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Question for fellow Amazon Affiliates

by TheChanger
8 replies
Hello everyone,

Earlier today I ran a "Tracking ID Summary Report" for all my active ID's. Now when I look at the "clicks" for one of my ID's it says that it received 16 clicks yesterday.

Now what exactly does Amazon mean by clicks? Does this mean that a visitor(s) actually "clicked" my link 16 times on my site? Or does it mean that a visitor clicked on one of my affiliate links once (on my site) and then clicked on 15 additional links while exploring the Amazon.com website?

So at this point I am not exactly sure if these "clicks" are from mysite.com, or a combination of "clicks" from my mysite.com and Amazon.com. So if someone could clarify this, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Gordon
#affiliates #amazon #fellow #question
  • Profile picture of the author mainstreetcm
    I believe it means the link or links (if you have more than one) on your site was clicked 16 times yesterday.
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    • Profile picture of the author TheChanger
      Originally Posted by mainstreetcm View Post

      I believe it means the link or links (if you have more than one) on your site was clicked 16 times yesterday.
      That appears to be correct - Thank you
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  • Profile picture of the author Sojourn
    Gordon- Bring up your Amazon Orders Report. On the top left you'll see a drop down of your IDs. Choose the one you want to review. Scroll down and select Daily Trends in the menu on the left. You'll see the number of unique visitors and the number of clicks.

    There's a Glossary button for definitions at the upper right of the report. Unique visitors are the total number of visitors who clicked on at least one of your affiliate links for that time period. Clicks are the total number of affiliate link clicks whether from the same person or not. So, if you had 10 visitors in one day and nine of those people clicked on only one affiliate link while another visitor clicked on 3 affiliate links on your site, you would have 10 unique visitors and a total of 13 clicks.

    I'm glad you asked because until now I thought the difference between unique visitors and clicks was the number of other products people looked at after they followed a link to Amazon. This makes more sense now.
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    • Profile picture of the author TheChanger
      Thanks for the reply!

      I just ran a "Daily Trends" report for one of my ID's (for the last week). And Amazon is reporting more "unique visitors" then Google Analytics. Amazon is saying that I had 89, and Google Analytics says that I had 16 unique visitors in the last week. So I wonder which figure I should believe? What do you think?

      Thank you,
      Gordon

      Originally Posted by Sojourn View Post

      Gordon- Bring up your Amazon Orders Report. On the top left you'll see a drop down of your IDs. Choose the one you want to review. Scroll down and select Daily Trends in the menu on the left. You'll see the number of unique visitors and the number of clicks.

      There's a Glossary button for definitions at the upper right of the report. Unique visitors are the total number of visitors who clicked on at least one of your affiliate links for that time period. Clicks are the total number of affiliate link clicks whether from the same person or not. So, if you had 10 visitors in one day and nine of those people clicked on only one affiliate link while another visitor clicked on 3 affiliate links on your site, you would have 10 unique visitors and a total of 13 clicks.

      I'm glad you asked because until now I thought the difference between unique visitors and clicks was the number of other products people looked at after they followed a link to Amazon. This makes more sense now.
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  • Profile picture of the author Sojourn
    Personally, I'd believe Amazon and not just because the number is better.

    I'm sure that there are some definitional reasons and timing differences between how the two track visitor information but to be that far off might indicate some other issue.

    Do you use any other visitor tracking application besides Google Analytics? If you don't have GA loaded on EVERY page, you might be missing some traffic stats. If you're using WP, add the Statpress plug-in and see what daily visitor traffic looks like as compared to GA and Amazon.

    You could also check your server's raw access logs. Although you have all kinds of stuff mixed in there, it might help you identify the cause of some discrepancies.
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    • Profile picture of the author TheChanger
      Hello Sojourn,

      I am currently only using Google Analytics for tracking purposes. For these Amazon sites I use the iTheme Builder theme, which allows me to insert my Google Analytics code directly into the theme's footer (So maybe that is the problem). I was told that inserting the Google Analytics code into the theme's header would yield more accurate results.

      I think I may go back to using the Google Analytics For Wordpress plugin. Which I do believe adds the Google Analytic code to the header. I will also give Statpress a try. I am assuming this is the plugin: WordPress › StatPress WordPress Plugins

      Thanks again,
      Gordon

      Originally Posted by Sojourn View Post

      Personally, I'd believe Amazon and not just because the number is better.

      I'm sure that there are some definitional reasons and timing differences between how the two track visitor information but to be that far off might indicate some other issue.

      Do you use any other visitor tracking application besides Google Analytics? If you don't have GA loaded on EVERY page, you might be missing some traffic stats. If you're using WP, add the Statpress plug-in and see what daily visitor traffic looks like as compared to GA and Amazon.

      You could also check your server's raw access logs. Although you have all kinds of stuff mixed in there, it might help you identify the cause of some discrepancies.
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  • Profile picture of the author Sojourn
    Yes, that's the plug-in. I'm kind of partial to it because you can see real time traffic plus, for each visitor you can see what phrase they typed into which search engine that led them to a page of your site. This is often how I find new phrases for which I'm ranking or ideas for new posts when some interesting long tail search comes up. While it doesn't match my GA stats exactly it's not far off and variances day to day are directionally in line between the two.

    Hope it helps!
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    • Profile picture of the author TheChanger
      Hi Erica,

      Thanks again for all the help.

      Gordon

      Originally Posted by Sojourn View Post

      Yes, that's the plug-in. I'm kind of partial to it because you can see real time traffic plus, for each visitor you can see what phrase they typed into which search engine that led them to a page of your site. This is often how I find new phrases for which I'm ranking or ideas for new posts when some interesting long tail search comes up. While it doesn't match my GA stats exactly it's not far off and variances day to day are directionally in line between the two.

      Hope it helps!
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