across search, social, display, and video channels by up to 18X. This performance was true across all Amazon conversion metrics, including mid-funnel metrics that show consideration for your products on Amazon, such as detail page view rate and Add to Cart rate, in addition to lower-funnel metrics, like sales and purchase rate.1 This performance highlights the importance of email for reaching customers no matter where they are in their shopping journeys.

The second-highest-performing non-Amazon marketing channel was paid search, also referred to as search engine marketing (SEM), which outperformed the average sales and purchase rates for all campaigns measured by Amazon Attribution across social, display, and video channels by 5X during the Q4 period. These results confirm that paid search is an important channel for reaching shoppers while they’re actively researching your products.2

2. Test creatives and messaging

Testing creatives and messaging is an important step to help you understand what’s resonating most with your audience. In fact, in some cases, you may even find that an entirely different strategy leads shoppers to engage more with your brand on Amazon. For example, craft and supply company BeaverCraft used Amazon Attribution insights to learn that customers were engaging more with their organic content—how-to video tutorials on YouTube—than their paid advertising. By switching their marketing strategy based on this information, the brand was able to double their sales over a period of three months.

As you lead up to key holiday shopping days, a few sample creative and messaging tests you might try include:

  • Deal-specific messaging versus general brand messaging
  • Product imagery versus lifestyle imagery
  • Time-bound messaging versus generic holiday messaging

Running these kinds of tests will help you learn which of your campaigns, creatives, and messaging drives the most impact for your brand on key shopping days.

3. Reach the right audience

You can also use Amazon Attribution to measure strategies that you’re planning for different audiences. The insights can help you understand which groups of shoppers outside of Amazon are most likely to purchase from your brand on Amazon.

For example, imagine you send the same deals-themed email to three of your audience groups: health and fitness enthusiasts, parents, and bargain hunters. While health and fitness enthusiasts may typically be your most engaged audience, Amazon Attribution measurement might show that you actually have a higher sales rate on Amazon from the email that went to parents and bargain hunters. You can then test new ways to improve engagement among health and fitness enthusiasts and grow sales for parents and bargain hunters.

4. Create engaging landing page experiences

Thinking about answers to the following questions can also help you understand how to plan your holiday ad campaigns:

  • Where are customers in their shopping journeys? Are they ready to purchase, still researching, or new to your brand?
  • What is the next step you hope these customers take?

By answering these questions, you can begin to test and learn which types of landing pages—a detail page or your Store—will offer customers the right experience based on where they are in their journey and your business goals.

For example, for ads that promote your brand more generally, or for ads that reach audiences still becoming familiar with your brand, you might test whether it makes sense to direct them to a specific product detail page or to your Store instead. By sending shoppers to a detail page, they’ll be able to easily add the item to their shopping cart. On the other hand, by sending them to your Store, you might help new shoppers that aren’t yet ready to purchase learn more about your brand and products. Another benefit of bringing shoppers to your Store is that they can discover additional products from you brand that they may not have been familiar with.

Using Amazon Attribution to measure your marketing efforts during the lead up to holiday will help you better understand how your customers are engaging with your brand wherever they spend time. With these insights from Amazon Attribution, you can make sure your holiday marketing campaigns are helping drive sales for your brand on Amazon. For additional strategies to help you maximize impact during the holidays and through the end of the year using Amazon Attribution insights, view our guide.

Amazon Attribution beta is available to vendors that sell products on Amazon in the US, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Canada, and to professional sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry that sell products on Amazon in the US. It’s also available to agencies with eligible clients selling products on Amazon.

Learn more about how you can use Amazon Attribution to measure and optimize both your organic and paid marketing efforts, and understand how your non-Amazon marketing tactics are helping drive sales on Amazon.

1,2 Amazon internal, Q4 2019