Understanding Amazon Advertising Attribution

Amazon sales attribution is when Amazon assigns credit for a sale to a specific campaign. For example, when a user click on one of your ads and buys a product within a certain time period such as 7 or 14 days, the “sale” is attributed to your campaign. There are three different dashboards you can use to advertise on Amazon.

Seller Central – also known as 3P or the dashboard third party seller’s use.

Advertising Console – known as Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) or the dashboard vendors use (1P/first party sellers)

Amazon DSP – formerly, the Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP), run by the Amazon Media group (AMG). Amazon DSP is offered through AMG managed service. It is also available through select agency partners as a self-service tool or directly to top-tier, large budget advertisers.

Amazon tracks attribution differently depending on the platform you’re using.

Seller Central Attribution

Sponsored Product Campaigns – Sales attribution is measured on a 7-day click through attribution window. If a user clicks on an ad, comes back up to 7 days later, and buys one of your products from your brand Amazon will attribute the sale to that campaign. Sales are attributed only to the last ad the user clicked.

Sponsored Brand Ad Campaigns (SBA) – Sales are measured on 14-day click-through window. Sales are attributed only to the last campaign the user clicked. SBA follows what Amazon calls “Brand Halo” sales attribution. This means that if the user clicks on your ad and buys any product with your brand name on it, not just a product featured in your SBA ad, Amazon will attribute the sale to that campaign.

“Brand Halo” gets very tricky. If you are a brand that has listings with different variants of your brand names, Amazon will attribute any sale from any of those brands, including sales made by anyone on Amazon who sells products under your brand.

Amazon Marketing Services – Attribution for the AMS differs from the Seller Central, even though many of the ad types are the same. Across the board, all the units in the AMS work on Amazon Brand Halo attribution whereas in Seller Central, only SB works on Brand Halo. Instead of a 7-day click attribution, AMS works on a 14 day click-through attribution.

Amazon DSP – There are a few different ways that Amazon attributes sales in the DSP platform, Amazon Display advertising platform. First, if you are advertising a product sold on Amazon, there are two types of reporting metrics or values to measure your return on ad spend: Product Sales and Total Sales.

Product Sales only tracks the ASIN you provide to Amazon for conversion tracking purposes. There is no Brand Halo attribution applied here. Amazon currently has to manually approve each list of ASINs you provide to them to verify they are indeed yours. The Product Sales metric is calculated on a 14-day view through attribution window. Viewable Impressions are based on the Media Rating Council Viewability standards. Only 50% of the display ad needs to be in view for one second or more for a sale to be attributed. Also, only 50% of a video ad needs to be in view for two seconds or more for a sale to be attributed. If user saw a DSP ad but then clicked on an SP ad, SP would take the credit for the sale, not DSP.

Total Sales tracks sales on the ASINs provided to Amazon for conversion tracking and all Brand Halo sales from the brand names included in the tracked ASINs list. If a brand gave a list of the ASINs with 10 different brand names, like the licensed brand, then total sales would be skewed because Amazon would attribute any sale from any of those brands in the list, even if you weren’t tracking those ASINs. Total sales are calculated on a 14-day view-through attribution window.

With Amazon DSP, you can also serve ads sending traffic OFF-Amazon. You can track the number of conversions attributed to the ad campaign but not the amount or type. The same 14-day attribution applies. It’s important to understand not just the numbers, but also the attribution behind the numbers so you can get a complete sense of how advertising is really performing to your specific goals.