Amazon Attribution and the Brand Referral Bonus: measuring the traffic you send to Amazon, and when Amazon pays you for it

If you spend money on Meta, Google, TikTok or email to send shoppers to Amazon, the ads console can’t see any of it. Amazon Attribution fills that gap: a tag on each link, and a report of what those shoppers did once they arrived. It is one of the measurement tools in our Amazon advertising UK guide, and it matters most to brands selling across channels, as we describe in running Amazon, TikTok Shop and your own site together.

In the US, Amazon goes further and pays brands a Brand Referral Bonus on the sales that traffic produces. UK sellers often read about it and assume it applies to Amazon.co.uk. It doesn’t. This guide covers both, and how to decide on profit whether external traffic is worth buying.

What Amazon Attribution is

Amazon describes Attribution as “a free, advertising and analytics measurement solution that provides insight into the on-Amazon impact of your marketing strategies across non-Amazon channels including search, social, display, video, email, affiliate/influencer campaigns"¹. It costs nothing¹.

It works with tagged links. You choose the products you want to measure, create one ad group per tactic, and Amazon generates a unique attribution tag for each, which you attach to the link in your ad, post or email². When a shopper clicks through and later views, adds to basket or buys on Amazon, the activity is credited to that tag.

Who can use it in the UK

The UK is on Amazon’s list of Attribution countries. Eligible users are professional sellers enrolled in Brand Registry, vendors, KDP authors, and agencies whose clients sell on Amazon; advertisers based elsewhere can use it if they sell in a listed country¹. You reach it through the Amazon Ads console or through tools built on the Amazon Ads API¹. Amazon renamed that console Amazon Ads Agent on 29 September 2026¹².

A few practical limits from the setup help²:

• A product must be in stock, with an image and a price, to be measured.
• Parent ASINs never appear in the product picker; select the children.
• For Google search and Facebook ads you can create campaigns in bulk: up to 100,000 Google keywords or 8,500 Facebook ads in one upload.

How Attribution credits a sale

Attribution uses a 14-day, last-touch model: a click gets credit only if the conversion happens within 14 days, and the credit goes to the most recent click⁴. Amazon’s example: a shopper clicks a video ad on 1 May, a display ad on 12 May and a search ad on 13 May, then buys on 17 May. The 1 May click is outside the window, and the 13 May search ad gets the credit⁴.

Compare that with sellers’ Sponsored Products, which credit sales over 7 days, on clicks only, last click⁵. The two systems use different windows and rules, so never add Attribution sales to your ads console sales and call it total advertising revenue.

The metrics, and which ones to trust

Reports cover engagement and conversion¹³:

Total metrics add the promoted products and the brand halo together³.

Two caveats, which are our practice rather than Amazon’s. First, Attribution sees only the shoppers who click your tagged link. Someone who watches a video and later searches your brand name on Amazon is invisible to it. Second, last touch hands the credit to the final click; if a shopper clicks your Meta ad and then a Sponsored Brands ad, both systems may claim a share of the same customer. Treat Attribution sales as a floor for some channels and a ceiling for others, and test before you scale.

The Brand Referral Bonus: what it is

The Brand Referral Bonus (BRB) rewards brands for sending traffic to Amazon. Amazon says it “credits Brands an average of 10% of sales from traffic you have driven to Amazon”, including other products from the same brand bought within 14 days of the click⁶.

The rules, from the help page and the terms⁶⁷:

• Qualified traffic must come from an off-Amazon ad tied to an Amazon Attribution tag, pointing to a detail page or Store for a brand where you hold the Brand Representative role. You must enrol in BRB and use Attribution.
• Qualified purchases are purchases of that brand’s products within 14 days of the click. Cancelled or returned orders drop out.
• The bonus can’t exceed the referral fee on a transaction, and it can only be used against future referral fees. It is credited two months after it is earned; a July sale is credited in September.
• Rates vary by category. Amazon’s estimated rates run from 5% (consumer electronics, cameras, computers) to 30% (Amazon device accessories), with 10% for most home and garden, kitchen, toys, pet, sports, office and “everything else” products.
• Associates can’t be combined with BRB for the same traffic, whoever claims each. Doing so can end your participation in both programmes.
• Tax information must be provided, or bonuses are held and expire after six months.

The US page and its UK equivalent are listed as sources 6 and 8, so you can check them yourself⁶⁸. If Amazon launches the programme in the UK, we will update this guide.

How the bonus offsets referral fees: a worked example

The bonus is easiest to understand as a discount on the referral fee for the sales you bring in. US referral fees for home and kitchen products are 15% of the total sales price¹⁰, and Kitchen’s estimated bonus rate is 10%⁶. So on externally referred kitchen sales, the effective referral fee falls from 15% to about 5%.

Here is what that does to a campaign. The price, fee and bonus rates are Amazon’s; the media cost, click-through and margin are illustrative.

The general test:

Which gives a break-even return on ad spend of 1 ÷ (margin + bonus rate). In the example, margin is $8.50 ÷ $29.99 = 28.3%. Without the bonus, the campaign has to return 3.53× its cost in sales to break even; with it, 2.61×.

For the UK, take the £24.99 product from our break-even ACoS guide, which keeps £5.52 before advertising: 26.5% of its £20.83 ex-VAT price. The UK referral fee for kitchen and most other categories is also 15%, with a 2% digital services fee on top⁹, and it is charged on a fee base that includes taxes¹³. There is no bonus to offset it. The same £2,000 campaign producing 192 orders makes 192 × £5.52 = £1,060 before media, or −£940.

Check which price basis your Attribution sales figure is on before you compare it with a break-even. Amazon states that sponsored ads reports exclude VAT⁵; we have not found an equivalent statement for Attribution. If its sales include VAT, the UK break-even on that basis is 1 ÷ 22.1%, or 4.53×.

When external traffic pays in the UK

With no bonus, direct sales rarely carry paid social traffic on Amazon.co.uk by themselves. In the accounts we manage, the cases that do pay share at least one of three features:

1. High margin and high basket value. The break-even falls as margin rises. A product keeping 40% before advertising breaks even at 2.5×.
2. Strong brand halo and repeat purchase. Brand halo sales and new-to-brand purchases count, and a customer who reorders adds margin outside the 14-day window.
3. A launch or ranking goal with an end date. External traffic that converts adds sales velocity. Treat it as an investment with a budget, a target and a stop date, as we suggest for launches in our ACoS guide.

The halo Attribution can’t see, shoppers who discover you on TikTok or Instagram and later search for you on Amazon, is real but must be measured against a baseline. The Search Query Performance dashboard in Brand Analytics shows query volume, impressions, clicks, basket adds and purchases for searches related to your brand¹¹; a rise in branded searches during a push, compared with a period or product group without one, is the nearest thing to a reading. Our TikTok Shop vs Amazon guide covers when to send creator traffic to Amazon and when to sell inside TikTok instead.

Setting up Attribution: our routine

If you sell in the US as well, enrol in the Brand Referral Bonus before you start: bonuses are only earned on qualifying purchases made after enrolment⁷, although sales from existing Attribution tags count from the day you enrol⁶.

The short version

Amazon Attribution is free, available in the UK, and the only first-party way to see what your external traffic does on Amazon. Use it on every paid link. The Brand Referral Bonus is a genuine margin lever, worth around 10 points on the referral fee for that traffic, but only in the US store. On Amazon.co.uk, judge external traffic on its own margin, its brand halo and a measured lift in branded search, and fund it only where those add up.