How to Drive External Traffic to Amazon: What Works in 2026 and How to Measure It

Traffic you send to Amazon from outside the marketplace can lower your referral fees, but only if you tag it and measure it correctly. Most brands do neither.

The old version of this advice was a list of seven channels. Channel lists are easy to find. What separates a program that pays back from one that burns budget is a tagging discipline, a clear idea of which channel matches which product, and an honest read on what the numbers can and cannot prove.

Quick Answer

• The opportunity: Amazon's Brand Referral Bonus pays a credit averaging 10% of qualifying sales from external traffic, so a tagged click can offset your referral fees as well as drive a sale.
• Who qualifies: A Professional selling plan in the US store and enrollment in Brand Registry, per Amazon's own program page.
• How it is tracked: Amazon Attribution tags, one unique tag per ad. Untagged traffic earns nothing and is invisible in reporting.
• What to run: Creator and TikTok content for discovery, Google and Meta for demand you can already see, email for your existing list.
• The risk: External traffic is demand creation. Attribution shows what happened after the click, not what the post caused, so do not read it as a clean ROAS.

For the primary source, see Amazon's Brand Referral Bonus overview.

Why external traffic is worth the extra work

Inside Amazon, you compete with every seller bidding on the same search terms. Off-Amazon traffic reaches shoppers before they ever open a search bar, and it arrives with intent your brand created rather than intent you rented.

It also pays twice. A sale from a tagged external click is a sale, and it can earn a bonus credit against future referral fees. Amazon's example: a $100 backpack with a 14% referral fee can earn a 7% credit, which is $7 off future fees. Rates vary by category, and the 10% figure is an average, not a promise.

The cost is complexity. Every channel needs its own tags, its own landing decision, and its own read on results. That is where most programs fall apart.

Set up tracking before you spend a dollar

Enroll in the Brand Referral Bonus

You need a Professional selling plan in the US store and an active or pending trademark through Brand Registry. Sellers without a trademark can look at Amazon Associates instead, which pays commissions to the affiliates who send you traffic.

Use one Amazon Attribution tag per ad

The bonus is calculated on sales Amazon can see through Attribution tags. Amazon's guidance is to apply only one tag to each ad. Reusing a tag across a creator's three videos, or across two campaigns, blurs which one produced the sale and makes the bonus data hard to reconcile.

Read the bonus next to campaign performance

Brand Referral Bonus credit now appears inside Amazon Attribution reporting, in the advertising console and through the Amazon Ads API. That lets you compare a campaign's attributed sales against the credit it generated without merging two reports by hand.

Match the channel to the product

Channel lists treat every source as interchangeable. They are not. Discovery channels create demand for products people did not know to search for. Capture channels collect demand that already exists. Pick by where the product sits.

Creators and TikTok work for products people cannot search for

If shoppers do not know the product category exists, no keyword will find them. Short video shows the product working, and a creator brings an audience that already trusts them. Our guides on advertising Amazon products on TikTok and TikTok Shop affiliate strategy cover the mechanics. Whichever route you take, pay attention to where the click lands, because a click that leaves Amazon's tagged path earns no bonus.

Google and Meta capture demand you can already see

Brand and product searches on Google reach shoppers who are close to buying. They are also the searches most likely to have ended on Amazon without your ad, so check incrementality before you scale. Meta works for retargeting people who visited your own site and for reaching audiences that resemble your buyers.

Email and owned content compound slowly

An email list you own is the cheapest traffic on the page, and it is the one source no marketplace can reprice. Blog and YouTube content take longer, but they keep sending clicks after the spend stops.

Send traffic where it can convert

Many guides say to send external traffic to a landing page you own. That works if your goal is email capture. It costs you the bonus on any sale that happens later, outside Amazon's tracked path.

For sales and bonus credit, send the click to a tagged Amazon link. Use an owned landing page only when the purpose is building your list, and accept that you are choosing list growth over the credit on that click. A product detail page converts external visitors best when the creative promised that specific product. Send a broad brand pitch to a storefront instead.

Measure external traffic without fooling yourself

Attribution tells you what shoppers did after they clicked a tagged link: detail page views, add to cart, purchases. It cannot tell you what the post caused. A shopper who saw a creator video, searched your brand on Amazon three days later, and bought will not appear as that video's sale.

What to track

• Attributed sales and detail page views per tag, which shows you which creative earns clicks that convert.
• Brand Referral Bonus credit per campaign, to see the fee offset next to the sales.
• Branded search volume and branded Sponsored Products impressions in your Amazon account, as a directional check on lift.

What not to claim

Do not call attributed sales ROAS and compare it to a Sponsored Products ROAS. The two measure different things. Treat external traffic as demand creation with a partial measurement layer, and judge it by trends over weeks rather than by one campaign's tagged sales.

Where the weekly work breaks, and what to automate

Run this for a month and the pattern is clear. Creating a tag per ad, matching tags to creators and creatives, then reconciling attributed sales with bonus credit every week is mostly spreadsheet work. It is also the step teams skip first, and it is the one that makes the rest trustworthy.

Qore is where you turn a review you do by hand into a workflow that runs itself. You build the tag-to-campaign reconciliation once with Q, the assistant that helps you shape the workflow, and Qore then runs it on a schedule: pulling attributed sales per tag, flagging campaigns with sales but no tag, and surfacing which creators and ads produced bonus credit. Actions default to manual approval, and you can allow more autonomy once you trust the output. Qore is in open beta, and you can sign up here.

It does not create demand or prove causation. It keeps the bookkeeping honest so the strategy decisions rest on clean numbers. For the broader view of growing sales across channels, see our guide to increasing Amazon GMV, and for how this relates to paid media outside Amazon, see endemic vs non-endemic advertising.

Start with one product, one channel, and tags you can read

External traffic pays when it is tagged, matched to the product, and judged with care. Enroll in the Brand Referral Bonus, pick one discovery channel for the product that cannot be searched and one capture channel for the product that can, and use one tag per ad from day one. After a month, you will know which creatives send buyers and which only send clicks.