[Kenshoo] Amazon Attribution & Building the Top of the Funnel

June 30, 2020

Meet The Speakers

Sean Marder

Director of Ecommerce Solutions at Kenshoo

Listen to the podcast

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Sean Marder talks about Kenshoo and the Amazon Attribution program
The data and metrics provided by Amazon’s attribution tool, and how these are helping sellers optimize their marketing
How the attribution tool works for vendors versus sellers
At what point should businesses start using attribution in their day to day?
Sean discusses how Amazon DSP ads work with attribution
Where to connect with Sean Marder and Kenshoo

In this episode…

In the past, Amazon sellers have struggled to track data and metrics about the traffic being driven to their products from other platforms, such as Facebook and Google ads. With their new attribution tool, however, this is all about to change.

Amazon Attribution is an analytics and measurement console that helps brands track their advertising performance across multiple channels. Sean Marder and his team at Kenshoo have been working closely with Amazon to get this attribution tool to you.

In this episode of the Buy Box Experts podcast, Eric Stopper interviews Sean Marder, the Director of Ecommerce Solutions at Kenshoo, about the exciting new Amazon Attribution tool. Sean explains the benefits of using this tool, the type of data and insights it provides, and how it will work for you. Stay tuned.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode

Buy Box Experts applies decades of e-commerce experience to successfully manage their clients’ marketplace accounts. The Buy Box account managers specialize in combining an understanding of their clients’ business fundamentals and their in-depth expertise in the Amazon Marketplace.

The team works with marketplace technicians using a system of processes, proprietary software, and extensive channel experience to ensure your Amazon presence captures the opportunity in the marketplace–not only producing greater revenue and profits but also reducing or eliminating your business’ workload.

Buy Box prides itself on being one of the few agencies with an SMB (small to medium-sized business) division and an Enterprise division. Buy Box does not commingle clients among divisions as each has unique needs and requirements for proper account management.

Learn more about Buy Box Experts at BuyBoxExperts.com

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:09
Welcome to the Buy Box Experts podcast we bring to light the unique opportunities brands face in today’s e-commerce world.

Eric Stopper 0:18
Hey and welcome to the Buy Box Experts podcast. This is Eric Stopper. The Buy Box Experts podcast is brought to you by Buy Box Experts. We take ambitious brands and make them unbeatable. We have a team of consultants here, please come and talk to us. We’d love to help you understand where you’re going wrong on Amazon or even where you know where you’re actually doing things pretty well. Just to validate the current activities that you’re doing day to day and what your team is trying to accomplish. Come and talk to us. Go to buyboxexperts.com click on the free analysis button. We’d be happy to talk with you.

This is the first in a 10-part series with Kenshoo. We’re going to be discussing some of the finer details of new products and lesser observed products on Amazon. Today I’m joined by Sean Marder, the director of e-commerce solutions at Kenshoo. Sean, welcome to the show.

Sean Marder 1:11
Thanks, Eric got to be here.

Eric Stopper 1:13
So today, we’re talking about attribution specifically. And I understand that you had to go and you went and had a conversation with Amazon to get some of the inside scoop on where attribution is and what is possible through the platform. And so I’d love to kind of get the brief on how that conversation went. Sure. Yeah.

Sean Marder 1:32
So a little background on us, right? We’re an API partner and you know, an Amazon partner for the better part of three years now. And you know, pretty much once a quarter, we go on Amazon into our QB ours and, you know, going in depth on the specifics of all the Amazon search programs and Amazon attribution is a program that we’ve actually been partnering with. For over a year and a half to help the find their products help under you know, drive into what will eventually be in a pod API accessible product and it overall it’s a, it’s something that’s really cool. My background personally is in search before I started working in Amazon in e-commerce around five years ago. And there’s always been this sort of gap between what you can expect from Amazon advertising compared to quote-unquote, traditional search advertising, right, and I’m making air quotes but Amazon attribution is kind of the first step in understanding more on how your advertising when driven to Amazon performs, right, we’re still not going to get things like path conversion stuff that you might expect in Google Analytics, but this is really that first step and again, outside Amazon, or excuse me, outside average rising drift driving to Amazon

Eric Stopper 3:01
And so some examples of that, right? We’re talking Facebook ads, Google ads as well, like what types of advertising channels allow Amazon attribution to plug in and to view those things?

