What is Creator Connections? It’s no secret that TikTok and Instagram have become the primary discovery platforms for young shoppers. Many people now start their shopping journeys on TikTok and Instagram, and then click over to Amazon to make the final purchase.
A lot of brands and agencies are trying to figure out how to engage these audiences.
This is especially true right now: CPCs are rising on Amazon, so any cheaper ways to drive high-quality traffic back to your Amazon stores is well worth trying.
Advertising on both platforms is a good option, but sometimes, it’s a lot more cost-effective to partner with social media creators who can give you a real personal touch.
There’s a program sitting right in front of you that can help: Amazon’s Creator Connections.
More on that in a second. But in essence, Creator Connections makes it easier to locate influencer partners, and then track the results.
Momentum Commerce has suggested that Creator Connections can increase conversions by 34%. In one survey, Stratably found that nearly 70% of its audience reported moderate or high ROI when using Creator Connections.
So is it worth it for you? Let’s break it down.
What is Amazon’s Creator Connections program?
Amazon’s Creator Connections gives brands a more direct way to collaborate with influencers.
Rather than waiting around for influencers to post about your product on their own, you can directly set up campaigns, and make them available to creators.
Create a budget, timeline, and a commission percentage for these campaigns. Then, you can push them out to eligible creators. They’ll see it in their dashboard, and sign up if it fits their audience.
FWIW: Commissions start at ~10%, and your minimum budget needs to be at least $15k. But remember, you only pay when products are sold, so you don’t need to worry about taking a gamble on a campaign that doesn’t produce results.
Plus, because it is all organized through Amazon, Creator Connections is one of the rare ways you can directly tie social media promotion to cold, hard sales on Amazon.
With Creator Connections, not only can you find influencers without a lot of hassle, but you can also track your ROAS directly.
How much money should I allocate to social media creators?
Many commentators have fairly pointed out that certain products do better on platforms like TikTok. These products tend to be a little bit cheaper, for instance—although this really isn’t universally true.
If you aren’t sure how much of your marketing budget you want to allocate to TikTok, Creator Connections can be a good way to experiment.
Start with a small campaign, and see what kinds of returns you’re able to drive. If the results are really strong, that’s a sign that TikTok needs to be a bigger part of your strategy.
From there, you may consider investing in TikTok Ads, for instance. And if you do go that route, you’ll be pleased to discover that Intentwise can bring TikTok ads data into our platform (or pipeline the data into your existing reporting system).
So if you do put more money toward a TikTok strategy, you can integrate your metrics seamlessly.
How do you attribute sales back to social creators?
Attribution is of course the most difficult part of a social media strategy.
Social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook do have pixels you can embed on your website, which makes it easy to track how many people saw your ad on social media and then bought from your DTC site.
Tying social media promotion to sales on third-party marketplaces is more tricky, as we’ve discussed before. But there are a few things you can do.
Lean on data from Creator Connections. It’s unlikely that Creator Connections would account for the bulk of your social media spend. This is one highly effective program among many.
But Creator Connections does make it a lot easier to track sales. Because the influencers you work with are selling on commission, Amazon gives you back the data on the sales your campaign generated.
Not every sale is going to come via a commission link, of course, but Creator Connections will still give you some high-level sense of how you’re doing.
Glance at Amazon Attribution. Amazon does offer a way to track all the external traffic to your product page, called Amazon Attribution.
It’s a very handy tool, and you can track cases where Instagram and TikTok are referring URLs in order to get some sense of how much traffic those platforms are driving.
With Amazon Attribution, you can create your own custom attribution tag that you add to all of your external links.
In this case, you could generate a custom Amazon Attribution link that you place on your TikTok bio, for instance, and as the CTA for your TikTok ads.
The problem is Amazon Attribution is slightly imperfect when it comes to measuring traffic from social media apps. TikTok is not the most link-forward platform. Which leads us to…
Track branded search traffic on Amazon. This is a little bit more rough, but we know a lot of businesses that use branded searches on Amazon as a rough proxy for their social media ads.
Basically: If your branded searches spike after you launch a social campaign, that’s a sign you’re onto something.
You can get more granular if you want. To make the attribution more accurate, you can write AMC queries that automatically exclude branded searches that clearly don’t come from social media ads.
For instance, we once wrote a custom query for Made In Cookware measuring what proportion of non-brand Amazon searches naturally generate into follow-up branded Amazon searches.
You can then just subtract these searchers from your analysis, since you know they heard about your brand on Amazon, not on a third-party platform.
