What is attribution?
Attribution is the manner in which a conversion is attributed to an ad click. If someone clicks an ad but places an order at another time, the conversion can still be attributed to the ad click. As an advertiser, it’s important to understand when and why a conversion can be attributed to your ad. This will help you with setting the bids and budget for a campaign.
If a conversion is attributed to an ad click too quickly, bids will be set too high and too much of the budget will be spent on the campaign. In contrast, if a conversion is not attributed fast enough, you’ll miss potential sales from your campaigns.
Attribution within Amazon
Attribution within Amazon PPC is dependent upon the type of vendor or seller and the type of ad (sponsored product or sponsored brand).
For vendors, in the case of sponsored product ads any sales of other products of the same brand are also attributed, provided that the product is sold by Amazon itself. If your brand is sold by a third party, the conversion is not attributed to your ad. For sellers, a conversion is attributed to a sponsored product if someone clicks your ad and buys the product or one of your other products. For sponsored brands, the rule for both vendors and sellers is that all conversions of the same brand, including both Amazon sales and third party sales, are attributed to the ad click.
Conversion period
The conversion period is the number of days after an ad interaction that a conversion is registered. The conversion periods also vary between the types of ads and between vendors and sellers. The table below lists the different conversion periods:
As a seller, if you have a Sponsored Brand ad and someone places an order within 7 days after clicking the ad, the sale will be attributed to the ad click. If someone buys the product 1 day later, i.e. after 8 days, the turnover is not attributed to the ad click.
For the other combinations this period is 14 days. Please note that many other advertising platforms have a standard conversion period of 30 days, which therefore is considerably longer than that of Amazon.
Gaining insight into conversion periods
Not every customer journey is the same. Someone who wants to buy an expensive washing machine will think longer about this purchase than when they’re buying a bottle of detergent. It can therefore be interesting for an advertiser to look at different conversion periods. Unfortunately, at the moment it’s impossible to set other conversion periods in Amazon.
Via Amazon’s API it is possible to retrieve additional data, though. As an advertiser, this will give you valuable insights with regard to longer and shorter conversion periods. Moreover, it will provide additional insights if you want to know how many sales and how much turnover were generated from an ad click on the same product that was sold.
