Most people have a common question with regard to affiliate programs, one of the most asked questions is regarding links management. Amazon associate is a profitable business and is very lucrative, now many of us who wants to promote the product come up with the question of shortening the amazon product links, also there are guidelines like Amazon Participation requirements. When marketer sometime fails to follow these guidelines as consequence they will get their account ban or your commission get banned. So you need to use a genuine link shorter for your links.
When you are using the links shortener tools make sure you are following the guideline of amazon specifically. Moreover, the links shortening for amazon can be really tricky means the trickiness of amazon guidelines which is not straightforward for many publishers. Amazon has been running their affiliate program for years and there are several changes.
Now all these rules are general rules, do not have anything on particular software. You can use multiple software like Bitly and Google link shortener they all fall under the same parameter and have to follow the same guidelines.
How Amazon URL Operates
Amazon is a corporate brand also a tech website, every product available on amazon has a URL that starts with a domain name of “amazon.com” and at the end of the domain, there are some measuring parameters for the tracking.
Below are some measuring parameters:
- Amazon Domain Name
- Product Name
- ASIN(Amazon Standard Identification Number)
- Search Keyword
- Search Position
- Exact Product Click Time
- Affiliate tracking ID
When all these parameters included in the product URL, it obviously becomes a little ugly and lengthy, if you have a product on your website you much more control over the URL of the product.
Publishers can shorten the Amazon link manually, so it looks short and easy to remember the URL. Below are the steps to shorten the URL.
How To Manually Shorten The Amazon link
Most publishers wanted to heads towards the Amazon website and search for the product and click on the product and then copy the URL of the product from the browser. That is something you can do but these links feel pathetic, below is a clear example of the links.
https://www.amazon.com/BluMoon-Pi-Bluetooth-Transmitter-Receiver/dp/B07T3379LM/ref=as_li_ss_tl?m=A2EGPLZ6IO8BFD&marketplaceID=A21TJRUUN4KGV&qid=1561185514&s=merchant-items&sr=1-5&linkCode=sl1&tag=ons0d-21&linkId=f6138c4144a22722662f64e93778aea0&language=en_IN
When you put this link on the web-page and social media for promoting the product the webpage might look ugly to the visitor and some users feel intimidated to copy and paste these types of links into their browsers.
- Remove the Useless Junk
You see the text starting from the “ref=” in the URL above is actually useless. Amazon will use that to keep the track of users data while browsing their site, but that would be useless for the visitors that click these links. So basically we can remove that part of the links which will result in the following form.
https://www.amazon.com/BluMoon-Pi-Bluetooth-Transmitter-Receiver/dp/B07T3379LM/
That is shorter and also better, it can shorter.
- Remove the Product title
As you can see the URL contains the title of the product, We simply do not require that title in the URL, so remove it and it can still work fine and be a lot shorter than before. So below are the links we get from this removal.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07T3379LM/
Disclaimer: Make sure that you have “/dp” remains in the URL, it is mandatory. Seems like a pretty Short URL we can go further to shorten links.
- Replace the Domain Amazon
You probably thinking what the hell did I just wrote, but keep reading you will have your answers.
Big cooperation and brand usually register multiple domain names around their main domain. One of the major domains they own is amzn.com. They use this domain in shorter URLs and also in other tasks. Below is the URL link is what look like when you replace the domain.
https://www.amzn.com/B07T3379LM/
Now the what makes the URL works in the amazon directory is because it has ASIN(Amazon Standard Identification Number), this is a variant number that is used to identify the product, every other item on amazon has this one number which is unique, our URL also had this number-B07T3379LM. You just have to change the ASIN number in the URL with your product ASIN number, you will have your own short link.
Note: You can now easily remove the ‘/dp/’ from the URL. This method will only work properly with the Amazon.com site.
Link Shorter Service
There are some links shorting service which are third-party tools but works any links you want to shorten. These link services are used by many publishers these days – the most popular domains of these services are bit.ly, goo.gl, tinyurl.com, bit.do etc. As you can search for the term “link shorter”, and you will some good tools on the search engine. One of the most popular ones is bit.ly they also provide the amzn.to the domain to shorten the amazon links directly.
Most of the services are freemium services means they offer free service and can access more features by paying for it, every other service has its own pros and cons when you using the services.
Some tools like bitly can track the links and the number of people who click on these links. If you promote the different products with different pages you can tack all the links separately with the tool dashboard even also their demographics, this majorly helps marketers to adjust their campaign.
One of the major drawbacks of these third-party tools is that you become dependent on the website, so if the site server is low it can surely affect your business. If they abruptly change their policies, decide to change their pay structure, and do not forget they might keep the data tracking for themselves.
Amazon URL Shortener Operates
With the help of the Amazon URL Shortener, you create a short and custom URL for the product of your amazon listing and the URL still be containing the measuring parameters.
Now publishers use amazon URL Shortener to keep the important parameter, keeping the parameter is important. Parameter like affiliate/ tracking id. When you strip the parameter out maybe the tracking parameter won’t work properly including the third-party tracking code.
Also, the URL which is based on keyword targeting, these URL required the search keyword information in order to work properly. There are many possibilities in which cutting down the URL to only ASIN is not gonna work. So better use proper URL shortener tools.
Summary
URL shortening tools with link management techniques are required tools for all affiliate publishers. In order to build a brand, you have to able to track the customer’s behavior. You should share some friendly URLs, analytics, and tracking dashboard for retargeting the campaign.