Hi there,

Welcome to a new edition of Reedsy’s marketing newsletter! In this issue, we’ll be looking at a tool Amazon released to authors a few months ago. It's one that I think can be a real marketing game-changer: Amazon Attribution.

“If Amazon Attribution has been live to authors for months, why only talk about it now?” 

On the one (honest) hand: procrastination. On the other (also honest) hand: because I wanted to test the heck out of it before recommending it to you.

But let’s start from the beginning…

What the heck is this “Amazon Attribution” thing?

Amazon Attribution is a tool available to all authors with an active Amazon Advertising account. As a reminder (if you haven’t yet read our latest book on Amazon Ads for Authors), any author can set up their own Advertising account through the “Marketing” tab of either their KDP dashboard or Amazon Author Central account.

Its function is simple: it allows you to generate special, trackable product links to use in your marketing and advertising campaigns. After a few days, Amazon will showcase all the traffic that visited these links (Detailed Pages Views), as well as resulting Orders, Sales value, and KENP reads (for books in Kindle Unlimited).

Accessing Amazon Attribution

When logged into your Amazon Advertising account, you’ll find Amazon Attribution in the sidebar, under “Measurement & Reporting.”

Amazon Attribution has a similar structure to Amazon Advertising, with Campaigns and Ad groups. Each Campaign can contain several Ad groups, with each Ad group corresponding to a trackable link.

While Attribution links can only point to one product on the store, an Attribution campaign can contain several products — and will report on the sales of all the products included in the campaign.

Let’s say that you’re selling a book in e-book, paperback, and hardback format. You can include all three formats in an Amazon Attribution campaign, but the Attribution links you set up in your Ad groups can only point to one of these (e.g. the e-book). If a customer clicks on that link and buys a different format, Amazon Attribution will report that sale only if you included that other format in your campaign.

This Amazon Attribution campaign tracks the sales of all three formats of the book

The same goes for series: if you include all your series’ books in an Attribution campaign, and a customer ends up buying three of them, all three sales will show up in your Attribution dashboard… as long as they happen within 14 days of the link click.

The 14-day attribution window

If you read Amazon Ads for Authors, you’ll know that attribution windows are a huge (and often overlooked) part of advertising. The attribution window is the maximum amount of time in which an advertising platform can claim that a click led to a conversion.

Amazon’s advertising platform and Amazon Attribution use a 14-day attribution window. So they will record all relevant sales of any products in your campaign, provided these sales happen within 14 days after a click.

This is not an issue if you’re selling just one book. If a reader clicks on your attribution link and doesn’t buy the book within 14 days, then you can pretty much infer that that click didn’t lead to a sale.

If you’re marketing a 20-book series, however, it’s a different game. While you can include all 20 books in an Attribution campaign, Amazon will only report on the sales that happen in the first 14 days after the click.

So if a reader clicks on your link, purchases book one immediately, devours it in a day, and then keeps reading one book of your series every day for the next 19 days, Amazon Attribution will log… only 14 orders out of the actual 20 that your campaign generated.

Here’s a real-life example:

As you can see, this Attribution campaign sold 13 copies of book 1, 7 of book 2, 5 of book 3, and 4 of all following books in the series. The ratio is relatively similar if we look at the KENP reads, with a progressive decrease from one book to another.

Now, there can be three different reasons for this gradual decline:

• Reason #1: This is the natural read-through of the series. Some readers won’t finish book 1, others will stop after book 2, etc.
• Reason #2: The read-through is actually much better than what is shown in this table, but many sales/reads happened outside of the conversion window.
• Reason #3: Some of the sales/reads of book 1 are fairly recent and the readers haven’t yet finished it, so the read-through might improve in the coming days.

Which of these three is it? There’s no way to know, and there could very well be a mix of them. If you want to remain conservative in your estimates, you can take these numbers at face value.

If you want to be more optimistic (or realistic), you can inflate them a bit (e.g. by 20%) to take into account the orders that may have happened outside the conversion window.

“The attribution window is one thing, but can we actually trust that Amazon Attribution accurately reports all the sales/reads coming from a given link?”

That’s an excellent question. For those of you who experimented with Amazon Affiliate links in the past, you’ll know that Amazon is known to “under-report” sales from affiliate links. 

Is it the same with Amazon Attribution? You’ll find out next week! 🧗🏻

Happy writing, and happy marketing,

Ricardo

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