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Having a VA manage your Amazon Associates?

by pdrs
2 replies
Hey Everyone,

One of the things that's long been a thorn in my side is managing all the tracking-id's and stuff for my Amazon associates account.

I like to create separate tracking id's for each product on a site, and sometimes for each link on a page so I can really track where my clicks are coming from.

I've got my website management team building down to a science with various managers/employees for each section but this is something I haven't quite figured out how to handle and I still find myself managing all of the affiliate links for my sites which is a lot of work in itself.

I know I can add users to my Amazon account, but as far as I can tell there is no way to give them permissions and they can see everything I have going on in terms of earnings, sales etc... which is definitely not what I want!

I've done a bit of googling around without any real answers.

Anyone have a solution for this?
#amazon #associates #manage
  • Profile picture of the author kilgore
    As far as I know, no, you cannot create a "limited access" user like you want to. You're absolutely right that "they can see everything I have going on in terms of earnings, sales". Perhaps you can try a workaround such as:
    • Create your own associates interface: unfortunately, the Amazon API is only for products, not for management tasks, but you could probably develop something using cURL that would allow your VA to create and manage tracking IDs. That said, this would probably be a big pain in the butt for all involved and I'm not sure it's even allowed by Amazon's terms.
    • Create less -- but more systematic -- tracking IDs. Amazon already gives you data on how many clicks you get on a product by tracking ID. Thus, I don't really see why you'd need different tracking IDs for each product. But you might want to create different tracking IDs for different sources, be they specific places on your website or things like email or social media. You could combine this scheme with the information Amazon already supplies and probably get (mostly) what you're looking for.
    • Track more with your analytics program. This isn't ideal because you can't follow the user through the the actual sale, but with good analytics programs (like Google Analytics) you can define different types of user behavior as a "conversion" so that users are tracked when they, for example, click a link. With Google Analytics, you can pretty much create these on the fly so your VA would only have to code new ones within the webpage.

    Sorry it's not what you want! I wish Amazon had better reporting too!
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  • Profile picture of the author pdrs
    Thanks for the response kilgore, unfortunately you're just confirming what I already suspected

    "Create less -- but more systematic -- tracking IDs. Amazon already gives you data on how many clicks you get on a product by tracking ID. Thus, I don't really see why you'd need different tracking IDs for each product. "

    I'm not sure I understand this fully.

    Say I have a review for product x and a review for product y - I like to have two sep tracking id's (one for each review) as I like to see which review is getting more clicks.

    For instance: Product X could have 400 visitors per month and make 3 sales with 50 click throughs, while Product Y may only have 200 visitors per month but makes 10 sales with 40 click throughs.

    As far as I know the only way to get a real good insight into actual conversions is with sep tracking ID's like this. Same with multiple tracking id's per review page.

    It would be impossible to tell all of this unless there were different product tracking id's, at least as far as I can see?
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