Broken Amazon Affiliate links are a very common issue on Amazon affiliate websites. Not fixing these broken affiliate links will cost your affiliate site Amazon referral commissions and not provide your customers with a great site experience.
Click this link to jump to how to automatically check and fix your broken Amazon affilaite links.
If your affiliate site is full of broken links customers will tend to try a different site. To understand more of what a broken affiliate link looks like, here is an article called “What does a broken Amazon Affiliate link look like?” that has examples.
What causes broken Amazon affiliate links?
Broken Amazon affiliate links can be caused by a variety of things. It could be due to changes in Amazon’s product page URLs, incorrect placement of the affiliate code, or an outdated or expired affiliate link.
It may also be caused by using invalid characters in the affiliate link, Amazon’s website being down, or experiencing technical issues.
Often, when manually fixing broken affiliate links people use the “Copy and Paste” keyboard shortcut. Either they don’t fully capture all of the links when they copy or don’t fully delete the old link when they paste. This is a very common error.
Linkmoney App Fixes This!
Linkmoney will check and automatically fix all your Amazon Store ID affiliate link issues.
How much Amazon referral commission do I lose per year if my Amazon affiliate website has broken affiliate links?
The amount of Amazon referral commission you lose per year due to broken affiliate links depends on the number of broken links, the amount of traffic your website receives, and the conversion rate of those visitors.
Without this information, it is impossible to estimate how much commission you may lose. However, you can make some assumptions:
Example of loss of revenue for 1 broken link on an Amazon affiliate website
In this example, there is an Amazon Affiliate site that has 200 posts. Each post has 10 Amazon affiliate links. This comes out to 2,000 Amazon affiliate links on your site. 10 Affialtie links per post are common.
If there is 1 broken Amazon affiliate link on the entire site this may or may not be a big issue. The determining factor of how much revenue the 1 broken affiliate link would be is what post the broken affiliate link is on.
If the broken link is on your top-performing post, then that link is seeing a lot more traffic. If the broken link is on a low performing post, then the broken link is seeing less traffic.
| Number of Amazon affiliate links on single post | Post traffic per week | Percent of each link getting clicks | Broken Link clicks | Loss of Amazon commission |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | 1,000 | 10% | 100 | 10% |
| 10 | 100 | 10 | 10 | 10% |
There is always more than one broken Amazon affiliate link
Amazon affiliate sites contain 1,000s of Amazon affiliate links.
A 1,000 post Amazon affiliate site can have well over 10,000 Amazon affiliate links. From Linkmoney customer use cases, the average Amazon affiliate site contains around 10-25% broken affiliate links.
The number of broken Amazon affiliate links on a site looks more like this:
| Number of affiliate POSTS on site | Number of affiliate LINKs on site | Percent (%) of broken affiliate links on site | Number of broken affiliate links on site |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | 1,000 | 10% | 100 |
| 500 | 5,000 | 10% | 500 |
| 1,000 | 10,000 | 10% | 1.000 |
| 100 | 1,000 | 25% | 250 |
| 500 | 5,000 | 25% | 1,250 |
| 1,000 | 10,000 | 25% | 2.500 |
There is another scenario- the broken link(s) is causing low traffic on a post (or site)
Broken Amazon affiliate links can be bad for an Amazon affiliate website, as they can hurt the website’s credibility and prevent visitors from buying the products they are looking for.
It is important to ensure that all affiliate links are working properly in order to maximize the potential of the website.
Additionally, broken Amazon affiliate links can cause the customer to Bounce.
What is Bounce Rate on Google analytics mean?
The Bounce Rate in Google Analytics is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions where the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page). Note: As of July 1, 2023, Google will convert to GA4. It is a good idea to get GA4 setup on your site and learn to use it.
In Google Analytics 4, Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that were not engaged sessions. In other words, Bounce rate is the inverse of Engagement rate.
Bounce an indicator of the quality of your website, as it shows how many people left your site without taking any action.
A high bounce rate can mean that the content on your page is not relevant to the visitor, or the page design is not user-friendly.
A high Bounce Rate is negative on SEO from Amazon affiliate sites.
How to fix Broken Amazon Affiliate Links
There are two ways. The easy and the hard way.
Ever wish you could push a button and all your problems go away? Now you can.
