AffiliateBrand.com by Gene Kavner

How to Track Multiple Amazon Associates Campaigns

I have noticed an entry on a blog http://www.45n5.com which discusses a particular reason why you may want to create multiple Amazon Associates IDs for your site:

Why do you want more than one Amazon Associates ID? The main reason to get multiple Amazon Associate ID's is for tracking.  Consider each one like a google adsense channel.

Actually, this is not a great reason to create multiple Amazon Associates IDs.   When you create multiple Associates IDs you are not able to combine them together and add all the products you've referred to Amazon in order to get into the next performance tier.

So, how do you then track multiple Amazon Associates campaigns you may be running?  By using Amazon Tracking IDs.  Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't describe how to get these tracking id's prominently on Amazon Associates Central.

The way to get these tracking id's is to email Amazon Associates Customer Service at associates@amazon.com.  Tell them the following:

1.  Your main Associates ID.
2.  "I would like to receive XXX Associates tracking id's to track multiple campaigns I am planning to run." 

That's it.  XXX can be any number up to 1,500.  You will receive an email within 24 hours with your tracking id's. 

Tracking id's will look very much like your Associates ID but a bit different.  If your Associates ID is "MyWebSite-20", then your tracking id's look something like "MyWeb1-20" through "MyWeb1500-20".

You will then be able to use your tracking id's in the same place as you would use your Associates ID.  You will get the same benefit of being able to track you campaigns separately while at the same time being able to combine all your sales together to propel yourself into the higher compensation tiers.

Update:

Per Shameek's comment below (thanks Shameek for the heads up!), if you would like to create a few tracking id's, you can do it yourself without emailing Amazon by simply logging into Amazon Associates Central web site and then clicking on:
    Your account -> Manage your Tracking IDs -> Add Tracking ID

This method may be too tedious if you would like to add hundreds of tracking id's, in which case you should just email Amazon, as I suggested.  However, you do have an option to name your tracking id's anything you like (with a -20 extension).

Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.
Join Amazon Associates Today -- it's Easy and FREE!

Amazon Announces Monthly Payments for its Associates Affiliate Program

Earlier today Amazon announced that it is planning on starting monthly payments to its affiliates effective January 1, 2007. 

With almost all affiliate and advertising programs paying at least on a monthly schedule, with some programs paying even on a bi-weekly basis, Amazon has remained one of the only programs that continued to pay quarterly.  This payment frequency (or infrequency, I should say) was reflective of its roots, being the first major affiliate program in 1996 when little competition was grabbing attention of potential affiliates.  Today, Internet has dramatically shifted to become the affiliate's market with merchants trying to outbid each other in the hopes of securing the precious real-estate of the in-demand web sites.  Amazon's monthly payment was not only making affiliates look the other way, it also affected those affiliates that remained in the Amazon court but had severe cash-flow probems, such as those bidding Amazon's products on various PPC sites such as Google. 

With its introduction of monthly payments, Amazon quickly catapulted to respectability in the affiliate space, matching Google and almost all major affiliate programs.  The following table reflects the new tiered structure given monthly payments, making the old quarterly tiers obsolete:

Monthly products sold	Cumulative fee % on non-electronics products
1-6	4%
7-30	6%
31-110	6.5%
111-320	7%
321-630	7.5%
631-1570	8%
1571-3130	8.25%
3131+	8.5%

As before, all Electronics products are commissioned at 4%, regardless of how many you sell during the month.  Electronics products, however, do count towards the product count, so selling electronics does contribute to your jumping to the next commission tier, even if the higher tier will only apply to non-electronics items.

In order to allow for returns, Amazon will pay commission fees 2 months after the end of the calendar month, so you will see payment for any items you sell in January on around April 1.

If you are not already an Amazon affiliate, you may join Amazon's Associates affiliate program here for free.

Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.

Widgets - The Future of Affiliate Marketing

According to Wikipedia, a Web Widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop applications.

Social networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace, as well as blogging engines have popularized the use of widgets as means by which millions of social networking aficionados share everything from music and video to various statistics of their web sites.

What made web widgets so popular is their ease of integration into various web sites and blogging platforms.  Six Apart Inc., developers of TypePad, was one of the first to introduce a functionality by which widget designers could make it strikingly easy for TypePad users to integrate widgets into their blogs.  Example of a widget is MyBlogLog's "View Reader Community" widget that you can find towards the bottom of the left sidebar of my blog.

Sites such as YouTube and iFilm.com have made widgets very easy to grab and put on any site.  You can simply grab the HTML code for the widget and place it right on your site.  Copying and pasting the HTML code is very simple as well.  Take a look at how easy YouTube and iFilm made it for you to copy the HTML code to place a video on your site.

YouTube Embed Mechanism	iFilm.com Embed Mechanism

Surprisingly, affiliate programs have not caught on to the widget bandwagon -- yet.  I strongly believe that this is the next direction for the Internet affiliate programs.  One of the toughest challenges for today's merchants is getting their program noticed by super-affiliates, those affiliates capable of driving significant sales.  Making it easy for them to grab a code widget, whether from the merchant's site or from another affiliate's site will make both, merchants' marketing job and affiliate implementation job so much easier. 

Lawrence Coburn of sexywidget.com recently gave a great overview of the five characteristics that each widget should have in his post titled Building a Widget? Read this First. I fully agree with his analysis that every widget should have

1. Accessibility.  Widgets must be formatted properly for the space they are designed to fit. 

2. Customization.  Widgets must be customizable by the webmaster to fit the overall look/feel of his site.

3. Content / Experience.  Widgets must provide a good experience for the reader.

4. Branding.  Widgets must offer branding to the merchant.

5.  Sharing.  Widgets must be easy to for the reader to copy from the site he is reading and place them on his own site. 

The last point is the most important in my perspective since this feature allows viral marketing of the merchant's affiliate program. Yet very few merchant affiliate programs offer this capability.  The easier merchants can make it for potential affiliates to become affiliates, the more affiliates they will have.  Furthermore, any business that a new affiliate brings to the merchant via the widgets they copied from the original affiliate's site should be credited in terms of second-tier fees to the original affiliate.  This will give affiliates plenty of financial incentives to display merchant's widgets on their sites. 

Today, merchants create too many barriers in their attempt to sign up new affiliates. Widgets are perfect for breaking down these barriers.  I expect many more widgets to become staples of mainstream affiliate programs in the months to come.

Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.
Join Amazon Associates Today -- it's Easy and FREE!