How Does the Amazon Affiliate Link Checker Work

If you’re an Amazon affiliate, your site probably has broken links or points to out-of-stock products. Right now, you’re losing money if you have no way to track this. Luckily, this post explains what Amazon’s Link Checker tool is, how to monitor your URL strength, and a lot more.

Let’s dive in.

What Is the Amazon Affiliate Link Checker?

The Amazon Link Checker tool verifies tagged URLs linking to Amazon.com. It’s one way Amazon affiliates can tell if they’re getting commissions from their links.

Amazon uses a Tracking ID or Associate ID to monitor every referral sent to Amazon.

It’s the only way Amazon can know who is sending them traffic and who should get credited for sales.

Your Associates or Tracking ID is how you get paid for all of your referrals.

How It Works

You’ll log in to your Associates Account, click “Tools,” and once the dropdown menu appears, select “Link Checker.”

You’re prompted to paste the URL of the link you want to check in the search bar below.

After copying and pasting the URL and running a check, you’ll see a notification from Amazon telling you whether your link is good.

Amazon says the tool is best for any modified links created outside of Associates Central. The URLs you create inside Associates Central will be coded correctly.

However, it’s always a good idea to know at all times whether your links work.

Note: The Link Checker won’t check the tagging for its served links, including Recommended Product Links and Widgets.

How Do I Find My Amazon Associates Link?

You can get Amazon affiliate links by heading to “Product Linking” on the home page. From the drop-down menu, click “Product Links.”

From there, you can search for products by keyword or ASIN. Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, click “Get Link.”

You can read our post that covers Amazon’s affiliate program (including tips for finding and adding links to your site) in more detail here. 👇

Further Reading:

• Amazon Affiliate Program: The Associates Simple Guide to Earning More This Year

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How Do You Tell If a Link Is An Amazon Affiliate Link?

You can check whether your links are tagging to your account by looking at the URL. All links generated from Associates Central have three things:

• A detail product (dp) indicator
• Amazon product ID or ASIN number
• Store or Tracking ID (your unique affiliate tag)

Anatomy of an Affiliate Link

Affiliate URLs are a hot mess of garbled numbers, letters, and characters. They’re impossible to remember and hard to say on a podcast.

Here’s a real-life example of an Amazon affiliate link:

Typically, your ID starts with “?tag=” so next time you’re taking a look at whether your link is tracing back to your website, check there first.

It will usually look like this inside your URL:

• ?tag=YOUR STORE TRACKING ID

Then, to confirm your links are valid, you can contact customer support to see if your ID is connected to your website URL displaying those links.

If this sounds time-consuming, you’re right. It’s easier to automate the process, which we’ll talk about below.

No API Credits Required

Copy and paste any Amazon URL into the dashboard and Lasso grabs the product title, image, and price automatically without needing API keys. Then, converts it to an affiliate link and updates that data every 24 hours.

Convert Your First Amazon Link

Do Amazon Affiliate Links Expire?

Amazon affiliate links don’t expire, but the cookie does. When a website visitor clicks your link, a piece of tracking data (aka a “cookie”) gets added to their browser. This action triggers a 24-hour countdown to make a purchase.

If the person buys before the timer expires, you get credit for the sale.

Amazon’s cookie lasts 24 hours. It works like this:

• Someone clicks a link on your website
• The click activates a “cookie”
• Cookies have a set timeframe from when a person clicks to make a purchase
• If the person buys within that period, you’ll get a commission for the sale

Yes, 24 hours is a short time, but the upside is that if the person who clicked your link adds an item to their cart, the cookie window extends for another 89 days.

For example, if someone adds an item to their cart, leaves Amazon.com, returns within 89 days, and buys, you’ll still get credit for that sale and earn a commission.

That’s the only way you can get an extended cookie duration with Amazon.

Once you put an Amazon affiliate link (or any affiliate link) to your website, that link will stay active unless another variable occurs (e.g., the link breaks, the affiliate network changes, or the cookie expires).

Further Reading:

• How to Create A Successful Amazon Affiliate Website This Year

How Do I Promote My Affiliate Link?

There are many ways you can promote affiliate links. You can guest post or write product reviews. You could also try:

• Creating in-depth guides and tutorials focused on using a product
• Email marketing linking to your affiliate links
• YouTube

For example, if you’re writing a product review, you could show your readers how to use the product, what the benefits are, its pain points, etc. Your audience will LOVE you for it.

You provide value for them by creating a review about something that would make their lives easier (while adding your affiliate link). It’s an easy way to monetize your website.

We have a substantial amount of product reviews on our personal finance site, Listen Money Matters that attract qualified readers to click our links.

Further Reading:

• Amazon Affiliate Income: 9 Tips for Earning More This Year
• 15 Proven Ways to Boost Amazon Conversion Rates

Can I Buy Through My Amazon Affiliate Link?

No, you can’t buy using your own Amazon affiliate link because it’s a violation of their Associates Program. You can’t even ask your friends or family to buy products via your links.

If Amazon notices you’re soliciting friends and family to buy through, you won’t earn a commission or, worse, you’ll lose your affiliate account.