The Easy way, use Linkmoney
The easy way is to run Linkmoney App on your Amazon affiliate site. Simply create an account, and run it.
Step-by-step guide to automatically fix your Amazon Affiliate links
Here are the steps to automatically fix your Amazon Affiliate Links. We created a complete “Step-By-Step Guide guide” here to get more information on how to setup and run Linkmoney App for the first time.
Step 1, Create a Linkmoney App account.
Step 2, Download the Linkmoney App Plugin
Step 3. Add your API Key to Activate Plugin
Step 4, Look at your Baseline Scan
Step 5, Finish setting up your License
Step 6, Start Your First Linkmoney App Fix Scan
Step 7, Run Linkmoney App again to get a clean report.
What does Linkmoney do?
Linkmoney App will scan your entire Amazon affiliate site and look for:
- Incorrect and missing Amazon Store Tracking IDs
- Broken Invalid Links
- Malformed Links
- Encoded Links
- Out of Region links
- Links with JavaScript errors
- No Affiliate Non-Product links
- No ASIN
- Extra query parameters
- /s/, /s? and /search links have the correct Amazon Store Tracking ID
- Amazon Short Links (AMZN.to)
Then it will fix them all. To see how to get started with Linkmoney, see this guide called the “Step-By-Step Guide”.
Most Amazon affiliate sites only take a few minutes to run. A 1,000 post affiliate site takes about 7 minutes as an example.
Linkmoney Developed its own A.I.
Linkmoney A.I. comes with a set of instructions to search an entire site for every common and uncommon affiliate link issue.
Here is an article that has all the Amazon affiliate common and not-so-common link issues Linkmoney A.I. currently checks and fixes called “Linkmoney App Reports Link Errors (all detectable link errors explained)”.
Linkmoney A.I. doesn’t make mistakes, it doesn’t get tired, and it is fast.
Linkmoney Reports everything it checks and fixes
Linkmoney creates an extensive Amazon link audit every time a Fix Scan is run. We save all of your Fix Scans so you have a Fix Scan history.
The audit also includes full easy to understand reports that show the affiliate links Linkmoney checked and fixed.
The Detailed Fix Report shows every affiliate link Linkmoney fixed.
The reports are also great for understanding how the affiliate link issues happened. If you know how affiliate link issues are getting on the site, you can stop them from happening.
Linkmoney A.I. converts, checks, expands and fixes Amazon Short Links (AMZN.to)
If you choose, Linkmoney will expand, convert, check, and fix all Amazon short links on all your sites.
Here is an article I wrote called “Amazon Short Link Checker” that explains how Linkmoney checks and fixes Amazon Short Codes.
To choose Fix Scan Options, just go to the License Control Panel and make your selections.
Linkmoney Scan Options
To choose Fix Scan Options, just go to the License Control Panel and make your selections.
The Linkmoney Fix Scan Options are:
1. Expand Short Links– Expands Amazon Short Links so they can be checked, and fixes any issues found.
2. Cleanup Links– Cleans up overly long Amazon affiliate links with extra query parameters and turns them into perfect standard Amazon affiliate links.
3. TablePress– Checks and fixes Amazon affiliate links in the TablePress shortcode.
What do we mean by “Affiliate Link Issues”?
We call an affiliate link issue anything that prevents an affiliate site from earning Amazon referral commissions.
Linkmoney is compatible with TablePress short code
TablePress might be the most popular WordPress plugin and millions of websites use it.
Linkmoney is compatible with the TablePress plugin and its shortcode.
As an example, if you have a site that has tables on pages such as “The Top 10 Something”, and there are Amazon affiliate links and or Amazon Short Codes in the table, Linkmoney will check and automatically fix all the affiliate links in the table.
The hard way- fix your Amazon affiliate links manually
For Amazon Affiliate Links, AMZN.to, and Amazon Associates, you can use the Link Checker tool provided by Amazon to verify that the link works and is properly redirecting.
You will need to be logged in to your Amazon Associates account to use the Link Checker.
The Amazon Link Checker will check a single link at a time. This is a great tool if you are needing to check a few Amazon links. Like Linkmoney, it will check both short links and standard affiliate links.
If the Amazon affiliate link is a good link there will be a “Success” message.
If the Amazon affiliate link checked is not a good link. it will show a “Fail” message.
