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9 Tips About How To Increase Amazon Affiliate Earnings By Increasing The Conversion Rate: Tip #4 Is My Favorite 🤗

In April 2020, Amazon cut the affiliate rates in many categories by almost three times 😭 That time, many affiliates pledged to leave it… but few did 🤷‍♀️ 

The Amazon Affiliate program is just too convenient to use thanks to the API and tons of tools built around it. It converts like crazy and always brings in more money since the buyers can find there pretty much everything.

Too bad that the Amazon affiliate rates now suck

“How can I squeeze more out of the Amazon products I already have on my pages? Without increasing traffic?” this is what has been occupying my mind lately 🤔

I realized I have got at least 9 tricks that can increase my Amazon affiliate earnings without improving the traffic of your website 😏 I decided to capture them all in one post that would be useful for you as well.

For each tip, I will also talk about how to implement it in two ways:

  1. using only bare Amazon product links you can create in your Amazon Associates dashboard; I do not recommend using this method but for new Amazon affiliate accounts, you have no choice 😟
  2. using AAWP, an awesome WordPress plugin. AAWP connects to the Amazon API and pulls all the product data automatically. It also offers other functionality that helps you to increase your Amazon affiliate revenue even more.

My favorite tip is #4 and I also have a bonus tip at the end of the post 😋

Let’s dive in!

Tip#1: Display the Prime icon

Amazon Prime is very popular among Amazon shoppers 💙 Amazon Prime members spend almost double what non-Prime customers do in a given year. They also love 2-day free Prime shipping 😍

If a shopper is subscribed to Prime, they will be looking for products that are a part of the program in order to get the perks. Thus, displaying the Prime logo will increase the conversion and affiliate earnings.

How to implement it

If you use bare Amazon links, the Prime status will be shown in a widget with text and image:

amazon widget with Prime status
A

For in-text links, you can specify next to the link whether the product is eligible for Prime. In this case, you would need to update the text once the product is no longer eligible for Prime.

With AAWP, you have a choice to either show the logo or to hide it in the widgets. It’s a global setting that affects the whole site.

And if you do show the Prime logo, you can enable linking it  to the “Amazon Prime 30-day free trial” landing page to receive an extra commission for Amazon Prime referrals 😏

AAWP Prime settings

Please note that this setting works only for the widgets that show the product images with the descriptions and won’t work for textual or image links.

Apart from that, you can use a shortcode that would display only the Prime logo if the product is qualified for Prime:

AAWP prime field

Tip#2: Create comparison tables

Online shoppers love to compare products that belong to the same category. Help them with comparison tables!

Present your products in a nice way that makes them easily comparable. In your table, include a few key pieces of information that would help the buyer to make the choice 📃

Don’t forget to include a Buy button next to each of the products 🧈

How to implement it

If you are using bare Amazon links, you can do it using a table plugin like TablePress that you need to fill with the Amazon widgets and other custom product info.

If you are using AAWP, making comparison tables is very easy. This is one of my most favorite features of AAWP 🤗

You can create something like this table below where you specify which product is the best, which one is a runner-up, add your custom info, etc, including the red and blue highlight colors:

Comparison table rendered
C

All the product info will be automatically pulled from Amazon.

Here’s how the internals of a comparison table look like:

comparison table settings
C

Once the table is created, you can insert the shortcode into your posts. 

Tip#3: Create comparison charts

If you want to be a bit more thorough and the products you advertise are expensive enough to justify extra work, you can create a comparison chart 📊

It’s very similar to the comparison tables I talked about above but is more elaborated. You can go into more detail comparing various properties of the product as well as add extra table functionality such as sorting, filtering, search, etc.

Comparison chart example rendered

How to implement it

To create a comparison chart like this, you would again need a table plugin like TablePress

If you use bare Amazon links, you use a product image and a product link for the Buy button. The rest of the product info (such as the Prime status) can be only filled out manually. If this info changes, you’d need to update it by hand.

With AAWP, you can pull much more info from Amazon. 

Just create a TablePress table and fill it with the AAWP shortcodes that output a product image, title, price, Prime status, Buy button, etc:

Comparison chart example config

However, if you want to create something similar to my comparison chart example, you should use an AWWP shortcode that produces regular tables:

AAWP regular table shortcode

It requires much less work and you’d get a nice table:

AAWP regular table rendered

BTW speaking of prices! Is it a good idea to display them? 🤔

Tip#4: Hide prices

This may look like a surprising move but hiding prices may increase your Amazon conversion rate 🤯

This has been my most favorite trick so far since it’s so unintuitive 😅

I ran a few experiments on a couple of my sites and confirmed that no prices did increase the CTR and affiliate earnings as a consequence 👀

Here’s how to run such an experiment:

  1. take a post that has a unique Amazon tag used to it;
  2. hide prices for two weeks in it;
  3. after two weeks, simply compared the number you got during these two weeks with the numbers from the previous two weeks.

