If you are posting Amazon affiliate links anywhere off of Amazon — YouTube descriptions, Facebook groups, Instagram Reels, Pinterest, deals communities — there is a good chance every single one of those clicks is being dumped into the same bucket. You have no idea which platform is actually making you money. You just see a pile of commissions at the end of the month and you guess.

A couple of days ago I walked through how to create custom tracking IDs inside your Amazon affiliate dashboard. That is step one. This is step two, and honestly it is the step that most people skip, because it is not obvious that it exists. If you use a deep linking tool like Genius Links, that tool has no idea which tracking ID you want to use unless you explicitly tell it. So it does the only thing it can do: it falls back to your default store ID, and all your data gets lumped together again. All that setup work, wasted.

Let me show you how to fix it. This takes about fifteen minutes to set up once, and then it just works forever.

Table of Contents

Why Deep Linking Tools Ignore Your Tracking IDs

Here is the mental model that clears this up. Your Amazon affiliate account has one default store ID, and then you can create as many custom tracking IDs as you want underneath it. Those tracking IDs are just labels. Amazon reports on them separately, which is the whole point — you can see that your Pinterest traffic converted at 4% and your Facebook deals group converted at 0.6%, and now you know where to spend your time.

But creating the tracking ID on Amazon’s side does nothing on its own. It is a bucket sitting there waiting to be filled. Something has to actually attach that tag to the link.

When you build a link by hand from the Amazon SiteStripe, you pick the tracking ID from a dropdown and it gets baked in. Easy. But when you run a link through Genius Links, you are handing it a raw Amazon URL and asking it to localize and route that link for you. Genius Links has to decide which affiliate credentials to stamp on it, and by default it reaches for the one account-level default you set when you first connected Amazon. It is not being difficult. It just has no way to read your mind about which of your fourteen tracking IDs applies to this particular link.

Groups are the answer, and the name undersells them a little. Most people assume a group is just a folder for organizing links, like a playlist. It is not. A group is a settings profile that gets applied to every link inside it.

That means a group can carry its own affiliate credentials. So you make a group called “Pinterest,” you tell that group to use your yourname-pinterest-20 tracking ID, and from that point forward every link you generate inside that group automatically carries the right tag. You stop thinking about it.

One group per traffic source. That is the whole system.

Creating Your First Group

Inside your Genius Links dashboard, head to the Groups section and create a new one. Name it after the platform, not after the product or the campaign. You want “Instagram Reels,” not “Kitchen Gadgets Q3.” The platform is the thing you are trying to measure.

  1. Open the Groups area of your Genius Links account and choose to add a new group.
  2. Give it a clear platform name — YouTube, Pinterest, Reels, Deals Group, Blog.
  3. Save it, then open the group’s settings so you can edit its affiliate configuration.

So far this is the easy part, and it is where a lot of people stop. They make the group, they see the group has “Amazon” listed as an affiliate program already, and they assume they are done. They are not done. That listing is your account default showing through, and it will happily keep using your default store ID.

The Step Everyone Gets Wrong: Overriding the Default Store ID

This is the part I want you to slow down on, because it is the one spot in the whole process where clicking the wrong thing quietly ruins your data for months.

Inside the group’s settings you need to find the option to override the default affiliate settings for this group. It is a toggle or a checkbox, and until you flip it, nothing else you do in here matters. Once it is on, the group stops inheriting from your account and starts using whatever you configure locally.

Then you add the program:

  1. Turn on the setting that overrides your default affiliate configuration for this group.
  2. Click to add a program, and select Amazon.
  3. Pick the correct geo — Amazon.com for US traffic. If you sell into multiple countries you will add a row per storefront, and each storefront has its own tracking IDs.
  4. Paste in the custom tracking ID you created on the Amazon side. Exactly as it appears, including the -20 suffix.
  5. Save.

The geo selection trips people up more than you would expect. If you are a US creator and you accidentally attach your tracking ID to the UK storefront, your links will fire but the tag will not match anything Amazon recognizes, and your reports come back empty. Match the storefront to where the tracking ID was created.

Confirming the Override Actually Worked

Do not trust the settings screen. Trust the link.

Generate a test link inside your new group, open it, and look at the URL you land on. Somewhere in that final Amazon URL you should see tag= followed by your custom tracking ID. If you see your default store ID instead, the override did not take — go back and check that you actually enabled the override toggle before adding the program, because adding the program without the toggle is the classic failure.

Thirty seconds of checking here saves you from finding out in November that a whole quarter of Pinterest data went into the void.

Setting up the group is only half of it. You have to actually use it when you create links, and the browser extension defaults to your general group unless you change it.

When you pull up the Genius Links extension on a product page, there is a group selector right there in the popup. Change it to the platform you are about to post on before you copy the link. That is it. But it is a habit you have to build, and for the first week you will forget. My fix was simple: I stopped generating links ad hoc. Instead I batch them. When I finish filming a set of products, I sit down once and generate every link I need for every platform in one pass, switching groups as I go.

Batching your link generation alongside your product research is the kind of thing that sounds like a small optimization until you are doing it across forty products a week. Keeping your research, your product list, and your link workflow in one place is exactly the problem I built Oink to solve — find the products worth filming, keep them organized, and move through your posting workflow without twelve tabs open.

The Groups I Actually Run

For reference, here is roughly how I have mine split up:

  • Deals — anything I drop into deals communities and Facebook groups.
  • Reels — Instagram Reels link-in-bio traffic.
  • Pinterest — pins pointing at products.
  • YouTube — video description links.
  • Facebook — my own page and profile posts.
  • Blog — links inside written content.

Six groups, six tracking IDs, and now every Amazon report I pull tells me something useful. When I saw that one of these was producing almost nothing despite eating a big chunk of my week, I cut it. That decision was only possible because the data was separated.

Why Off-Site Tracking Is Worth the Setup

Most Amazon influencers I talk to are flying blind on everything that happens outside their storefront. They know their on-Amazon numbers cold and they have essentially zero visibility into whether the four hours a week they spend on Pinterest is producing anything at all.

Your time is the scarce resource here, not your link count. Custom tracking IDs plus Genius Links groups is the cheapest possible way to find out which platforms deserve your hours. It is a one-time setup that pays you back every month for as long as you do this.

Here is the full walkthrough if you want to follow along on screen:

Get Your Whole Workflow Organized

Tracking is one piece. The bigger piece is picking products worth making content for in the first place — because perfect attribution on a bad product list still gets you nowhere. That is what I spend my time building over at Oink for Influencers: product research and workflow tools built specifically for Amazon influencers and affiliates who are trying to make more per hour of filming.

Go set up your groups. Then go find something worth linking to.

I'm an Amazon Influencer since 2023 and blogger since 2021. My goal is to help you succeed in the Amazon Influencer Program.

Similar Posts