Sean Marder 3:13
Yeah, pretty much anything that has that can drive through a link. Right? So Amazon attribution works through, you know, a click URL, a tracking pixel on through a click, and then through sometimes even views, right? So if through an email, if it’s on your website, like you said, on Google ads, or Bing, or Facebook, or Instagram, all those kinds of things, you’ll be able to, again, drive to Amazon, which you may or may or not, may or may not have been doing already. But now you can directly attribute the sales that are caused by those after those advertisements, right, which is really, really cool.

Eric Stopper 3:51
So I mean, attribution is the word that we want, that we want to talk about here and I understand that there’s a bunch of different ways to to attribute the way that a sale comes through Amazon, right? And this and this goes for most advertising platforms in general, you’ve got first touch, you’ve got last touch, you’ve got like a multivariate touch that considers the customer journey, which is arguably the best, right? Because then you’re getting really clear insights into, okay, this person saw a Google ad and they came to the website and they left. And then they searched for us on Amazon, and they went to my competitor, and like being able to map that whole journey is really important. So with Amazon’s attribution tool as of right now, what are some of the things that we can actually see, some of the views that we have the insights that we can get from the data via attribution?

Sean Marder 4:44
Yeah, there’s actually a lot of cool metrics that they provide. It’s actually probably and when compared to DSP, and Amazon advertising via sponsored product sponsor brands, it’s has a lot of different touch points that they report on and we can look at our Detail page views by an ad we can look at add to carts driven by that we can then obviously looking at the purchases themselves and the units alongside of those, right. So they kind of give you a really clear picture of when you are advertising via Google and driving to Amazon, right via Facebook and Amazon, what sort of stage each consumer is added and what kind of action those ads encourage, right? So you could have an ad that’s really good at getting added to carts, but maybe you know, doesn’t have enough of a value prop to drive them to purchase or get them getting a lot of views on the page. But again, maybe it’s getting to that next point of Add To Cart so you can kind of see all those little parts on the way to ultimately getting that purchase. And oh, sorry, go ahead.

Eric Stopper 5:52
Well, I was I was gonna ask, does does Amazon recommend any certain actions based off of, you know, the events that happen so Let’s say for instance that somebody added my product to cart but they didn’t purchase does Amazon give us information insights into what exactly I should do to my listing or my price or whatever in order to, to offset the fact that they didn’t purchase?

Sean Marder 6:15
Currently? No. But you know, this is where experts like yourselves come in, right is to kind of talk through these scenarios and look at that consumer journey and see where there might be opportunities to optimize it. Right, because there’s so much sort of interesting testing that you can do with this that may not have previously been available, things like creative messaging, Detail page authorizations, you know, optimizing your store page, all these fun things that you can really latch on to in a way that was previously unavailable. Because I mean, at the end of the day, what this really is encouraging is top of funnel advertising, right? Like there was there were not I would say not enough ways to train Drive awareness of your product and see the effect of that awareness directly when it came to, you know, off Amazon advertising and, and this is a, it’s a, you know, maybe an upper to mid funnel way to start driving outside traffic to your detail pages to your stores and seeing the direct effect of that.

Eric Stopper 7:20
Okay, so that makes a lot of sense. So let me I want to try to wrap my head around exactly what insights we’re going to be able to get through. I’ve played with the tool a little bit and I found it clunky, like a lot of the things that Amazon releases at first, and obviously they’re always working on it. So if somebody comes from an ad on Facebook, right, I’m able to see that. Number one that person came to the detail page, they viewed it based off of that specific ad. Am I able to see if that same customer came back and, you know, came to my Detail page through an Amazon ad or through an organic listing, click

Sean Marder 8:00
were unsure of outright at this point of the exact look back window. But the view attribution method would allow for that, right. Like if they viewed an ad and came back, you would see that purchase from the view. And the same thing for unclick. Right. So if someone got to that stage, and you know this is and they click through on the product, then you would eventually see that conversion attributed to that click or to that view, right.

