Setup Amazon’s New Brand Referral Bonus With Attribution For External Traffic

Hey everyone, and happy #TipTuesday.

Today, I want to talk to you about a brand referral bonus that Amazon recently announced. I am going to explain to you guys how it works and how you can claim it.

So what is the Amazon brand referral bonus about?

It is strictly for registered brands. Within Seller Central, if you click on brands, you can scroll down, and there, you will find the brand referral bonus. Click on it and it will redirect you to another page.

To benefit from the referral bonus you have to drive traffic to Amazon from off of Amazon. Whether that traffic is from your Facebook page, or from your Google search ads, anywhere where you’re driving traffic to Amazon using a link to your product page or your storefront, which results in a conversion, Amazon is going to pay you a bonus of 10% of the product sales driven to Amazon by your non-Amazon marketing efforts.

The more traffic you bring, the more opportunities you have to earn a bonus. The bonus is provided as a credit on your referral fees. To clarify, it is turned into a credit on your referral fees, meaning it is paid for you by Amazon as part of your product sales fees on Amazon.

When you list a product on Amazon, you pay two different fees. One is the fulfillment fee, which is the cost for Amazon to fulfill that item to the customer. And the other is a referral fee, which is a percentage of the total price of the product. And that is the cost for you to list your product on the amazing Amazon.com.

Notice if you check your inventory dashboard and view your Amazon fees, you will see the referral fee and the fulfillment fee. This means the referral bonus money will be converted into credit. Now take a look at your transactions. If you go to your reports, click on your payments report, or your business reports, your payments report will show your transactions for each product sale and all the fees that were charged for that product sale.

In this case, if that product sale resulted as an effort of you driving traffic from off of Amazon and that traffic ended up converting, Amazon will give you 10% back from that as a credit on that referral fee.

We just did the setup process now and it was super easy to do. We have Google Search Ads leading to Amazon, and those are driven by a link to Amazon. We have also set up a two-step URL so that we’re able to not just drive traffic straight to the product page but to give some keywords in there that will also help us rank higher for keywords. We have been doing this for years and a lot of people always ask me if this isn’t illegal. To answer you, no, Amazon also uses two-step URLs. However, we can delve into this topic further in the Facebook group and you guys are welcome to ask me as many questions as you want. Because Amazon is paying bonuses now, this is a wonderful way for us to help to drive traffic to our listings.

Here is a step-by-step process of how I did it

First: You have to generate a tag. And this is just a tag that goes to the end of your link of whatever it is that you’re driving to Amazon. In our Google search ads, we have a link that goes to Amazon.

Second: Now that you have generated this tag, we go into our Google Search Ads dashboard, edit our ad and we add this tag to the end of it.

Third: Then we go back into the Amazon side of things, and we add the tag to our campaigns.

So we create an order, and then we add that link that we’re driving to that product with that tag included to this dashboard for Amazon to track so that they know that you’re driving this traffic as part of this referral program. This means they will be able to track it and then we can also come back into this dashboard and check what is converting from those links that are coming from off of Amazon and leading to Amazon so that you can also track it from your Google ads, your Facebook ads, or whatever dashboard that is.

However, you’re also tracking it here in this brand referral bonus dashboard that is going to tell you which of those links that you’ve generated, including those referral tags have actually converted to sales. And, for those sales, you’ll receive a credit on your referral fees, 10% per sale.

It is a very easy process, you’re just going to set it up on both ends, and Amazon does a great job of walking you through it.

So check it out and let us know how it’s going, what kind of traffic you are driving, and if you are using this with your organic traffic as well off of Amazon.

I believe this new tool adds such an interesting dynamic because Amazon attribution is kind of clunky. And that’s what’s being used to track this. However, I am hoping that Amazon is going to put some more effort into their attribution program now that they have this brand referral bonus.

If you haven’t implemented this yet what are you waiting for? Let’s get some bonuses! We could all use some help on the Amazon side with fees.

 

Take care friends! Thanks so much for tuning in For today’s Tip Tuesday tool review.