Do you advertise your Amazon products through non-Amazon channels like Facebook ads or Google searches? If so, you could be leaving money on the table.
For sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry and selling in Amazon’s US store, Amazon’s Brand Referral Bonus is an opportunity to earn, on average, a 10% bonus of the sales price on sales generated from non-Amazon marketing efforts. If you aren’t earning a Brand Referral Bonus yet, here’s how it works…
Measure the impact of non-Amazon marketing
When you promote your products on non-Amazon channels—such as search ads, email marketing, and your own website—we call that “non-Amazon marketing.” If you want to understand how your non-Amazon marketing efforts perform, Amazon Attribution can help you monitor these campaigns and make data-driven decisions to improve performance.
With Amazon Attribution, you can add “tags” to your product listing links. When you share these links in non-Amazon marketing, the tags allow you to track the performance and efficiency of your campaigns (available metrics include detailed page views, Add to Carts, and sales).
Brand Referral Bonus is used by sellers who are enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry and selling in Amazon’s US store in conjunction with Amazon Attribution. To earn the bonus, you first need to register for an Amazon Ads account and start using Amazon Attribution (Amazon Ads login required).
How to get a Brand Referral Bonus
Once you’ve registered for an Amazon Ads account, sign up for the Brand Referral Bonus on Seller Central (login required). Then use Amazon Attribution to create a campaign and add attribution tags to your product listing URLs. You can find Amazon Attribution in the “Reporting and Measurement” menu in the Amazon Ads console
Once you add your attribution tags to your product listing URLs, embed these links in your non-Amazon marketing campaigns. Any sales your brand receives from these tagged links will receive a bonus—this includes both your promoted products and any additional products the same customer purchases from you within the 14 days after they click on the link with your Amazon Attribution tag.
Amazon distributes the bonus in the form of a referral fee credit—reducing your total referral fee cost—after a two-month waiting period to accommodate order cancellations and customer returns. For example, any bonus earned in June will be credited to your account and applied to referral fees starting in August.
Each product category has a different estimated bonus rate, ranging from 2%-30% depending on the volume of sales and product category.
Learn how to estimate your bonus.
Make the most of your Brand Referral Bonus
Ohid Islam is an Amazon product manager on the brand experience team that helped launch the Brand Referral Bonus. “Profitability is a key issue sellers face,” Ohid says. “My team is working to develop tools to solve this problem and improve marketing efficiency. Brand Referral Bonus is one such tool designed to do exactly that.”
Ohid has seen sellers get creative to make the most of the Brand Referral Bonus for optimizing sales and increasing profitability. Here shared three specific tactics he has seen brands use to make the most of their bonus:
1. Jump-start new product sales
When you launch a new product on Amazon, or if you have products with low sales, try to increase the discoverability and conversion of your products with non-Amazon marketing. Consider including your new product in emails to your current customer base, or sharing your new product with your followers on social channels, so you can simultaneously earn a bonus and get your first sales. Additionally, you may want to consider other ways to increase product visibility, such as advertising, Vine reviews, or optimizing your product detail page.
2. Use Sponsored Display to reengage shoppers
Amazon Ads can help increase the visibility of your products. For example, when you promote products in non-Amazon marketing, you can use Sponsored Display ads to reengage customers who viewed your product but haven’t purchased it yet.
By reminding customers of your product as they continue to browse both on- and off-Amazon, you can drive conversion on products that already received views from your non-Amazon marketing efforts, thereby helping offset your ad spend and increasing your return on ad spend (ROAS).
Follow these steps while creating a Sponsored Display campaign creation to help drive sales of the products you promote through non-Amazon campaigns:
- Name your Sponsored Display campaign something related to the Brand Referral Bonus so you can quickly find it in the future.
- Advertise the products you are promoting through non-Amazon marketing.
- During campaign creation, choose “Audiences” targeting, and then “Views remarketing; Advertised products” to engage audiences who viewed your specific product detail page during a specified lookback window.
- Brand Referral Bonus uses a 14-day attribution window, so we recommend changing your Sponsored Display campaign’s lookback period to 14 days to match.
3. Combine Brand Referral Bonus with Deals
Brands have promoted their Deals, such as Deal of the Day, through non-Amazon marketing to increase the reach and sell-through rate and improve the efficiency of Deals, while earning a brand referral bonus on the sales.
Try adding a call to action (CTA) that references your deal in your non-Amazon marketing efforts, to drive conversion and create urgency. For example: Save 25% now or Shop our Deal of the Day on May 15.
Understand your Brand Referral Bonus earnings
In order to accommodate order cancellations and customer returns, there is a two-month wait time before Brand Referral Bonuses are credited to your account. Once you begin receiving a bonus on qualified sales, you can download your Brand Referral Bonus report in Seller Central (login required).
The report is refreshed every Friday to summarize the estimated bonus amount you’ve earned in the past 90 days, up to the previous Friday (for example, if you download the report on May 20, you will see the estimated bonus amount earned up to May 13).
Your earned bonus will be used as a credit to deduct referral fees on future transactions until the bonus is exhausted.
Check your credits by going to the Payments Page in Seller Central (login required) and downloading Date Range Reports from the 10th of each month for the next 10 days (for example, May 10–20). Transactions with 0 (zero) Selling Fees are the ones where the bonus was applied.
There are two additional ways to track bonus disbursements in individual transaction details.
When the bonus partially or fully covers the referral fee and there is a tax on the fee, bonus payments show up in the “Discount on referral fee” line, as illustrated below:
When bonus payments cover the entire referral fee and there is no tax on the fee, the bonus is applied in the background and the referral fee section will not be shown in the transaction, as illustrated below:
Start earning your bonus
Whether you’re already running non-Amazon marketing or looking for an incentive to do so, the Brand Referral Bonus is a great way to earn a bonus back on your efforts.
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