Eric Stopper 8:29
delineation that you could achieve. That makes a lot of sense. And I do want to back up because a lot of the people that are listening are probably looking for attribution on their Seller Central or their vendor central account. Let’s let’s break down the differences real quick. So can vendors have access to attribution? And how did they get that?

Sean Marder 8:47
Sure, yeah. So vendors and sellers could have access to Amazon attribution, you can just go I think you can see I just google it here, right, you can just go to advertising on amazon.com. And there’s an attribution Sort of a sub domain there slash Amazon dash attribution and you can sign up there or register and start driving traffic to Amazon from your website or from your other ads.

Eric Stopper 9:12
And for those two views, are they different? are they offering the same products to vendor and seller in terms of the attribution tool?

Sean Marder 9:20
There’s some minor differences, right, like, as there are for any vendor versus seller sort of product and Amazon right now, I believe that sellers do not currently have access to the view base conversions. That being said, the way Amazon moves, you know, they can move pretty quick. It can be there tomorrow. But again, at the end of the day, though, this is something that if you’re driving, if you’re driving traffic to Amazon, or even if you’re driving traffic to your DDC site and you want to see how that is affected by our how that Amazon is affected by those ads, you know, this is a good place to do it. One really interesting piece that I want to touch on is the fact that you can get Amazon sales data from driving DTC, at least from Google ads. This isn’t available in the social quiet yet. But if you’re driving traffic from Google ads to your DTC site, and let’s say your DTC site is it converting at a, like a Hyatt or like a rate that you would really like, sure, you’re able to then see what amount of people bounce from your website, right and then if they purchase on Amazon or not, which is really really cool, right? Because they are the amazon customer might be going to your website, your research, and then ultimately purchase it on Amazon if you’re listing it there. And this is going to give you some insight into whether or not that’s happening.

Eric Stopper 10:47
One one point that I’ve been making with a lot of the people that the clients that we have is the people who are bouncing from your website that are buying on Amazon are probably just Amazon Prime members, right? Like they just want to go Check it out. And that’s a natural thing that they’re going to do. And so this is actually going to allow us to quantify how much of your bounce rate is attributable to people who just want to buy it on Amazon. That’s that’s one insight that it sounds like we’re able to get from this.

Sean Marder 11:16
Yeah, absolutely. And on top of that, this is especially relevant for maybe businesses who only sell on Amazon. But they have a website just for that purpose. And they’re losing that tracking in between. This is a really good opportunity to not lose that customer to see exactly how they interact with your website and then interact with Amazon, right? So this is very relevant for we work with a lot of enterprise CPG clients, right and who don’t sell direct, right, they only sell in stores or Amazon or other retailers. And this allows them to continue their brand building efforts via Google ads and being in those kinds of things but still be able to see what sorts of conversions those ads drive on Amazon.

Eric Stopper 12:03
That makes sense. Yeah. So it really can apply the tool and can be used by anybody and everybody. Do you have to be brand registered to use attribution? for sellers? Yes.

Unknown Speaker 12:14
Yeah, for sure.

Eric Stopper 12:14
Okay, but not for vendors. That’s, that’s good to know. So, the last question that I have for you is, right, obviously, if you have the resources to be able to use attribution, you should probably start playing with it and learning about it. But at what phase Do you think and this is less from Amazon and more of your kind and can choose opinion? At what point do you think that someone should really start sinking their teeth into it? And trying to understand this, this kind of flow of customers through their business isn’t enough to just say, like, Oh, I’m spending a whole bunch on sponsored ads, and that’s doing really well for me, but I want to get more specific, more targeted, more efficient in my ads. What’s the kind of stage that businesses should be at when they start considering using attribution in their day to day?

