A complete guide for the Amazon affiliate program

The Amazon affiliate program ranks among the world’s largest and most rewarding affiliate networks—a testament to its enormous potential. Imagine being part of an empire with a whopping $386.1 billion net sales in 2020. Remarkably, a considerable fraction of this revenue trickles down to affiliates who work smart, not hard. They recommend products, facilitate sales, and earn attractive commissions.

Reaping the benefits of this program, however, requires a robust strategy, a keen eye for products that resonate with your audience, and sound knowledge of managing these ads effectively on your WordPress website. This is where our tutorial—and the powerful affiliate plugin Advanced Ads—enters the picture.

In this comprehensive guide, I’ll share insights on leveraging Advanced Ads to integrate Amazon affiliate advertising straightforwardly into your WordPress website.

This tutorial encompasses essential aspects of the Amazon affiliate advertising program, including text links, promotions and bounties, Amazon OneLink, and third-party Amazon plugins to maximize affiliate commissions. With Advanced Ads and this guide, you are ready to optimize your Amazon affiliate integration.

Owing to the rich content packed within this tutorial, it might be a lengthy read. To assist in your learning journey, I’ve included a table of contents for easy navigation. Let’s dive in!

What is the Amazon affiliate program?

At its core, the Amazon affiliate program is a tailored gateway to the world’s largest online retailer’s countless products, expansive global reach, and enviable customer trust levels.

If you’re a publisher seeking to monetize your website through Amazon affiliate advertising, there’s a goldmine waiting for you. Given Amazon’s product diversity spanning every conceivable category, you can find relatable products for nearly every topic on your website.

You pocket a commission when a visitor completes a purchase via the embedded Amazon affiliate links on your website. This win-win scenario is the essence of affiliate marketing.

Amazon’s reliable refund policies have built a brand associated with towering levels of customer trust. And this trust equates to higher conversion rates for you, the publisher.

Opting to become an Amazon associate could be a game-changer for you:

• Access a vast product range for promotion
• Endorse a globally trusted brand with high conversion rates
• Tap into a worldwide audience and earn commissions from global sales

How much can Amazon affiliates make?

One of the most common questions I come across is, how much can Amazon affiliates earn? The answer is as varied as the factors influencing it, making it a bit elusive. Some affiliates may just be scraping in a scant few cents, while successful publishers often report earnings in the five-figure range. Rather than focusing on a specific number, understanding the following factors that determine your income will give you a clearer perception of the program’s potential.

I explain these factors in more detail in our comprehensive guide, How much can Amazon affiliates make? Within, you’ll find a thorough overview spanning from the significance of product categories to the effects of click-through rates on your earnings. The guide is also peppered with actionable tips to ensure you get the most from the Amazon affiliate program.

Amazon affiliate commissions

The Amazon affiliate program is advantageous for publishers who regularly publish content that relates to products of any kind. However, it’s important to note that Amazon affiliate commissions depend on various factors, such as your product’s category and the referral program particular to your country.. This range is typically between 1% and 20%.

Thorough research into the market, its key products, targeted keywords, and SEO metrics is indispensable to your success. This holds true whether you’re a beginner scouting for a profitable niche or a seasoned publisher seeking to optimize your monetization strategy with Amazon.

Sign up for the Amazon Affiliate program

Getting started with the Amazon affiliate program is a fairly straightforward process, completely free and surprisingly quick. Nonetheless, the affiliate program is tied to a distinct Amazon country site. Consequently, as a publisher, you must register separately for each country or region where your potential customers reside, for example, Amazon US, Amazon UK, or Amazon DE.

Once you’ve joined the Amazon affiliate program, signing up for additional marketplaces becomes faster and less intricate than first-time registration.

To become an Amazon associate, sign up here for the affiliate program in your country.

Please note that the availability of certain ad formats varies across country-specific Amazon affiliate programs. If you can’t find a specific ad format in your account, it’s likely due to the restrictions of the target region.

The examples used in this tutorial draw from the Amazon US referral program, primarily because this program boasts the most extensive array of ad formats.

What are the official Amazon ad formats?

In the past, Amazon presented wide selection of advertising formats to its affiliates directly from the Amazon Partnernet dashboard. However, Amazon has significantly reduced these options. Presently, the sole ad format available to affiliates is text-link ads.

