You're selling a book or product on Amazon and you're wanting to drive more traffic and potential sales to your listing. You've read that Google Ads can be a good way of doing this but is it okay to drive traffic directly to an Amazon listing from your Google Ad?

I just had this conversation with a potential client recently and made it clear that I don't recommend driving Google Ad traffic directly to an Amazon listing. Why?

Because there's no way to accurately set up Google Ad conversion tracking on Amazon. There is 'Amazon Attribution' but PPC advertisers online have been claiming it doesn't work right and has inaccurate data.

Without conversion tracking you won't know which keywords, which locations, which demographics are generating the best results for your Google Ad Campaign.

This means that you won't be able to improve your campaign's performance over time, which is a problem if your campaign isn't profitable out the gate, which chances are, it won't be.

What should you do instead?

Create a dedicated landing page with your products sales copy and make the call to action to 'Buy on Amazon', so when they click the button it takes them to your Amazon listing.

Why is this way better?

Because you can set up Google Ad Conversion Tracking on that 'Buy on Amazon' button click.

Yes, it would be more ideal to track the actual sale, but so long as that's happening on Amazon.com, we can't.The next best thing is tracking this 'Buy on Amazon' button click as a Google Ad Conversion.

This way as we start to get clicks and conversion data in Google Ads, we can start to see which keywords are just wasting ad spend, meaning they're clicking over to our website, reading the sales copy and leaving the website without clicking over to Amazon.

By reducing this wasted ad spend it should translate into a higher return on ad spend.

If you were to just send this traffic directly to your Amazon listing, there would be no way to identify the visitors who are not interested in your Amazon product like we can with the landing page. Which means there would be no way to filter these people out and reduce wasted ad spend.