This is the Before snapshot; you can see that the conversion rate was 27.56%:

Hiding price experiment before

And this is the After snapshot showing that the conversion rate grew to 33.70%. The commission amount got increased as well.

hiding price experiment after

In my experiments, the CTR increase was more than 5%. In this game, every percent matters 😆😅

How to implement it

If you use bare Amazon links, you just need to either use the text-only links or image links. It’s also possible to do with the text+image widget 😉

You just need to set up the price color to white (the same as Background Color) in the Link Customization panel:

Amazon widget hide the price

However, if after finishing the experiment, you concluded that it’s better to show the price, you would need to recreate the widgets with the visible price.

You can also use custom CSS to hide the HTML element that contains the price.

With AAWP, you can do it in two ways: globally and locally.

To hide prices globally, you need to adjust the Price section in the Output settings:

Select

You can control displaying prices locally on the shortcode level with the modificator “price=none”:

AAWP show no price shortcode

Also, if you want to hide prices in your AAWP tables, you need to go to each table individually and remove the price row from there. There is no global setting allowing you to do it all at once 🤷‍♀️

Tip#5: Adjust Amazon button color

This is another nice trick that can help you to increase the conversion rate easily 🟠🔴🟢🟣

An Amazon buying button is in fact a call to action (CTA) button. Its color is very important and it’s recommended to use a color that contrasts the background and your website theme.

The most common choice for such colors is red or orange 🟠🔴 If you are using bare Amazon links, it offers only one color: orange 🟠

When your website color theme is, let’s say, blue, it’s easy to see that the CTA color should be orange.

However, what is your website color is orange? 🤔 Should your CTA color be blue? Or green? Or maybe the orange color is still good despite not being in contrast to your main theme? 🤔😖

You can get the answer by running an A/B experiment in Google Optimize.

I ran several experiments like this and found some low hanging fruits that helped me to double the conversion rate 🤯

Here’s how one of the Google Optimize experiments looked like:

How to implement it

To run an Optimize experiment with bare Amazon links, first, you need to set up Google Tag Manager to track clicks on those links. Google Tag Manager would tag the clicks in such a way that would allow you to track them in Google Analytics as events

It’s a big topic so it’s better to discuss it some other time. For now, you can simply follow the Google Tag Manager tutorials.

Once you find the winning color, you can use custom CSS to change the color of the Amazon buttons. Unfortunately, Amazon does not offer an out-of-box setting for that.

Meanwhile, with AAWP, most of the work is already done for you 🤗

AAWP has an integration with Google Analytics (and Google Tag Manager). Thanks to that, Clicks performed on the Amazon links are already being reported as amazon-link events:

AAWP Google analytics events

Given that, setting up a Google Optimize experiment is very easy. The objective of your experiment would be Goal Completion for the amazon-link events.

Once the winning color is found, you can either choose it from a list of predefined button colors or use custom CSS if your color is not on the list:

AAWP custom css button color

Tip#6: Adjust Amazon button text

It’s very similar to adjusting the Amazon button color we discussed above. Just run a Google Optimize experiment to find the winning text 👍

How to implement it

Unfortunately, with bare Amazon links, it seems impossible to change the button text. Amazon does not make this setting customizable and CSS won’t help you either.

With AAWP, it’s again easy to implement. On the Output tab of the settings, you need to scroll to the Button section and change the Label text:

AAWP button text setting

Tip#7: Fix Currently unavailable Amazon product links

It happens very often that Amazon products get out of stock 🤷‍♀️ Whenever a visitor clicks on the product link and sees that they cannot buy it, the chances that they will leave are pretty big

The more unavailable products you have, the worse it makes your conversion rates. So, it’s really worth it to take a look into it.

How to implement it

If you are using bare Amazon links, you can use a service that scans your site and finds broken Amazon links.

One of such services is amzlinkchecker.com. It can crawl your whole site or only a part of it and supports link cloaking. apart from finding broken product links, you can also find products with low ratings 🤩

You can then export the results as a CSV and task your VA to find replacement products. They offer a fully functional 7-day trial 👍

Image credit amzlinkchecker.com

With AAWP, you can also use a site scanner but there is one more method to do it 😀

If an Amazon product is unavailable or not found, AAWP can display a special custom message in lieu of the product:

aawp no product found example

You can set this message up on the Functions tab in the Settings:

aawp no product found settings

If you show the notice to public visitors, it means you can find the posts that have it 😉

Just type in the Google Search bar:

site:<your site URL> "no products found"

where <your site URL> should be replaced with, you know, your site URL 😉 and hit enter! You will get all the posts with unavailable products 😏

Tip#8: Holiday edition – Add an Amazon banner

We are approaching Black Friday which is one of the most lucrative shopping seasons 🤑

You can be a bit pushier during this pre-Black Friday period since online shoppers are much warmer towards sales and more tolerant of ads 😏

Thus, you can add Amazon banners to your product pages.