Amazon has phased out other previously popular formats. These include Amazon banners, Amazon Native Shopping Ads, discount promotions, mobile popovers, product image ads facilitated through SiteStripe, and Amazon advertising banners from the bounties area.

Amazon text links

Text links are the veterans of the affiliate marketing world, though they are sometimes underrated due to their simplicity and age compared to today’s flashy, animated HTML5 banners and video ads. 

However, this perception could not be more off the mark. Text links on my own affiliate websites are dominant as ad formats. In fact, their performance often outshines that of any HTML5 banner.

There are three key reasons why text links are such a powerful tool in your arsenal:

Firstly, since publishers primarily incorporate text links within the content, they resemble editorial links more than advertisements. Consequently, they often elicit a higher click-through rate than banners, which may explain their recent popularity resurgence.

Secondly, text links typically lead directly to a specified product. Such deep links tend to convert more effectively than a generic category banner, for instance.

Thirdly, text links have the unique advantage of remaining unscathed by ad blockers. This resilience ensures that all your users will actually see these links, preserving your ad impressions and potential revenue.

For deeper insights, please look at our comprehensive tutorial about online marketing and affiliate text ads. 

Obtaining text links through Amazon SiteStripe

SiteStripe is an incredibly convenient tool enabling you to craft an Amazon ref link directly from the Amazon website’s frontend.

Before leveraging this feature, you must activate SiteStripe within your Amazon affiliate backend by navigating to Tools > SiteStripe.

Once activated, you can start generating Amazon text links directly from any product page on the Amazon website. Locate the SiteStripe bar at the top and click ‘Get link: Text.’

When creating a new link, choose your desired Tracking ID. Additionally, you can decide whether to utilize the Amazon affiliate link shortener or opt for an unmodified link. Each Amazon affiliate link is distinct, containing a unique product ID (ASIN) and the affiliate ID tied to your account.

If you activate the Advanced Ads Tracking add-on’s link masking feature, it’s advisable to use the untagged link. This tactic helps you avoid unnecessary redirections.

Alternatively, use Amazon’s ‘Short Link’ option in SideStripe if you do not want to mask your outbound links. This feature helps your ads project a more user-friendly target URL.

Amazon bounties and promotions

The Amazon Bounty program, located under ‘Promotions & Bounties,’ forms the backbone of the lead-generation campaigns within the Amazon affiliate program.

The program provides text links for various promotions, such as Amazon Prime, Amazon Music Unlimited, Audible Audiobooks, Amazon Channels, Prime Student, Amazon Visa, Amazon Kids+, Kindle Unlimited, Wedding List, Prime Video, Baby Wishlist, and Prime Try Before You Buy.

Within this program, leads yield fixed affiliate commissions. You earn money when visitors subscribe to services such as Amazon Prime, Amazon Prime Video, the Amazon Baby Wishlist, Amazon Audible, or Amazon Kindle.

Select from an array of standard text links and add your unique Amazon affiliate ID. These links lead to specific landing pages; all you need to do is append your affiliate ID.

To incorporate these links into your website, which I explain next, treat them exactly like other Amazon text ads.

Use Advanced Ads to embed your Amazon ads 

Once you’ve crafted your affiliate links, you could manually incorporate them into your website’s content. This integration involves linking existing content or new additions. However, updating these links will become exponentially time-consuming when managing a substantial amount of content that continues to grow. That’s where an ad management plugin, such as Advanced Ads, gets to be indispensable.

Advanced Ads is the perfect WordPress plugin for Amazon affiliate marketing because it auto-integrates all Amazon ads into your WordPress website. It comes packed with features designed to overcome a number of technical limitations of the Amazon affiliate program.

As such, it can significantly bolster your earnings as an affiliate, generating Amazon referrals.

When using Advanced Ads to embed Amazon ads, you stand to gain several advantages:

• Streamlined ad management: A clear overview and easy control of all your ads
• Time-saving auto-injection: Auto-insert ads into your content, eliminating the need for manual page editing
• Precise targeting: Match Amazon products to relevant content and visitors for better conversion rates
• Geo-targeting: Adjust Amazon ads according to visitors’ geographical location
• Ad performance tracking: More data to fine-tune your ads

Navigating text links in Advanced Ads

To incorporate a text link, create a new ad unit in Advanced Ads and opt for the “Plain text and code” ad type.

