The concept of halo sales in AMS means that the estimated total sales that you are seeing in your campaigns, are sales that the ads have influenced across all your brand products, not only the ones that you are promoting. This concept is crucial to understand when analysing the performances of your AMS campaigns.

AMS sales = Halo sales = sales for promoted ASINs + sales for all ASINs belonging to the brand (after user clicks on ad)

Halo sales in AMS: example

To understand better how this works, let’s take the following example:

Your brand is in the PC category and you are selling Laptops, PCs, and Tablets. You have AMS campaigns running only for laptops. A user clicks on one of your AMS campaigns that you are running > he/she ends up purchasing a tablet that you aren’t promoting. The sale will still be attributed to the Laptops’ campaign, as the tablet that he purchased is part of your own brand.

Sales are attributed to a campaign only if a user clicked on the ad before the purchase was made. Read more about the Sales Attribution Model in AMS.

So, when an advertiser creates an AMS campaign to promote one or more ASINs, AMS expands those ASINs to others within that brand’s subcategory, category, and General Line (GL). When a customer clicks on the ad and purchases a product within that brand’s subcategory, category, or GL, the campaign gets sales’ credit for that order, as it helped the customer discover the brand.

Are AMS estimated total sales real sales?

Yes, and No.

No, because the sales are not for the products that you are promoting, but for all the products belonging to your brand.

Yes, because even if they are halo sales, they were still influenced by the campaigns that you are running (i.e. a user had to click on one of your campaigns for the sale to be attributed to your ad). This is the old sales’ attribution principle that advertising is based on: you are promoting one of your products to create brand awareness that will help increase sales for all your products.

Is there a way to see real sales vs halo sales in AMS?

At this moment, Amazon doesn’t provide this information. They will probably keep the halo sales practice going. If they split the sales, they risk that advertisers will put less money onto AMS, as they will see the real sales that the campaigns are generating – these would be lower than the current metrics.

Conclusion on Halo sales on AMS

The total sales and Units sold data from the AMS campaigns can be deceptive, as they are not only sales for the products that you are advertising, but sales influenced across the whole brand. Currently, we cannot see the split between sales for promoted products vs sales for brand products. The encouraging thing here is that sales are click-based attributed and not viewed-based (as AMG is). This means that, no matter what product a customer ended purchasing from your brand collection, he’s done it after clicking on one of your ads.

Read also:

• Frequency capping in AMS campaigns
• Sales attribution model in AMS