#061: Amazon Attribution Improves Your Facebook Ads

Read Time: 3.5 Minutes

Amazon Attribution (the tool many authors use to track the performance of their Facebook Ads when selling books on Amazon) gets a bad rap for not being 100% accurate and having a data lag.

Despite these "flaws" I still believe every author driving traffic to their books on Amazon from Facebook Ads should use Amazon Attribution.

Why?

Because some data is better than no data.

Before Amazon Attribution

Amazon Attribution launched back in September/October 2022. Before then, the only (dodgy) way to know which Ads were selling books was by using another tool from Amazon called Amazon Associates.

I've used it myself, but I call it dodgy because it goes against Amazon's terms of service to use Amazon Associate links in paid Ads.

Plus, Amazon Associates could only report sales, not page reads.

On top of this, it was only a matter of time before Amazon figured out you were using Amazon Associate links in your Facebook Ads and they'd close your Amazon Associate account down.

Anyway, I digress.

If you were playing by the rules before Amazon Attribution launched, the only way to assess the performance of your Facebook Ads was to use the metrics in your Facebook Ads dashboard, such as:

– CPC (Cost Per Click)

– CTR (Click-Through Rate)

– CPM (Cost Per Mille - Cost Per 1,000 Impressions)

You could also look at your Amazon Bestseller Rank and see if there was an improvement. The same goes for overall royalties vs overall Ad spend.

But so many factors can affect rank and royalties, it was only a way to look at things from a 30,000ft view.

Even if our rank improved, or royalties jumped, there was no way we could tie that performance back to a specific Facebook Ad.

Yes, there were complicated tests and experiments you could run, such as only having one active Ad at a time, creating complex spreadsheets and formulas, etc, but that's just not me.

Simple wins every time in my book.

To put it bluntly, before Amazon Attribution, we were guessing.

After Amazon Attribution

With Amazon Attribution now in our toolkit, if you use it how I recommend inside Facebook Ads Mastery For Authors, and create separate Amazon Attribution links for every Ad, you can see which Ads are generating sales and/or page reads.

The reality is that some Ads will look great in your Facebook Ads dashboard (low CPCs, high CTRs, etc), but from a conversion standpoint, they're about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

If you create an Ad that catches attention and generates a lot of clicks, your costs will be low and you think you're onto a winner.

Until you look at your Amazon Attribution data that is.

This has happened to me on countless occasions.

I call these Trojan Horse Ads.

Ads that look great on the surface but are in fact just haemorrhaging money.

The 2 Most Important Metrics

Although the Amazon Attribution data isn't 100% accurate, it does allow us to calculate the two most important metrics of any advertising campaign, in any niche:

– Cost Per Sale

– Conversion Rate

Out of these 2 metrics, Cost Per Sale is the most important, but they are both critical to understanding the true performance of an Ad.

Cost Per Sale is simply how much it's costing us to generate a single sale (or borrow) of our book from a specific Facebook Ad.

The formula for Cost Per Sale is: Spend ÷ Number of Sales and/or Borrows

Conversion Rate is telling us how many people bought/borrowed the book from a specific Facebook Ad (e.g. if 100 clicks generated 5 sales, that's a 5% conversion rate)

The formula for Conversion Rate is: (Sales and/or Borrows ÷ Clicks) x 100

The target Cost Per Sale is going to differ based on a number of variables such as:

– Price of books

– Number of Books in Series

– Number of Books in Catalog

– Readthrough

These numbers will determine Customer Lifetime Value.

A higher Customer Lifetime Value means you can spend more to acquire a customer.

To give you an idea of our targets for these metrics:

– Cost Per Sale: £5 (or lower)

– Conversion Rate: 2% (or higher)

When analyzing our Facebook Ads, provided the Conversion Rate of an Ad is above 2%, I make the rest of my decisions based on the Cost Per Sale.

The metrics in the Facebook Ads dashboard (e.g. CPC, CTR, CPM, etc) are secondary metrics to me and just help me tell the story of an Ad. I don't make final decisions from them.

I use Cost Per Sale and Conversion Rate to do this.

Wrapping Up...

Inside Facebook Ads Mastery For Authors, I provide a tool to help you calculate the Cost Per Sale and Conversion Rate.

You simply enter your numbers from Amazon Attribution (Sales and Page Reads) and Facebook Ads (Clicks and Spend) and the tool does everything else.

This makes decision-making so much easier.

Ultimately, making decisions on an emotional level is rarely going to turn out well.

We need hard data to make informed and confident decisions.

And although Amazon Attribution isn't perfect, it's 100x better than having zero data to work with.

If you've been on the fence about using Amazon Attribution, I would highly encourage you to give it a go. I don't think you'll look back.

Thank you for reading.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

To Your Success
– Matt