Data sourced from attribution APIs is vital to today’s brands, empowering them to make informed decisions to maximize ad performance. Brands currently rely heavily on Facebook’s Attribution API to gather data about consumer behavior and gain insights into their ads performance. However, Amazon has recently unveiled its own contribution to the world of attribution, generating quite a buzz.
But the question is, just how powerful is Amazon’s Attribution API? Can it solve the attribution problems brands face in today’s marketplace? Could it potentially rival Facebook’s Attribution API in its effectiveness?
Noah King, CEO of Popsixle sat down with Jonathan Snow, founder of The Snow Agency, to answer these questions and provide recommendations on how to leverage Amazon’s Attribution API for advertising success.
Let’s explore how Amazon’s Attribution API works and how it can be used to monitor traffic.
Understanding Amazon’s Attribution API
Amazon’s attribution API enables sellers to understand how their non-Amazon ads drive sales to the platform. It allows sellers to track sales from external platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Google Ads, etc. Additionally, it can monitor free and organic traffic to Amazon listings, not just paid advertising.
By sourcing data from Amazon’s Attribution API, brands can potentially gain valuable insights into their ad performance to optimize their advertising efforts to reduce cost-per-click (CPC) and amplify Amazon traffic, leading to a continuous boost in sales.
How Do You Use Amazon’s Attribution API To Track Traffic?
For eCommerce brands, knowing the touchpoints that drive traffic resulting in a sale is crucial to advertising success. The “Black Box” refers to the blind spot between a Facebook ad click and an Amazon purchase. Amazon’s attribution tool aims to illuminate this Black Box — by providing deeper visibility to bridge this gap, potentially uncovering valuable data-driven insights that might currently go unnoticed.
Unlike Facebook which uses pixels or cookies for traffic monitoring, Amazon’s API uses a URL-based tracking method.
Here’s how tracking traffic from a Facebook ad to an Amazon sale works:
- Your Facebook ad is tagged with a unique Amazon tracking UTM code.
- Users click on the ad, redirecting them to your Amazon listing.
- Amazon records each user’s clicks, purchases, and other interactions, associating them with the unique tracking code.
- The resulting data is available in the form of reports, on dashboards, and now, also in an API.
How Reliable Is Amazon’s Attribution API For Tracking Data From Ad Sales?
In theory, Amazon’s attribution product sounds impressive. If it lived up to its intended functionality, it could not only show you how your ads perform on Facebook but also help optimize future ad campaigns for even better results.
Unfortunately, in practice, the API’s results fall short of the promising theory due to a couple of critical issues: lack of data recency and low user-matching rates.
Delays In Data Recency
Having visibility into data recency, or the real-time traceability of customer interactions, is crucial for strategic decision-making in advertising efforts. Unfortunately, Amazon only updates attribution reporting once per day, leading to a lot of waiting periods for newer data to arrive. This delay in data recency is not ideal for making strategic decisions in real time. While the reporting capabilities of Amazon’s API are a step up from the previous obscurity of the Facebook-to-Amazon Black Box, it is simply not the real-time data connection that we wish it was.
Lack of User-Matchable Data
Ideally, conversion data should be paired with user-matchable metadata, enabling platforms like Facebook to match data back to specific customers to gain insights into your customers’ behavior. However, Amazon’s API provides only purchase data and data related to purchase values. So, while this data can help identify which ad campaigns are driving revenue, it doesn’t contribute to Facebook-Meta’s machine learning models and therefore, results in low user-match rates.
What’s The Verdict: Is Amazon’s Attribution API The Glimmer of Light We Have Been Waiting For?
The current functionality of Amazon’s Attribution API is reminiscent of the early days of Facebook’s attribution pixel. While it does shed some light, it does not yet quite illuminate the Facebook to Amazon Black Box to the degree we would hope. Like Facebook’s initial pixel launch, Amazon’s attribution product falls short in terms of its ability to help sellers enhance ad performance and its data quality, primarily due to its low user-match rates. For example, if we were to evaluate the API’s data, it would receive a low Event Match Quality score on Facebook’s Events Manager.
How Does Popsixle Recommend eCommerce Brands Use Amazon’s Attribution API To Enhance Ad Performance?
If your eCommerce brand is directing traffic from Facebook ads to Amazon, you should definitely explore this platform. And with Popsixle, there’s no need for any additional steps.
While the data recency of Amazon’s Attribution API is currently limited, we recommend that you download the data retrievable once per day and upload it to Facebook via offline events. Again, given its current drawbacks, it’s not worth building a server-to-server connection just yet. However, as Amazon continues to evolve and refine this attribution tool, this may change in the future.
So, for now, it’s a waiting game. Stay tuned for updates and improvements that will hopefully enhance the power and effectiveness of Amazon’s Attribution API.
Keep in mind – it is just the beginning and we are optimistic about the immense potential for data-driven attribution to provide valuable insights for eCommerce brand owners like you.
Amplify Attribution To Maximize Ad Performance
Knowing how to optimize your advertising efforts is key to digital marketing success and scaling the growth of your business. Ready to see what supercharged attribution can do for you? Take the first step by reaching out to digital marketing experts at The Snow Agency and see how a customized digital marketing strategy can help you reach new heights of performance.