How to track Amazon Affiliate links in Google Analytics
Alchemy Coder here, and I want to share with you some digital alchemy that helps me personally put more money into my bank account every single day.
You see, I have a magical crystal ball.
* Only works with Universal Analytics Web Properties. Support for Google Analytics 4 Properties is not yet available.
Later in this article I will share exactly what I do with this data to
increase my CTRs & Conversion Rates. And it's easy.
It’s the middle of the night, and a new visitor from Los Angeles, USA lands on your beautiful new product review after seeing it listed in the Google search results. It’s exactly what they are looking for.
After scanning your review for a lengthy 45.438 seconds, they decide to take a look at your slick product showcase. They click on the product image, which happens to have an affiliate link wrapped around it and they are whisked away to Amazon.
ZZZZZiiiiiiiPPPP … at that very moment in time, a tiny electrical signal is sent across the world and lands right in your Google Analytics account. It happened so fast nobody even noticed it – and your visitor was none the wiser.
Did this specific user buy something on Amazon earning you a commission? You may never know … but that’s not important.
There are greater powers at work here.
It’s a small piece of data, and to the untrained eye may not seem to tell you very much. So what, somebody clicked the link in my showcase, duh.
But the secret is when you combine this data with the clicks of all your visitors. You get a large set of detailed data that you can combine with other data, and make amazing and often surprising discoveries about what your visitors are actually interested in.
This leads to ACTIONABLE ideas you can implement to get the highest click-through-rates and conversion rates possible.
It’s powerful, but you have to know what to look at. You see, not all data is created equal.
Let’s take a look at exactly what AmaLinks Pro event tracking tracks.
Action: Text Link Click
Label: Link Text: XXXXXX, ASIN: XXXXXXXXX
Category: ID# 123 – Your Page Title Here
Action: Image Link Click
Label: Image Alt Tag: XXXXXX, ASIN: XXXXXXXXX
Action: CTA Button Click
Label: CTA Button: XXXXXX, ASIN: XXXXXXXXX
Action: Showcase Title Link Click
Label: CTA Button: XXXXXX, ASIN: XXXXXXXXX
Category: ID# 123 – Your Page Title HereAction: Showcase Image Link Click
Label: CTA Button: XXXXXX, ASIN: XXXXXXXXX
Category: ID# 123 – Your Page Title HereAction: Showcase Bottom Button Click
Label: CTA Button: XXXXXX, ASIN: XXXXXXXXX
Category: ID# 123 – Your Page Title HereAction: Showcase Opened Reviews
Label: CTA Button: XXXXXX, ASIN: XXXXXXXXX
Category: ID# 123 – Your Page Title HereAction: Showcase Closed Reviews
Label: CTA Button: XXXXXX, ASIN: XXXXXXXXX
Category: ID# 123 – Your Page Title HereAction: Showcase Opened Disclaimer Popup
Label: CTA Button: XXXXXX, ASIN: XXXXXXXXX
Category: ID# 123 – Your Page Title HereAction: Showcase Closed Disclaimer Popup
Label: CTA Button: XXXXXX, ASIN: XXXXXXXXX
Category: ID# 123 – Your Page Title Here
Action: Comparison Table Link Click
Label: Table ID# XXXXXX, Row: XXX, ASIN: XXXXXXXXX, {column_type} column, Clicked Link
Category: ID# 123 – Your Page Title Here
Action: Comparison Table Link Click
Label: Table ID# XXXXXX, Row: XXX, ASIN: XXXXXXXXX, {column_type} column, Clicked CTA Button
Category: ID# 123 – Your Page Title Here
Action: Comparison Table Sorted Column
Label: Table ID# XXXXXX, Column: XXX
Category: ID# 123 – Your Page Title Here
Action: Comparison Table Pagination Click
Label: Table ID# : Page {page_number}
This tells me what page the visitor was on, what type of affiliate link they clicked, where the link was and the product ASIN of the link. This is all very useful data when combined with other visitor’s event data.
Once you collect enough of it, you start to see patterns emerge and can easily figure out what products, link types and link placements get the highest CTRs, conversion rates, and overall most interaction.
Category (page the event happened on):
ID# 7571 – Coleman Classic Propane Stove Review (AmaLinks Pro with Elementor)
Action (type of link click):
Comparison Table Link Click
Label (details about exact product link):
Table ID# 2013, Row 3, ASIN: B0006VORDY, image column, Clicked Link
I mentioned earlier the data for one particular event is not very complicated, and you can see that here. Alone, this doesn’t help us very much. It needs to be combined with many other events, over time and then combined again with other data to be useful.
