One way of monetizing a blog is through affiliates and Amazon Associates is the most common affiliate program. Their reports can tell you all kinds of good information that you should know so you can take stock of your affiliate efforts and see what needs to change or stay the same. But the reports can be a bit confusing at first. This post should help you in understanding Amazon Associate Reports.

Understanding Amazon Associate Reports

To get to your reports, go to Amazon.com and login. If you have the site stripe, you can click on the words Amazon Associates Site Strip at the top left or go here. You may have to login again.

Your page should look something like this:

Actually it should start with you on the home tab but if you click reports, this is what you will see. I’ll go over what the other tabs are for quickly but right now we are focusing on reports.

Product Linking – you can get product links and banners here to put on your blog or website. I find it easier to search Amazon for products and use the Site Stripe to get the links but you can search through product links too. The Native Shopping Ads are a bit of code you can put on your site where it will show related products to what your page is about. Mobile popover is a way to monetize when someone views your site on mobile. Finally an astore is like your own mini store. You can view the one I made for my gaming blog here:  shop games

Promotions – you can get links and banners for current promotions here. Add them to your sidebar for more conversions.

Tools – Site Stripe explains how to use the Site Stripe to link to anywhere on Amazon. The Link checker is for those creating or modifying their own links to make sure they are correct.  Publisher Studio is a way to add affiliate links from Blogger or WordPress or wherever you blog. It’s neat and convenient but can slow down your page. Product Advertising API is for programmers.

Amazon Associates Reports

The default range is one month but you can change the view by clicking custom date range. There are lots of date ranges to choose from or you can create your own 31 day range.

Now if you only have one tracking id it should show that one but if you have more than one like me (and you should if you have multiple blogs) you can click the little down arrow next to Tracking ID ALL to pick a certain one. This is what I saw after clicking on the tracking id for my gaming blog.

It shows you what days you got clicks (red), items were ordered (yellow) and money was earned (blue). Choose a bigger category (like last year) to really see how your affiliate marketing has been working.

If you scroll down you will see exactly what items were sold (the person above must be having fun ) It shows me that they didn’t buy the products I specifically mentioned in my post but they did buy two things through those links. It also shows in the second half which of my tracking ids the clicks and sales came from. So I can see above that my sales for the month of March came through my gaming blog but I did get clicks on two other blogs too, but no sales.

Click on the Link Type Performance tab and you’ll see this:

This shows you if your views, clicks and items ordered and shipped came from product links, banners or widgets. You can get a better idea of which ones are converting for you.

Daily Trends looks like this:

This shows each day the number of clicks and items ordered. If you have a large amount of clicks on one day, go back to your blog analytics and see what post was popular that day and update it with more links and more drive to click.

TIP: When you are looking at the screen that shows what items were ordered, if you see an item that was really popular, consider sharing that link on social media or writing more posts that link to it. You can easily get the link again when you hover over it.

I hope this guide has helped you with understanding Amazon Associates Reports section better. Don’t forget to check back periodically to see how things are going.