The reason doing it manually is the hard way
1. The Amazon Link Checker will check only one link at a time.
2. Amazon Affiliate websites can have many thousands of links. If you have a problem with one link, you probably have many more.
3. It takes a lot of time to check a single link. If an affiliate link has problems, it takes a lot of time to fix it.
4. The Amazon Link Checker can not find all link errors on your affiliate site, and also it can not fix them.
5. If you find a link with an error, The Amazon Link Checker does not tell you what was wrong with it. The error could be a human or plugin error which could mean this error could have been made many times, all over the site.
Is manually checking an entire affiliate website’s short links impossible?
No, but, checking and fixing affiliate links on an entire affiliate site is a very manual process. I have found it nearly impossible to do.
There are just so many links on an affiliate site. You can find some online tools that can print out all the affiliate links on your website, but then you still need to manually check and fix them all.
It is not uncommon to have many thousands of Amazon affiliate link errors. I found the time to put a team together, manage that team, to fix thousands of links is an incredibly different task.
Plus, people manually fixing affiliate links by hand will introduce more errors. The QA process of making sure all the work is done correctly is enormous.
Why should I check ALL my Amazon Affiliate Short Links Links at once?
It is important to check all your Amazon Affiliate Short Links at the same time to ensure they are working correctly and that they are properly tracking your referral commissions.
If they are not working correctly, you may miss out on potential commissions.
Checking your links will ensure that you do not violate any of Amazon’s terms and conditions, which could lead to your account being suspended or closed.
Additionally, it is important to make sure that the URL is properly formatted and is not leading to any broken pages, which can cause customers to become frustrated and leave your website.
Finally, checking your links regularly helps to ensure that you are getting the most out of your Amazon Affiliate Program and customers will have more trust in your website.
Can I just look at the affiliate link and see errors?
No, unless you are an Amazon Affiliate links expert. Most can’t just look at an Amazon affiliate link and know there is anything wrong with it or if the link has the correct Amazon Affiliate Store Tag so you get your commissions.
Does Linkmoney see affiliate link errors?
Yes. When you first run Linkmoney, all of your Amazon Affiliate links will be audited.
After the first scan, which is called a Baseline Scan, you will be able to see the both number of standard Amazon affiliate links and Amazon short links (AMZN.to) links that are on your site.
Linkmoney also automatically fixes these errors so you don’t have to.
Are ALL the Amazon Store Tracking Codes on your site yours?
Does Linkmoney tell me how many Amazon Links are on my site?
Yes. When you first run Linkmoney, all of your Amazon Affiliate links will be audited.
After the first scan, which is called a Baseline Scan, you will be able to see the both number of standard Amazon affiliate links and Amazon short links (AMZN.to) links that are on your site.
Below is the Linkmoney Dashboard explained.
To view more about the Linkmoney App Dashboard and Link Audit, see this article called “Linkmoney App Dashboard“.
How often should I check my Amazon affiliate site for broken links?
It is recommended that you check your Amazon affiliate site for broken links at least once a month.
This will help you stay on top of any issues that may arise and ensure that your visitors are able to access the content they are looking for.
Looking to sell your Amazon affiliate site?
If you are looking to sell your Amazon affiliate site, fixing all your affiliate links prior to a buyer evaluating the site will add revenue to the site. I wrote an article called “Amazon Affiliate Website Buyers and Sellers MUST see this!” with more information on affiliate site buyers and sellers.
1. Checking and fixing your Amazon affiliate links adds more revenue to the site from its existing traffic. If your affiliate links are broken or have Amazon affiliate tracking ID problems, you will not earn your Amazon referral commissions.
2. Clean healthy Amazon affiliate links give your customers a better experience and can increase your Average Time On Page” and lower “Bounce Rate”.
If all your Amazon affiliate links are healthy and making you revenue, you will earn more Amazon commissions from your existing traffic.
More revenue the site makes gives it a better valuation. And you get a bonus, the site will earn more revenue while you are looking for a buyer.
Conclusion
If you are looking to earn more Amazon referral commissions from your Amazon affiliate website, the first thing you should do is make sure all of your affiliate links are healthy.
You can do this easily with Linkmoney App or you can do it the hard way- one manual link at a time.
Either way, it needs to be done or your traffic may go to your competitor instead.