Assign it an unmistakable name that will help you quickly identify this ad unit later. Embed the link you’ve obtained from your Amazon affiliate program backend or SiteStripe into this ad unit. 

You can either paste and adjust the provided HTML code below or construct it yourself.

You can tailor the anchor text to fit your specific needs when employing a text link. For instance, you can use the product’s name as an anchor text or even incorporate a call-to-action like “Find related products on Amazon.”

In line with guidelines issued by Google, it is recommended that you append the “sponsored” attribute to links of this nature. You need to add this attribute to your ad code manually. If the Tracking add-on is activated, you can employ the link attribute option in the ad parameters settings, as shown in the above screenshot.

Here’s an example of what the code of an Amazon partner link with enabled URL shortening could look like:

<a href="https://amzn.to/3u3x2B8" rel="sponsored noopener" target="_blank">Find more related products on Amazon</a>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

After publishing the ad, you can insert it into your content manually via the shortcode or automatically by assigning the ad to a placement.

Expanded application of text links

Text links are exceptionally versatile and can fulfill roles beyond mere integration into your content. They can transform into persuasive call-to-action (CTA) buttons, nestle within product tables, act as potent ad blocker fallbacks, or combine to form link blocks.

Call-to-action buttons

Text links can morph into impactful call-to-action (CTA) buttons, combining the persuasive power of a well-crafted CTA with a text link’s direct approach. This strategy is a great way to improve click-through rates. You can generate such CTA buttons by inserting simple HTML code into the ad parameters field of your Advanced Ads ad unit.

For example, you can turn an Amazon affiliate link into a straightforward button like in the picture above with the following code. Mind that it misses a referral ID, which you need to include.

<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Michael-MK2024-316011-Sunglasses-ADRIANNA-GRADIENT/dp/B01HYW1U8M/" rel="sponsored noopener" target="_blank"><button>Get this on Amazon</button></a>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

Product tables

Text links find an excellent home in product tables. With the WordPress block editor’s tools, you can rapidly construct eye-catching product or comparison tables.

To enhance table creation and management further, consider integrating Advanced Ads with a dedicated table plugin like TablePress. This freemium solution allows you to embed your affiliate text links or call-to-action buttons from Advanced Ads into dedicated tables using shortcodes.

With TablePress’s user-friendly interface, customization with CSS becomes effortless, and managing a growing number of tables remains a breeze.

Ad blocker fallbacks

One of the critical strengths of text links lies in their resilience against ad blockers. As these ads dodge blocking, they significantly extend their reach and enhance the chances of clicks and conversions.

Ad blocker fallbacks—backup ads displayed to visitors who have an activated ad blocker—can particularly benefit from this attribute.

Advanced Ads Pro identifies such users and selects alternative fallback ads to display. This allows you to show them text links to specific products if the original banner ad is blocked, for example.

Text link blocks

Text links do not always need to stand alone. They can combine to form a link block reminiscent of the discontinued Amazon Native Search Ads or Google AdSense link units.

You can create such a link block from various text links targeted to specific content on your website. Advanced Ads will automatically assemble a block using a selection from these links. Learn more about configuring this setup in our tutorial.

Integration with Amazon affiliate plugins for WordPress

Beyond simple Amazon text links, advertisements created using dedicated Amazon affiliate WordPress plugins such as the aptly-named Amazon Affiliate WordPress plugin (AAWP), AzonPress, or Lasso bring a more aesthetically appealing touch. These plugins streamline the creation of product widgets, comparative tables, or bestseller lists tailored to your Amazon affiliate marketing needs.

With just a few clicks, you can import product data via an Amazon API through these WordPress plugins. This functionality allows you to comfortably build attractive product boxes, lists, or tables showcasing details like product images, reviews, or the current price. Such Amazon plugins fill the void left by Amazon’s deprecation of the SiteStripe Text + Image ad format.

Since dedicated Amazon plugins for WordPress generally entail a cost—and potentially a substantial one—, you should consider any associated investment thoughtfully. Yet, on my sites, product tables and boxes created using these plugins often achieve twice the click-through rate of my already high-performing text links, suggesting this expense can be profitable.

