Amazon Attribution Links Remove the Guesswork from Your Ad Campaign
One ads strategy I typically recommend involves running multiple ads to determine which will resonate with the audience. I spend some money and sell some books, but if I have five ads for the same book, how do I know which one is making the sales?
Before Amazon introduced Amazon attribution links, the advertiser on Facebook—yes, Facebook, not Amazon—had to guess.
Intelligence could steer the decisions. A low cost-per-click or a high unique outbound click-through rate were good indicators that an ad was working for a given audience.
But Amazon attribution links remove the guesswork by showing you exactly how many books an ad has sold on the platform.
You can create an attribution link in your Amazon advertising console by clicking the symbol that looks like a graph on the left side of the window. This will be familiar to anyone who has ever created an Amazon Ad. You can find how-to videos to guide you through the rest of the process, so I won’t attempt to cover it here.
Figure 2
What you see here is the report for one of my campaigns. I have multiple ads running, and the identifying name for each—as shown in the “Ad Group” column—is the same as that used in my Facebook Ads. You can call them whatever you want, as long as you can identify which line in figure 2 corresponds to which ad on Facebook.
This is a fairly extreme example, but hopefully, you can see that ad 6 is outperforming the other ads by a significant margin. Ad 2 is also performing well. One reason ad 6 is performing so well is its budget, which is higher than the others. Therefore, to fully analyze the results, it may be necessary to create a spreadsheet to calculate books sold and KENP pages read per dollar spent.
With this spreadsheet and a simple analysis, you can run Facebook Ads and use the links from Amazon attribution to see which ads to cut and which to push. Of course, this only works for traffic driven to Amazon as a shopping platform. But if you are wide and have more sales somewhere other than Amazon, you can use the results from Amazon sales as a benchmark for ads to other platforms.
Keep in mind, too, that although I have only talked about using these to aid your Facebook advertising so far, they can be used anywhere.
I have created links to use on Bookbub ads and successfully identified which ads on Bookbub were actually selling books. You could use the links to measure the effectiveness of a promotion you have paid for on Written Word Media, Robin Reads, BookDoggy, or on one of several other sites available. You could use the links to see how many of your newsletter subscribers make a purchase from an offer you give them, or you could employ them to optimize author swaps on services such as BookFunnel or StoryOrigin.
Amazon attribution links allowed me to double my ad spend and more than double my income. I hope it can help you do the same.
Steve Higgs
Now retired from the military, he is having a ball writing mystery stories and crime thrillers and claims to have more than a hundred books forming an unruly queue in his head as they clamour to get out. He lives in the south-east corner of England with a duo of lazy sausage dogs. Surrounded by rolling hills, brooding castles, and vineyards, he doubts he will ever leave.
Start or Join a Conversation About This Article:
When Writing Means Business, Storytellers Read Indie Author Magazine
In the past, I’ve hired editors, cover designers, and even a virtual assistant. Passing off those responsibilities makes sense, but internal formatting always seems so straightforward. At what point is it worth investing in professional formatting services? Frugal Formatter Dear Frugal, Oh my, that moniker sounds like you’re an inhabitant of Middle Earth, but I digress. Formatting your own manuscript seems as simple as building a bookcase from IKEA: just insert tab A into slot
Despite my best marketing efforts, my backlist just isn’t selling. How do I decide whether to go back to the drawing board and refocus the series or cut my losses and unpublish it? At a Crossroads Dear Crossroads, I feel your frustration, love. When a backlist underperforms, it’s like owning a vintage auto that sputters more than it purrs. Do you tune it up or trade it in for a new model? Let’s hash out
I’ve only ever written in one particular genre. I have an audience built there, a decent backlist, and a few ideas for future books. But I just recently got an idea for a story in an entirely different genre—one that I don’t even know I’ll continue past this book. Do I write the new idea or stick with what I know? Pestered by a Plot Bunny Dearest Plot Bunny, The temptation of an off-brand manuscript
We’ll send you our best articles, special offers, and industry updates
Would You Like a Free Issue?
Hello! I’m Indie Annie, and I would love to send you a copy of this month’s issue of Indie Author Magazine. Just join our email list and I’ll drop it in your inbox!
