How to Track Amazon Affiliate Links (The Easy Way)

Are you wondering why your website visitors aren't converting into leads or sales for your Amazon affiliate business? A report by Econsultancy shows that 50% of companies say conversion rate optimization is a crucial part of their digital marketing strategy.

To optimize your conversion rate, you first have to track your website traffic so you can make data-driven decisions. Even as an affiliate marketer, tracking your traffic is crucial to find out which products or campaigns generate the most clicks, leads, and sales. You can then boost your marketing efforts for what's already working and improve what's not.

In this post, I'd like to share what affiliate marketing is. I'll also introduce the beast of all affiliate programs: Amazon Associates and how to track your Amazon affiliate links the easy way.

Alright, let's get started.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

For those of you who aren't familiar with affiliate marketing, it's the process of earning money or commissions every time you promote a company's products or services and drive a sale.

When someone buys through your affiliate link, you get a commission. As an affiliate, you're basically a salesperson for the company. You help the company to make a sale, and you get paid.

And to effectively promote products, many affiliate marketers leverage their social media networks, create landing pages, use email or video marketing and paid ads.

Speaking of paid advertising: Did you know that Instagram earns roughly $4 billion in mobile ad revenue per year? Some of that revenue is coming from affiliate ads.

How Much Does an Amazon Affiliate Make?

Generally, an affiliate marketer can earn anything from 1% up to 90% commission depending on the program and products they're promoting.

Even though Amazon Associates is one of the most popular affiliate programs, it offers low commission rates. The rates start at 1% and go up to 10%, depending on the product category.

However, the enormous popularity of Amazon still makes it a profitable program for many affiliates. For instance, research shows that 59% of Millennials will go to Amazon first when online shopping. That's an excellent market to take advantage of.

Amazon Associates: The Affiliate Program Beast

Many affiliates start their journey with the Amazon Associates program because it offers so many products to promote. No matter what niche you're active in, you can always find products to market and sell.

The only issue is that Amazon doesn't give you any reports on which of your links are getting clicked, so it can be hard to track and optimize your results. They only tell you the ones that led to purchases.

So, if you want to see all your clicks and what campaigns you need to improve to boost conversions, you need to have a different measurement plan in place.

Why Track Your Affiliate Links?

Tracking your affiliate link clicks on your website will show you what pages convert the best and which products get the most clicks, which will help you make data-driven decisions.

Here's a breakdown of a few reasons why you should track your affiliate links:

• See what landing pages or posts perform the best: By tracking affiliate links, you can find out what pages and types of content generate the most clicks and sales.

• Get new content ideas: You can get new ideas for creating content and placing product links that are more likely to convert.

• Identify campaigns that have the best ROI: Through affiliate tracking, you can figure out which promotional campaign gave you the best return on investment (ROI) and replicate it in the future.

• Understand user behavior: Understanding who your audience is and what products they prefer can affect how you create content and help you boost conversions.

Amazon's reporting within your Associates' account shows what products are getting clicked on and purchased, but you won't see all clicks.

In fact, you won't find them anywhere in your Associates' account or Google Analytics unless you take specific steps to set up link tracking. That being the case, let's take a look at how to do that the easy way using two different WordPress plugins next.

Managing Your Affiliate Links

The first thing I recommend you to do is install an affiliate management plugin, like Pretty Links. It'll help you organize and manage all your affiliate links as your website grows.

It also lets you cloak your long and ugly affiliate links and create your own. That way, it won't be as apparent to your visitors that it's an affiliate link, and it's also easier to share.

An important note is that Amazon doesn't allow cloaking. They want it to be clear to users that they've clicked on an Amazon link. But as long as you add "Amazon" to your Pretty Links, it's all good.

Using Pretty Links is very easy. For instance, you can organize your links, add redirections (301, 302, 307), and add nofollow tags instantly.

Once you've organized all your links, it's time to track them on your website, which I'll show you how to do next.

Tracking Amazon Affiliate Links

If you're not a techie, the absolute most straightforward way to track your Amazon (or any affiliate link) is by using a Google Analytics plugin, like MonsterInsights. Using this plugin, you don't have to create Google Analytics custom events for each affiliate link. It takes care of that for you.

Once you've installed and activated the Plus version of MonsterInsights, you simply allow it to access your Google Analytics account.

The next step is to set a path so that your internal links can be tracked as external or outbound links. You can set the path in the publisher tab, and the plugin will automatically detect your affiliate links and start tracking.

For example, if all of your Amazon links are set up to go to yoursitehere/amazon/product, then you'll want to put /amazon/ in your MonsterInsights paths.

After your paths are set up, you can view detailed reports of all your affiliate links and clicks inside the publisher and top affiliate links tabs. It lets you quickly see what affiliate links get the most traffic, and you can work on improving those that don't get as much.

In addition, if you want to dig even deeper to see which of your pages a visitor was on when he clicked on your affiliate link, you can check the "View All Affiliate Links Report." You can then compare your landing pages and figure out why some are working better.

Wrapping Up

With an affiliate link management plugin like Pretty Links, you can organize, find, and replace any link across your website instantly. And with the MonsterInsights plugin, you can automatically track all your Amazon affiliate links without changing any code or hiring a developer. Remember that statistics are the measure of your business endeavors. Making blind guesses won't help you grow your affiliate business.