Note: If you have an active All Access license for Advanced Ads, you have access to a 20% discount code for the awesome plugin AAWP, which is one of the best Amazon affiliate plugins for WordPress. You can find this AAWP coupon in your account.

Synergizing Advanced Ads and Amazon affiliate plugins

Integrating Advanced Ads with Amazon affiliate plugins like AAWP, Lasso, or AzonPress offers two primary benefits.

First, the automatic injection of ads into content is a time-saving feature. It eliminates the need for manual ad insertion, freeing up more time for other tasks.

Second, advanced ads’ display and visitor conditions allow for precise targeting of products and content to your users, enhancing the ads’ relevance.

Embedding shortcodes from 3rd party affiliate plugins

Advanced Ads integrates smoothly with all leading Amazon affiliate WordPress plugins. Rather than editing individual pages to insert these shortcodes, you can create a new ad unit in Advanced Ads and let it auto-insert these shortcodes into your content. Choosing a distinctive name for the ad will enable you to identify it quickly later.

If you opt for the “Plain text and code” ad type, activate the option to execute shortcodes. However, shortcodes execute automatically with the Rich Content ad type, rendering this step unnecessary.

Upon saving and publishing the ad unit, you can manually embed the ad using its shortcode. Alternatively, apply it to a placement for automatic insertion.

Close collaboration between AAWP and Advanced Ads has led to the creation of the AAWP Advanced Ads ad type. If you use both plugins on your website, you’ll be able to pick it when creating a new ad unit. Get more insights on this integration in our dedicated AAWP tutorial.

Auto-injection of Amazon ads into your content

Suppose you prefer not to embed your Amazon ads using a shortcode or block manually. In that case, you can instead create a placement—for instance, after the 2nd paragraph, in the middle of the content, or at the end of the article. Afterward, assign the ad to this placement.

Placements are predefined positions in which Advanced Ads can inject ads. They offer several advantages over manual embedding. Besides the automatic injection of ads, they also support features like Ad Blocker fallbacks and Lazy Loading for those ads.

Additionally, placements enable centralized ad management where you can control the entire ad setup from a single page.

Please refer to our manual for more details about using placements in Advanced Ads.

Ad Targeting

Effective targeting of your ad units is a crucial component of ad optimization. The more accurately your ads align with your users’ intents, interests, and needs, the higher the chances of increasing your click-through and conversion rates. Enhanced ad targeting is a surefire strategy to boost your revenue from the Amazon affiliate program substantially.

Advanced Ads provides an array of tools to refine ad targeting. For instance, Display Conditions like Category, Tag, or keywords within the text can hone the display of your ads.

These conditions can restrict ad displays to posts about a specific category or a particular keyword.

On the other hand, Visitor Conditions allow you to target ads to particular user groups based on aspects like device, referral URL, or geolocation.

For instance, on an affiliate website with global traffic, you can direct your Amazon affiliate ads to appear exclusively to visitors of countries where the linked products are most likely to be purchased from.

Tracking and reporting of Amazon affiliate ads

Amazon provides publishers in the Amazon associates reports with only basic tools for assessing their ads’ performance. Although limited, these statistics offer vital information about sales and conversion rates. Enhancing the data from the Amazon associates report with the help of the Advanced Ads Tracking add-on delivers improved insights. These investigations are an excellent basis for further ad optimization.

Amazon affiliate report

You can locate the Amazon ads reporting in your affiliate account under Reports > Earnings Reports.

In addition to an overview of referred Bounties and sold products, the “Link Type Performance” tab presents key performance indicators (KPIs) such as clicks, conversion, ordered items, and earnings. However, the count of ad impressions is notably absent.

The report organizes results by Link Types, like product text links or PA-API, indicating traffic via ads generated by third-party plugins using the Amazon API.

Regrettably, this data is only available in an aggregated form and filterable by Tracking ID, devoid of specific details about which links received how many clicks or initiated conversions.

Managing multiple Tracking IDs

TTo navigate this limitation, consider using different Tracking IDs for discrete ad campaigns. While the data of ads assigned to them will still be aggregated by Tracking ID in the performance report, this approach allows for distinction on the group level, e.g., by channel (website, email) or promotion (Black Friday, Amazon Prime Day).

