We have a number of affiliate marketing websites. These are a hangover from when we first came into affiliate marketing when we felt that having more websites meant making more money. If we were starting out now we would only have a couple as it is so much more manageable. But having lots of websites means we have lots of product reviews and we realized early on that if we were going to keep track of where sales were coming from that we needed to start using Amazon tracking ids.
If you have begun to add product reviews to your own website and are using Amazon then you should really be doing the same thing. This will make it so much easier to check your sales on Amazon as you will be able to see exactly from which pages on your website the sales came from.
Choose Your Tracking IDs Carefully
Be very selective in how you want your tracking ID’s to look as you cannot delete or change them once they have been approved by Amazon. Bummer I know.
We found this out the hard way, we had started using a set of ID’s and then found it didn’t really help us when we came to determining which products were performing the best and we had to start over, but the original ID’s could not be deleted or changed, and keep in mind that you can only have 100 tracking ID’s per account. This may sound a lot but once you get started you will find it doesn’t take long to start using up your quota. Having said that, we haven’t used ours up yet but that is because we track a mix of websites and products. So we only bother about tracking products that meet our product review criteria.
We use one tracking ID per product review page so it will be used for both the images and the text links on that page. However, if you want to go even deeper and see which individual links are performing the best, you can use a tracking id for each individual link. So you might have a tracking id for the image link, a different tracking id for the first link in your product review, a different tracking id for the second link and so on. But as we said previously, you only ever get 100 tracking ids per Amazon account so doing it this way will mean that you have the potential for running out of tracking ids fairly quickly.
So how do you Create a Tracking ID in Amazon?
1. Sign into your Amazon Associates account.
2. Click on Account Settings in the top right hand corner of your screen.
3. In the Account Information Section find the bullet point “Manage your tracking IDs” and click on it.
4. Click the Add Tracking ID button and you will be presented with a page where you can add a tracking ID (see image below). Add the tracking ID that you have decided to use for a particular product or website in the blank box. We usually type in a word that relates to the product we are promoting. So for instance, say that we have written a product review for the iPod Touch. If we wanted to create a tracking ID for that page we might enter the words “ipod-touch” into that tracking ID field. So the tracking ID would look like this – ipod-touch-20 (Note that Amazon IDs end in ’20’ in North America).
5. Click the search button and Amazon will do a search to make sure the Tracking ID is unique. Amazon will let you know straight away whether the ID is available and if it is you can start using it on your product review page.
How to Add the Tracking ID to the Product Review
1. Open your product review post in WordPress. Also open your Amazon Product page in a new tab or window, whichever suits the way you work with multiple internet windows.
2. On the top line of the product page in Amazon you will find the words “Link to this page”. Click on that link. This will open the ‘Customize and Get HTML’ pop-up.
3.You will see two drop-down boxes – one says “Signed in as” and the other says “Tracking ID” Click the down arrow and select the Tracking ID for the product review you just created (see image below). Amazon will automatically change the code in the HTML code box so that it now includes your tracking ID.
4. Now, you can simply grab the code and add it to either your image or text links as you would normally do and the tracking id will be included. (For instructions on adding Amazon links to images click here.)
So there you have it a quick and easy way to keep track of where your clicks and conversions are coming from as your Tracking ID will show in your Amazon Tracking ID Summary report.
You will be able to see at a glance, how many clicks, items ordered, items shipped, shipped item revenue and commissions or Advertising Fees each product is producing.
Thanks! That is extremely helpful!
Great post, Wanda and/or Paula! LOL! ;)
100 IDs per account, right?
Then you can create another account, right? Amazon doesn’t have any rules against that, do they?
Thanks!
Chris
Read Terry’s comments below Chris. Seems like we can get more than 100.
Paula, Thanks for another informative post.
It’s good to know the best way of tracking before getting too far ahead.
Shirley
It definitely is worth getting them right at the start. It makes life so much easier.
I’ve written to Amazon a few weeks ago in regards to the 100 ID limit. They got back to me and said that if you run out and need more ID’s… send support an email and they can increase the limit to 1000.
That’s excellent Terry. We emailed them some time back about it but they didn’t let us know that we could increase it. Maybe they have changed their policy.
This is great. I didn’t know I could do this. Thanks again for the info!
No problem Liz. Hope the sales are still increasing for you.
Thanks – they are getting better each month!
They can increase it indeed as I have that much. But what they do is you have to decide the id you want to be increased and they add a number before the dash. I mean like this
mytracking1-20, mytracking2-20, mytracking3-20 etcetc It’s a bit more difficult to keep track of which id is which site/page but I have it in an excel sheet so i can see it fast enough.
Thanks for the info Edwin. We have ours in a spreadsheet as well although we try to be as descriptive as possible with our tracking IDs so we can see at a glance what page each ID relates to.
Will Amazon penalize me for cloaking links? I used .php file to cloak amazon link…i got 7 sales initially..But no sales since july having more than 200 clicks.
I don’t know the answer to that one Ranzyt. I’ve never heard of that happening but who really knows what Google will do.
Paula,
First of all, I don’t get a lot of traffic at this point, however, when I browse my account and the specific product is purchased then I know where it came from based on my domain. Yes, sometimes I get people buying things I’m not selling but not that much, and I’m guessing the low traffic. My popular sites are all on pg 1 and 2 of google, with one #2, but not a lot. Someone in my position wouldn’t need several ids, but maybe if I had a lot then it would be different. hmmmm.
It’s good to have a tracking ID on your websites so you know which ones are performing. We also add tracking ID’s to our product review pages so that we can monitor which ones are performing. This also helps us to determine whether the page needs tweaking if its not performing well. With our Amazonian Profit Plan we concentrate on writing good quality product reviews (5 at a time) and we now have lots of reviews. With the Tracking ID we can see at a glance where the money is coming from.
We just find that if you add tracking ID’s at the start you are don’t end up with a major task when adding ID’s as the number of your product review pages increase.
Well done on your Google rankings.
I have a question about these tracking ID’s. If I wanted to assign an Amazon tracking ID to each visitor I direct to Amazon, what do I do when I reach 1,001?
You don’t assign tracking ids to visitors, you assign them to pages or websites. So say you have a website on dogs and one of your product reviews is about dog beds, you would assign a tracking id to that dog bed product review page. Then when you check your stats on Amazon you can tell how many people clicked through to Amazon from that dog bed page.
I was more interested in tracking the members of my site that I send to Amazon
Unfortunately you won’t get that detail with Amazon tracking ids. You will be able to see how many people click through to Amazon but not exactly who clicks through.
Helpful information indeed! I find myself going from post to post, some quite dated, just to catch up. Guess it is time to order your book.
Thanks!
Very informative post. I wish I had known about setting up tracking IDs properly when I first started creating websites for my Amazon aStores. Oh well, I got half way through and realized my mistake. Anyway, I’m getting off track. I didn’t know you could also get a tracking number for a non aStore product. This is awesome. Thanks for always having such great posts. I’m about two weeks into my Amazonian Profit Plan process and am so excited about getting my first review site up within the next couple of days.
Can i automaticly create 1.000.000 amazon tracking id? Please help me
You would need to contact Amazon directly to ask for more tracking ids.
How would I create a link with my associate id that links to the Amazon (product)reviews page (of all reviews).
I’m not sure what you are asking Jackie. Can you clarify a bit?