Keep reading to see exactly how to make the right data combinations & insights – and peer into your visitor’s psyche through your own crystal ball.
For those of you that are already AmaLinks Pro Members – Here is how to get all set up and tracking your affiliate click events to outsmart your competition – the people reading this not using AmaLinks Pro 🙂
I’m ready to stop reading, follow this tutorial, and start tracking my own links right now…
if you are ready to get started – click that link, get all set up, create some links, then come back to this tutorial. If you are still not ready, feel free to skip this section and jump to Part C.
* If you know you have Google Analytics installed, you can skip this step, but come back to troubleshoot if your event tracking is not working.
Log into your Google Analytics and set up a Property for your website if you have not already. There are many tutorials online if you need help with this step.
Then add the tracking code to your website in your preferred way. You can either paste this code into yourtag or use a plugin such as Google Analyticator to add the tracking code to your site.
AmaLinks Pro Auto Event Tracking works with either the latest and standard gtag.js as in the example above but also works with the legacy analytics.js tracking code as well. We recommend using the gtag.js version as that is what Google recommends.
To test if your Google Analytics is tracking properly, visit the Real Time > Overview page and you should see yourself there and be tracking at least 1 visitor.
Don’t see anything being tracked in the real time analytics?
If you are using the Google Analyticator plugin mentioned above, it may be set to not track logged in admin users. If this is the case, log out of your website, visit your homepage, and see if you are being tracked.
If nothing is being tracked, the next step is to verify that you see your tracking code in the website’s source code.
To verify if your tracking code is installed, right-click on your webpage in an open space, and click “View Page Source”
Next, look at the page of code that opened up in a new tab, and click CTRL+F (CMD+F Mac) and search for the word “google”. You should be able to find your Google Analytics tracking code that looks similar to this.
If you do not see your tracking code present in the page source, and no traffic is being recorded in real-time, please refer to the documentation of the plugin you are using to insert the tracking code or refer to Google’s own documentation.
Once you have your Real-time Google Analytics working, and can see yourself in the Real-time traffic (check by looking for your location, city, etc…) go to your AmaLinks Pro Settings Page and click on the “General” tab. If you do not see the “general” tab, your plugin may be out of date. Update the plugin and try again
Check the box next to “Enable Google Analytics Auto Event Tracking” and click the “Save Changes” button.
Now you should be all set up to test your event tracking.
Open up a page that has either an AmaLinks Pro text link, image link, showcase or product comparison table … and click on a link or two. DO NOT CLICK MORE THAN YOU NEED! You don’t want to send Amazon much test traffic.
Now open up your web browser page with the Google Analytics Real-time Analytics and click on the Events view.
Give it a few seconds after clicking your affiliate link, but if after say 30 seconds you do not see your click tracked in real-time, go back through these instructions to see what is wrong.
If tracked successfully, you will see events listed for your click! You will now track every Amazon Affiliate link click right within Google Analytics – enabling you to get some really awesome data on exactly what people are clicking on within your web pages.
I think the best thing to do would to be to use our latest product review demo. This review is built using AmaLinks Pro and our favorite page builder, Elementor. If you haven’t seen our latest review post, you’re in for a treat.
Check out our demo review post, then continue reading this tutorial …
Those of you that are AmaLinks Pro Members already have the ability to create professional engaging reviews like that and then track exactly what links and products get the highest click-through-rates.
Those of you who are not AmaLinks Pro members yet – we are your competition. Now you know what you are up against.
Let’s take a look at an example of event data that is sent to Google Analytics when visitors click my AmaLinks Pro generated links in that review post.
Log into your Google Analytics account, and navigate to “Behavior > Events > Overview
In this view right here, you can see the pages that have the most AmaLinks Pro events tracked. In our case, it is our new post illustrating the old boring review post style versus our advanced professional review template using AmaLinks Pro & Elementor together. If you didn’t click the button above to view this demo – you really should now.
This tells us the best posts to dig into further to learn more about why these pages have the highest click-through-rates.
Now I click on the first row in the data table to see only the events from post ID #7571, our Propane Grill Review demo post. Click the link to see the “Event Action”. This is still showing us only link clicks on the page we clicked.
Now you can see exactly what types of AmaLinks Pro links are being clicked on this page.
This tells you what types of links on this post gets the most clicks.
