tracking with amazon links

TRACKING YOUR RESULTS

WITH AMAZON ASSOCIATES TRACKING LINKS

IMPORTANT NOTE:• Sending traffic to Amazon via your Amazon Associates tracking links is a great way to test which traffic is converting the best

• BUT it is technically against Amazon’s Terms of Service to use these tracking links in our emails and ads

• Amazon only allow you to use tracking links to send traffic via your own site - which will need to be an approved site

• So, using tracking links in our emails and ads is against the terms of service

• BUT - many authors use them. And it is pretty much the only way we can measure the effectiveness of our conversion rates

• BE AWARE - Amazon don’t actively police this, but if you do get a warning email from Amazon for using tracking links outside of your own website you can make the necessary changes to remove your tracking links from your emails and ads

• Worst case scenario - Amazon will shut down your Associates account and / or refuse to pay you your commissions on referred products

• Depending on your situation, this may or may not be something you will worry about.

• It does NOT affect your ability to stay in the KDP publishing program. Amazon will only close your Associates Affiliate account (as a worst case scenario).

• So please make a judgement call - it is up to you to decide whether or not you want to use tracking links inside your ads, and understand the risks. The alternative method is to send traffic to a landing page on your site, and put the links there. I’ll show you examples of this.

• With that said - let’s look at how you set up tracking links so you can see which ads are performing best…

Setting Up Tracking Links

• Make sure you have an Amazon Associates account for the country you want to send traffic to (eg, US, UK, Canada, etc)

• After your account has been approved, navigate to your home page and click your profile link at the top right

• Then select “Manage Your Tracking IDs” and click it


• This will display all your tracking IDs - if you haven’t set any up yet, the bottom area will be blank

• To set up a new tracking ID - so you can create unique URLs for different ads to track that ad’s performance - click on “Add Tracking ID”

• Then give your new Tracking ID a name - something you can easily identify and match to your ads / emails


• Your new tracking ID is now created - it’s time to use it!

• Navigate back to the home page and click Product Linking -> Product Links at the top left

• This will take you to the page where you can search for products (books) you want to link to


• In the search box, type in the name of the book you want to link to

• The results will display underneath, along with an orange “Get Link” button

• Click the “Get Link” button (not the little arrow next to it) so you can build your link and match it up to your new tracking ID and make sure everything looks okay

• You will see which tracking ID is being used by looking at the top-right (you’ll see my bookbub-cpm-1 Tracking ID is being used here)


• On this page, you can build your link and see a live preview of what it will look like on a web page

• If you are creating a link to go on your website and you want the image to be displayed as in the preview, select either “Text and Image” or “Image Only” from the tabs at the top

• If you just want a text link (eg - to use in your ads or emails) then click “text only”


• At the top right, click the blue Tracking ID to display the drop-down menu

• Select the Tracking ID you want to use


• If you want to use the full Image on your website, copy the HTML and paste it into your site, where you want to display it

• If you just want a URL to send people to your Amazon page (eg to use in your emails or ads) then click “text only” from the tabs along the top of the preview window

• Then select “short link”

• Highlight the HTML and paste it into your ads or emails

• You can also test the link to make sure it works

Setting Up Tracking Links• Now to use the tracking link to measure

your results…

• Once you’ve had some clicks from your Tracking Link, navigate to your home page and scroll to the reports section, then click on “view full summary”

• This will take you to your reports page

• Simply filter your results by Tracking ID to see how each individual link is performing (and thus, how each ad or email is performing)

• The total sales, conversion rates, and product data will be displayed here too

• NB: it takes 24 hours for results to show up and they get refreshed once per day - so it’s not realtime

Alternatively…• You can create a landing page on your

website, and add clickable buttons containing the tracking link we created earlier

• This is not against Amazon’s terms - although having an extra link to click might impair the performance of your ads / emails

• Also - if you are running multiple adsets / ads you will need a separate landing page for each one - which will get very cumbersome!

• It can also get tricky to use tracking links in ads if you are running dozens (or hundreds!) of ad variations. That’s a lot of tracking links to create and use! But once you have a good idea of what converts, you can focus on other metrics - like cost per click - to measure your ads’ success. Or, you can use lots of tracking IDs! It’s totally up to you.

tracking with amazon links

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