From Amazon:

Select the kind of banners you would like to display on your site. For optimal performance, place the banners near the top of your most frequently visited pages. Banners created using Adobe Flash will not work for mobile devices.

These banners contain a link to an Amazon landing page that shows the latest deals in the section the banner was created for as well as products from the browsing history of the readers.

You can find the banner code in your Amazon affiliate area:

Amazon banners

How to implement it

What you will need for it is an ad inserting plugin, for example, Ad Inserter. It’s a free plugin that allows you to insert ad code based on particular rules defined by you.

Just copy-paste the banner code and set up the pages you want it to show:

insert amazon banners

Once the sales period is over, simply disable the ad insertion.

AAWP does not offer any functionality for Amazon banners. I think it’s because Amazon does not provide any API for it and their banners are easy to use.

Tip#9: Special mention – Capture international sales

Aaand one more thing that’s not about the conversion rate but just more like a reminder and food for thought.

If you receive traffic from more than one country, you should apply to Amazon affiliate programs in all these countries 🌎🌍🌏

This is Amazon Affiliate 101 😏

Each country has its own Amazon affiliate program. Being accepted in one of them does not guarantee that you will be approved in the others.

If you have been with Amazon for a long while, it may happen that you’ll get rejected by the programs of the other countries. Amazon gets better and better at finding out compliance violations and it may find many of them on your site 👮‍♂️👮‍♀️🚨

If they did find something and rejected you, you can simply fix the violations and reapply.

Good thing is that being rejected by one of the Amazon country-specific programs does not affect your status in any other program where you are already accepted.

If you ask me, it’s actually not a bad thing that you need to get accepted separately for each store. The silver lining here is that you can find whether you are still compliant with the Amazon Affiliate Terms Of Service 🤔

While time passes by, Amazon changes its TOS and maybe you have stopped being compliant.. unknowingly…

Applying to a new Amazon affiliate program helps you to see if you are still compliant and it may prevent you from being banned on Amazon 👍

How to implement it

If you use bare Amazon links, use Amazon OneClick that implements the redirect between the different Amazon affiliate shops based on the location of the visitor 🌐 It allows you to use a single URL per product and the rest is happening behind the scene:

Amazon oneClick menu

You just need to link your main account with your international associate account and then, just follow the OneClick Integration Guide.

With AAWP, it is again easy to implement. It provides geo-targeting that allows you to redirect your website visitors (when they click on Amazon affiliate links) to the Amazon shop that handles their location.

On the Amazon API tab in the settings, you need to specify the tracking IDs for your international stores. AAWP then will handle the redirect as mentioned above:

AAWP multiple tracking ids

Bonus: Track your conversions

In order to understand what’s working and what’s not, you should assign a custom Amazon tracking ID to each of your product pages 🤓

For example, if you have a page dedicated to selling plush bunnies, create an Amazon tag plushbunnies01 and use it in the product links on that page 🐰

Then, you can check the Amazon report for your ta. If you see that your visitors often buy $300 heaters from links with this tag plushbunnies01, it might be a good idea to write something about heaters on that page 😉

How to implement it

If you use bare Amazon links, you can specify a tag to use when you are creating a product link.

amazon link specify custom tracking id

With AAWP, you can add a custom tag to any shortcode using the field tracking_id:

Add custom tracking ID

What you need to know before starting using AAWP

The best way to work with the Amazon Affiliate program is to use a tool that takes advantage of the Amazon API 🏹

My choice here AAWP, which stands for Amazon Affiliate WordPress.

It’s a WordPress plugin that connects to the Amazon API and pulls all the data automatically.

Get 10% off AAWP with the code SAVE10
(applicable to new licenses only)

However, in order to be able to use it, your Amazon account has to satisfy the following conditions:

  • If it’s a new account, it has to be verified and have generated at least 3 sales
  • If you created a new API key, it takes 48 hours for it to start working
  • If your account has not generated at least 3 sales in the last 30 days via the API, you’ll lose access to the API.

Did you like my tips for increasing Amazon affiliate earnings?

I hope that my post with Amazon affiliate tips has helped you improve the conversion rate of your Amazon links 😀 and increased your earnings!

If you are interested in the AAWP plugin, you can buy it using my affiliate link (and I will receive a small commission):

Get 10% off AAWP with the code SAVE10
(applicable to new licenses only)

If you want to know more about it, check out my AAWP review.

Do you know other ways to increase CTR? Share them in the comments!


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