Sean Marder 13:02
I Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s, it’s, it’s like let’s say you already maxed out your sponsored ads or sponsored brands, right? sponsored product sponsored brands. Those are after the core of the very lower funnel, product right. Sponsored brands are great for building your brand on Amazon and driving to store pages and product pages and obviously, sponsored products or for owning the SERP. But there’s a point of diminishing returns in which you’re no longer able to capture new audiences, because you’re limited by the audience of Amazon, which, you know, it itself is large. So it’s not like you’re gonna have a hard time spending money there. But it’s saying like, Okay, well, I actually want to capture people off of Amazon and drive them to my pages, right people who, if you’re, let’s say you’re running a display campaign, and you know, you want to take advantage of your, you know, off site placements, you can drive us to Amazon. See, I mean, you can already obviously do this with Amazon DSP, but see the attributed purchases from those ads. And again, like if you if you want to control your brand on Google, write it on your brand terms on Google, drive them to Amazon, and then see what those conversions are or bid on the same non branded terms that you are at Amazon, on Google on Bing, driving Amazon see the result of those right so it’s these are all upper funnel, their category of building they’re in there. It’s really incremental dollars that you maybe wouldn’t have had before because honestly, it’s a different audience. Right? These are people looking elsewhere. These are people that aren’t on Amazon at this very moment. And it said you can drive them to Amazon purchase, right?

Eric Stopper 14:45
You mentioned you mentioned DSP and i think that’s that’s important because there I was, I was talking to a client of ours and they were they were running some DSP ads and and by the way, for those that don’t know, the DSP is the display network that Amazon uses to populate Your Amazon ads elsewhere outside of Amazon. So I am imbd recipe websites. They bought a company that has a bunch of servers for this kind of stuff. And it’s pretty cool. But it didn’t have attribution at the very beginning. And when I was having this conversation, they were saying, Well look, we’re spending on this DSP and it is super top of funnel, right? Like we’re getting people literally when they’re not searching for anything, just trying to target their awareness and be in their peripheral. What they found was that there was a direct correlation with the amount of money that they spent on their DSP ads and the amount of branded searches for their product on Amazon. And while they couldn’t attribute those two things, it sounds like attribution is pretty much the key to that to understanding Look, if I’m spinning up the top of funnel, how much is it actually making me at the point of purchase is that is that fair to say? Well,

Sean Marder 15:54

DSP will run just fine to get you know view through attribution and Brand Halo without the Amazon attribution platform Amazon attribution is more so targeted to again those those off site to Amazon right products that aren’t run directly through the Amazon DSP mean, you could take if you’re not running through Amazon DSP you could technically use like if you’re doing like the trade desk or dBm or something like that. You could use the Amazon attribution click tags, the tracking URLs, but it’s more again more So focus Google ads, Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising, which are you know, which have some really powerful targeting mechanisms that you can now leverage to, you know, discover new audiences or you know, retarget your, your existing audiences through email or on site cookies, and then again, see those results when driven to to Amazon.

Eric Stopper 16:50
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, Sean, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on the show guys if you need attribution help if you want to take this step with business First of all, always, I always say try it right like try to fool around with a tool and see if you can if you can get something out of it. And then if you run into snags please come and talk to Buy Box Experts in our team. And Sean, how do people get in touch with Kenshoo? How? Where should I send them?

Sean Marder 17:16
Sure. Yeah, I mean they could, you can reach out directly to me if interested [email protected] or feel free to you know, visit the website at kenshoo.com and get in touch. Awesome.

Eric Stopper 17:27
Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. To finish today’s podcast, I want to share some final thoughts for third party sellers. To be successful on Amazon. You’ve got to get reviews. We at Buy Box Experts are really big fans of the team over at eComEngine. And it’s tools that help Amazon sellers simplify the process of soliciting reviews from customers who purchase their products. For more information, go to e-commerce engine calm. Thanks for joining us today.

Outro 17:53
Thanks for listening to the Buy Box Experts podcast, be sure to click subscribe. Check us out on the web. And we’ll see you next time.