How to Track Which Affiliate Links Are Making You Money

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While I share money-making strategies, nothing is "typical", and outcomes are based on each individual. There are no guarantees.

If you don’t know which affiliate links are making you money, you’re not running an affiliate business. You’re running a guessing game.

Most bloggers fall into this trap. They set up their links, publish their posts, and check their commission dashboard once a month to see the total. They have no idea which posts drove those commissions, which specific links got clicked, or which products their audience is genuinely interested in buying.

That’s not data. That’s noise. Here’s how to actually track what’s working so you can do more of it.

Why Affiliate Program Dashboards Aren’t Enough

Amazon Associates shows you clicks, ordered items, shipped items, and earnings. It segments by product, by category, and by tracking ID. What it doesn’t show you is which post on your blog drove those clicks.

That missing piece is the one that matters most for content strategy. If you knew that your top three earning posts were all in one content category, you’d publish more content in that category. If you knew one post was sending clicks but generating zero conversions, you’d either improve the post or reconsider the product.

The program dashboard tells you what sold. It doesn’t tell you what drove the sale. To get that, you need click tracking that lives on your site, at the post level.

Lasso does exactly this. Every click on a Lasso display is tracked and attributed to the specific link and the post it appeared in. You get the post-level data that Amazon’s native reporting doesn’t provide.

Setting Up Amazon Tracking IDs by Category

Amazon Associates allows you to create multiple tracking IDs under one account. Most bloggers use one for everything, which means all their earnings look like one undifferentiated pool of revenue.

A smarter approach is to create separate tracking IDs for different content categories. If you run a home and garden blog, you might have one ID for kitchen content, one for outdoor furniture, one for organization. When you look at your Amazon reports filtered by tracking ID, you can immediately see which content category is generating the most revenue.

This segmentation works alongside Lasso’s click tracking to give you a layered picture of performance. Lasso tells you which posts and links are getting clicks. Your Amazon segmented reporting tells you which categories are converting those clicks into actual purchases.

The combination of both is what gives you genuinely actionable data rather than just numbers on a screen.

What to Do With Click Data

Click data without action is just a report. The point of tracking is to change what you do based on what you learn.

When Lasso shows you that one product display is getting 10x the clicks of everything else on a given post, that’s a signal. You should add more internal links pointing to that post. You should consider creating a dedicated review post for that product if one doesn’t exist. You should make sure that high-performing product is also mentioned in related posts where it’s relevant.

When you see a display with zero clicks despite appearing in a high-traffic post, that’s also a signal. Maybe the placement is wrong. Maybe the product isn’t relevant enough to the post’s audience. Maybe the display needs better copy or a different image.

Every data point is a question: why is this happening, and what can I change to get a better result?

Tracking Clicks vs. Tracking Revenue

Clicks and revenue don’t always move together, and understanding that gap is important. A product might get lots of clicks but low revenue if it’s priced so low the commissions are minimal, or if it’s in a category with a low commission rate, or if people are clicking but not buying.

A product might generate significant revenue with relatively few clicks if it’s a high-priced item in a high-commission category and the visitors clicking it are highly motivated buyers.

You need both data points to make smart decisions. High clicks with low revenue might mean you need a better product recommendation in that spot. High revenue per click means you should find more opportunities to feature that product across your site.

Lasso gives you the click data. Your affiliate program dashboards give you the revenue data. Comparing them regularly is how you identify both your highest-performing assets and your biggest optimization opportunities.

Using Google Analytics Alongside Lasso

Google Analytics shows you which posts are getting the most traffic, where that traffic is coming from, and how visitors are behaving on your site. Combined with Lasso’s click data, you can build a complete picture of your affiliate funnel.

A post with high traffic and low click-through on your affiliate displays is a conversion optimization opportunity. A post with moderate traffic but strong click-through is worth investing in for SEO to grow its audience. A post with high traffic, strong clicks, and strong Amazon commission attribution is your template for future content creation.

Most bloggers don’t connect these dots because the data lives in three separate places: Google Analytics, Lasso, and Amazon Associates. Making a habit of reviewing all three together, even monthly, gives you a level of strategic clarity that most of your competitors don’t have.

You don’t need to become a data analyst to do this well. You need to look at the right numbers and ask what they’re telling you about where to focus next.

Identifying Your Highest-Value Posts

Every affiliate blog has a small number of posts that drive a disproportionate share of revenue. Finding them is the first step. Protecting and growing them is how you build a sustainable income.

When you know which posts are your top earners, you treat them differently. You update them more frequently to keep them ranking. You add internal links pointing to them from newer posts. You make sure every affiliate display within them is clean, current, and optimized.

You also study them. What makes them work? Is it the keyword they rank for? The type of content? The specific products they recommend? The way the displays are positioned? Understanding what’s working in your best posts tells you exactly what to replicate in future content.

Lasso’s dashboard helps you identify these posts quickly by showing click volume by link and by post. You don’t have to guess which posts matter most. The data tells you.

Catching Revenue Leaks Before They Compound

A broken link doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly stops earning. If you have a high-traffic post with a broken Amazon link and you don’t catch it for three months, you’ve lost three months of commissions from that post. That adds up fast.

Lasso monitors your link health and surfaces problems when they occur. A broken link shows up in your dashboard so you can fix it before it becomes a sustained revenue leak rather than a brief hiccup.

This kind of passive monitoring is one of the clearest arguments for using a proper affiliate management tool rather than raw links. The cost of a missed broken link on a high-traffic post can easily exceed the cost of the tool that would have caught it.

Track your clicks. Review your revenue. Fix your leaks. Do that consistently and your affiliate income grows in the direction it should be growing.