From Amazon:

You will not directly or indirectly purchase any products or take a bounty event action through special links… and you will not permit, request, or encourage any of your friends, relatives, or employees to directly or indirectly purchase any product…

They’re strict when it comes to this. Play it safe and focus on SEO, organic traffic, and high-quality content to get clicks and commissions.

Read Amazon’s Participation Requirements full policy for details.

How Much Do Amazon Affiliate Links Make?

Earning money as an Amazon affiliate can be lucrative, but commissions vary based on the product category and the number of buyers you send to Amazon. It will also depend on the product types you promote and how profitable your niche is.

For example, if you’re promoting high-priced electronics or appliances, you’ll potentially earn a larger commission. Your audience size also plays a role: the larger it is, the more you’ll make.

Here are Amazon’s fixed commission rates by category:

Depending on your strategy, you could target this list based on income rate percentage or product category. Then, weigh your interest level per category before deciding on which topic to start blogging about.

Further Reading:

• Amazon Affiliate Commission Rate: (This Year’s Definitive Associates Guide) 
• How Bloggers Can Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking In WordPress (& Boost Income)

The Advantages of Using A Link Checker Tool

One of the best ways to optimize your affiliate marketing content is to check for broken links. URLs can become unreliable, broken, or malformed. If you don’t know where they are, you’re losing money every time you send visitors to those destinations.

URLs can link to:

• Unreliable product listings
• 404 pages (broken links)
• Unavailable products

Another reason to use a link checker tool is to find monetization opportunities. If you link to other products, brands, or keywords with an unmonetized affiliate link, that’s lost income.

For example, let’s say you mention Asana in your blog content, and you link to their domain. Then you join their affiliate program, and now you want to turn those links to Asana’s domain into monetized affiliate links.

Link checker tools can streamline the process with instant alerts without needing to copy and paste URLs into a search bar manually.

Here’s how to squeeze every dime out of your affiliate marketing site with Lasso in 5 steps.

[Thread] 🎤

— Lasso (@LassoWP) September 1, 2021

Further Reading:

• The Content Audit You NEED to Run for Your Affiliate Marketing Website

Alternatives to the Amazon Link Checker

If you’re looking for other ways to monitor your affiliate links, try a tool designed for that specific purpose. There are several that are quick, easy, and automate the process, so it consumes less of your time.

For example, if you’re using Lasso to monitor your affiliate links…

In that case, you’ll get notified when your links are broken, products are out of stock, and any monetization opportunities available on your site.

It’s an excellent way to avoid sending your visitors to a broken link, but also for finding new income opportunities you may have missed.

You can install Lasso’s plugin in a few steps on your WordPress site.

Once that’s done, Lasso scans every link across your site. It’ll detect which ones are broken, out of stock, and look for ways you can monetize.

Further Reading:

• The Best 2091 Affiliate Programs to Monetize Your Site This Year

Finding Link Issues with Lasso

You can troubleshoot affiliate link issues with Lasso from inside your dashboard. It displays all broken URLs and out-of-stock products in a single location, as well as income opportunities.

Lasso runs on its own servers when checking your URLs so it won’t slow down your site. Most broken link checkers don’t integrate with your server resulting in your hosting provider banning them.

If you want to search for busted links, for example, click the red icon:

Lasso displays every place on your site where they appear.

You’ll see three columns:

• Products (along with an image) with broken links
• The alert type (in this case, “broken links”)
• Number of locations where those broken links appear on your site

When you click “Locations,” Lasso shows you each post with the broken link.

For example, if I use the first affiliate product link on the top of the list, Arcadia Power, when I click “Locations,” I see this:

This page shows you three things:

1. The content the link appears (e.g., a blog post)
2. Link with context (anchor text used)
3. Link type (whether it’s a text link, image link, etc.)

An easy way to do this is with Google Analytics. Lasso integrates with Google Analytics so you can track every click’s performance.

It will help you see which posts get the most clicks and by what affiliates.

All you need to do is enter your Google Tracking ID and enable click tracking in Lasso’s dashboard. You can read about how to do that here.

Then, you’ll know what posts perform best. Adjust your site links as needed so you can incrementally make improvements and *ideally* boost conversion rates 😉

Just rinse and repeat this process to check for out-of-stock products or monetization opportunities.

The Last Word

The Amazon affiliate link checker is a useful tool when conducting one-off checks for your affiliate links. However, if you’re running a site with a substantial amount, a streamlined process might make more sense.

One drawback of relying only on Amazon’s Link Checker is that it won’t automatically alert you when links are broken unless you manually paste the link into the tool.

For this reason alone, using something that does it for you automatically is a game-changer. Ready to find out how Lasso will grow your business? Try a 14-day FREE trial.

Sean Brison is a dad, writer, business owner, and Chief Growth nerd at Lasso. He's spent the past several years in cahoots with Lasso's founder, Andrew, creating awesome things for people. He's also addicted to perfectly-balanced cocktails, the outdoors, and John Mulaney's stand-up comedy.