Amazon Hacks

Measure Your Associate Sales

Find out when, where, and how your visitors are arriving at Amazon from your site.

A great way to improve the effectiveness of your associate efforts is to measure exactly what’s happening with your account. Amazon provides the reporting tools, but it’s up to you to come up with a system of measuring your results and using that data to fine-tune your site.

To get started with the reporting tool, log into your associate account (http://associates.amazon.com) and choose “View Reports” from the navigation bar at the top of the page. This reports page is divided into three sections—your earnings, your traffic, and your link performance. Each adds a piece of important data to help you understand your associate account activity.

Earnings

Let’s get to the money. Earnings reports relate how much money you’ve made. On the View Reports page of the Associates Central extranet, you’ll see a quick overview of your earnings for the current quarter. To get the details, though, you’ll have to click “see reports” next to Your Earnings to get to the earnings report tool (https://associates.amazon.com/exec/panama/associates/resources/reporting/earnings.html). From here there are two types of reports you can view:

Total Earnings

Much like the overview you’ve already seen, this report provides total items sold, total revenue for Amazon, and your total referral fees. You can choose different time periods from this page, zeroing in on data going back four years or more—if you’ve ...