Where to Send Your Peak-Event Traffic

On a big sales event, the question isn't whether to drive traffic. It's where to land it, and the obvious answer isn't always the right one.

By Jade Mossop, Global Creative Marketing Director

A big sales event like a Prime Day or a Black Friday is one of the few moments you can count on demand spiking. The interesting decision isn't whether to buy traffic into it. It's where to send that traffic, because the obvious choice and the smart choice aren't always the same.

Say you're running paid ads into the event. You have two broad choices for where the click lands.

Option one: straight to your Amazon listing. The upside is real. Sales on Amazon during the event feed your ranking and deal velocity, the algorithm rewards the surge, and you ride the platform's own traffic wave. The cost: you pay the full marketplace stack on every sale, and you never meet the customer.

Option two: to your own site, where you capture the customer and keep the margin, and they check out there. The upside is ownership. The cost is that those sales don't feed your Amazon momentum during the one window where momentum is cheapest to build.

There's a third path worth testing, and it's the one I find most interesting: send the paid traffic through a tracked Amazon Attribution link so you learn which channel and which creative drove what, then make the routing call on evidence instead of instinct. The Attribution link also qualifies those sales for the Brand Referral Bonus, so you get data and a fee credit at the same time. Tag everything. Measure it. Let the next event be decided by what the last one taught you.

One honest caveat: the exact mechanics of how Buy with Prime checkout interactions feed event-period ranking, and how attribution credit flows when a sale routes through your own site first, are worth verifying against current Amazon guidance each season before you build a budget around it. Platform rules in this area shift, and the specifics matter.

The move for you: pick the goal before the event, not during it. Building Amazon rank? Land traffic on Amazon. Building an owned audience? Land it on your site and accept the ranking trade. Either way, tag the traffic, so the event pays you twice: once in sales, once in what you learn.