By creating distinct Tracking IDs for specific campaigns, you can compare metrics such as click-through rates and conversion rates against your average Amazon Ads performance. This level of segmentation is crucial; otherwise, if all your campaigns are grouped under one Tracking ID, you only see overall sales numbers, missing key performance differences.

For example, imagine running a fitness blog where you promote various home workout equipment alongside affiliate links for supplements and clothing. Without separate Tracking IDs, you can’t accurately measure how your fitness equipment links perform in comparison to your other categories. But by assigning a unique Tracking ID to these fitness equipment ads, you get clear data on click-through and conversion rates, allowing you to adjust your strategy based on the specific success of those links.

Creating additional Tracking IDs is straightforward under Account Settings > Manage Your Tracking IDs. You can create and utilize up to 100 Tracking IDs as an Amazon affiliate.

Tracking Amazon ads with Advanced Ads

When you incorporate your Amazon ads into your WordPress site using Advanced Ads, you can monitor each ad’s impressions and clicks and optimize them based on this data. This impression data is essential, as it allows you to compare and improve the click-through rate of individual ads.

The Tracking add-on supports all ad types, including text links and Amazon ads from third-party plugins like AAWP.

Linking your Amazon affiliate tracking to Google Analytics provides even more information. For instance, it lets you pinpoint exactly which pages received clicks on your ads and gain more insights about the users interacting with them.

Amazon OneLink

The Amazon OneLink feature offers a straightforward solution to cater affiliate products to users from various countries using a single link. This feature intelligently redirects international traffic to the relevant country-specific Amazon sites, ensuring accurate sales tracking for that region.

You can set up OneLink under Account > Tools > OneLink in your Amazon affiliate account. This feature allows you to designate whether Amazon should redirect international traffic to its dedicated store for each tracking ID.

In the OneLink settings, you can choose between “Close match,” “Exact match,” or “Do not redirect.”

By activating the “Close match” option, Amazon redirects your international visitors to the nearest Amazon marketplace only if a similar or identical product is available; otherwise, the link retains its original destination.

Selecting the “Exact match” option ensures Amazon only redirects international visitors if the precise product is available in their region.

You can also opt for the “Do not redirect” setting for each tracking ID. In this way, you ensure that all visitors arrive at the original link destination.

Amazon OneLink supports several countries, including the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.

For more granular details about Amazon affiliate OneLink settings, please refer to the official integration guide.

Amazon Unified Ad Marketplace (UAM)

Amazon’s header bidding program, known as the Unified Ad Marketplace (UAM), operates on an invitation-only basis. As such, it primarily targets large publishers, and we won’t delve into its intricacies here.

However, if you operate a high-traffic website, contacting Amazon UAM could be beneficial.

Amazon’s server-to-server header bidding integration necessitates a Google Ad Manager account (formerly DFP). This account automates the creation of ads as line items.

The Google Ad Manager add-on of Advanced Ads serves as the most convenient tool for integrating these ads into WordPress. It operates just like any other ad from Google Ad Manager. You can explore this tutorial on how to embed Google Ad Manager ads into WordPress for more information.

Conclusion

And that wraps things up! The Amazon affiliate program can be a lucrative addition to almost any publisher’s ad portfolio. To create a diversified monetization strategy, consider using it alongside other formats, like programmatic ads (such as Google AdSense), direct ad sales, and video ads.

Although Amazon has reduced SiteStripe’s features to just text links, this simple ad format converts surprisingly well. For affiliates who miss the impact of image-based ads, there are plugins available that help create attractive product boxes and comparison lists.

In any case, to maximize your WordPress site’s revenue—whether through Amazon affiliate ads or other channels—invest a little time into setting up a reliable ad manager plugin like Advanced Ads. Sooner rather than later in your project’s growth, the benefits of centralized management, flexible placement, precise targeting, and robust tracking will become essential for efficient site upkeep.

I encourage you to leverage the Amazon affiliate program to boost your site’s revenue. By integrating it alongside other monetization strategies, you can create a robust income stream that delivers real results. Thank you for reading, and best of luck with your affiliate marketing efforts!

Frequently asked questions