That tells you exactly what affiliate link content your visitors are the most interested in – and you can make some page optimizations based off this.
So, what do I see here?
It looks like the comparison table in the middle of the post get more clicks than all other links on the page combined!
That’s not something you can just guess about your visitors behavior unless you track the data like this.
We’ll have to dig a little deeper to see what inside the table people are actually clicking on … and I have a theory about what people are clicking on.
Right above this table, I have the text “Click any image for more details” bounce in when you scroll to the table.
I have a feeling that this is the reason the table gets so many clicks. If we find out that the most clicked column is the image column – that will be evidence of it.
Now it’s time to dig into the table events to see exactly what products and columns are being clicked.
The answer to our question “Are people clicking the image column a lot?” is buried here.
I click on the first row “Comparison Table Link Click” and now I can see only the link clicks within my table.
Would you look at that … my site visitors ONLY clicked on the image link! Even with such a small sample of visitors and clicks, I’m pretty confident that adding that text above my table will increase clicks on the table.
It seems like such a simple little bit of data that I just studied – but if I add that call to action text above all of my tables – it could have an instant impact in increasing my CTRs and ultimately my Amazon commissions!
I’m may to start doing that to all of my tables.
Does that mean that you should do that too for every table?
I can’t answer that for you … I don’t have the data to study to make that decision. I can’t even make that decision for myself quite yet. Although it seemed to work on this page and this table, I need to test it on other pages to see if it holds true. I now have something concrete with a trackable datapoint that I can run a handful of tests with and explore.
That’s what optimization is all about right there. Tracking detailed data points, studying them to gain insights into your visitor’s behavior and testing changes based off your best guess as to what might increase your CTR – the ultimate goal with your Amazon reviews like this.
What will I do next?
It’s great that we saw evidence of my call-to-action text above the table working, and I can make some sitewide improvements based on that information.
Also, I can to study the events on the pages I add that text to, then compare the data from an older time period to a newer time period when the table has that text above it.
If it increases the number of clicks on multiple pages – I know it works and can implement it across all my tables.
If you look at the Event Labels, you will see that the image on row 3 got clicked more than all the rest combined.
This tells me that whatever product is in row 3 – people are more interested in that the other products in the table. I should probably write a full review on that product and add the same comparison table, but with that product as my “Top Product”
There, I have now optimized my site by adding a new review for a popular product I discovered through my event data.
I have also discovered that my call to action text I added above the table seems to be working well.
I wonder if I could move the table up the page even more to increase clicks?
Doing that might increase clicks – or annoy people so they just leave without clicking anything.
Without AmaLinks Pro & Automatic Google Event Tracking – you can only make a guess if this move works.
I’ll be able to look at the data and see exactly if it worked or not.
If not, I put it back. If it does increase my Amazon clicks – maybe I leave it there or test another optimization. There are so many options and things I could do and test.
Here are a few ideas that I use, and that you can use for yourself or to help spark new ideas. There are so many things you can do, I would love to hear your tactics that work well using AmaLinks Pro!
So now you have seen some of our real AmaLinks Pro Automatic Event Tracking in action, and we explored actual examples of what we could learn and practical ways to apply the insights we gained from the data that was collected effortlessly.
Actually, I have some experiments I’m excited to run now and I’ll make sure to share any great results I may get with all of our readers.
Try adding “Click any image for more details” above your product comparison tables and see if it increases your CTR!
This article is already so long and packed with information, I was going to end it but decided to add one more unplanned section – some ideas on how you can use the event data from the AmaLinks Pro Table Builder to optimize your pages and earn more money.
Tracking exactly how your visitors interact with your tables can help you optimize them for the highest click-through-rates possible.
Here is some ideas on what type of insights and decisions I think about when I track Amazon affiliate links in my tables. Please use them for yourself and come up with your own great optimization ideas.
As you can see – the possibilities are endless. This article only scratches the surface of how to track amazon affiliate links however…
All of the ideas on this page can be done without using AmaLinks Pro if you know how to set up event tracking for all of your own links, but it gets complicated and time consuming to say the least.
You can set this up by coding some javascript to send the event data to Google, or you can set up event tracking on Google Tag Manager – but both of those require that you know a lot of information to get set up and manage it.
That’s CRAZY and a waste of time.
Instead, just use AmaLinks Pro – where it is all designed to work automatically with zero setup other than having Google Analytics installed and activated on your website already.
I sincerely hope this post helps you, AmaLinks Pro customer or not.
~ Alchemy Coder
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