A couple of days ago I walked you through setting up custom tracking IDs inside your Amazon affiliate dashboard, one for each place you post off-site. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, your blog, wherever. That way when clicks come in, you can actually look at your earnings report and see where your traffic is coming from instead of guessing. If you are posting in multiple places, that is one of the most important things you can do for yourself.
But there is a second step nobody talks about, and if you use a deep linking tool like GeniusLinks, skipping it means every single one of those tracking IDs you just built is doing absolutely nothing. Your deep linker has no idea which ID to use at any given moment, so it quietly falls back to your default. All that setup work, wasted. Here is how I fix that.
What We Are Covering
- Why Custom Tracking IDs Matter in the First Place
- The Step Most People Miss
- Setting Up Groups in GeniusLinks
- Overriding the Default Affiliate Program
- Using Your Groups Day to Day
- What This Actually Unlocks for You
Why Custom Tracking IDs Matter in the First Place
If you are only posting Amazon links in one place, you can probably get away with a single tracking ID and never think about it again. But almost nobody is doing that anymore. You have got a YouTube channel, maybe a Facebook group, maybe a blog, maybe you are dropping links in an email newsletter. All of that traffic funnels into the same Amazon earnings report, and if it is all riding on one tracking ID, that report tells you exactly nothing about where your money is coming from.
Custom tracking IDs solve that. You create one per channel inside your Amazon Associates dashboard, and suddenly your earnings report becomes a map. You can see that your Facebook group converts at three times the rate of your Instagram posts, or that the blog you have been ignoring is quietly out-earning everything else. That is the kind of information that changes what you spend your time on.
This is the same logic behind everything I build into Oink. You cannot make good decisions about which products to chase or which platforms to double down on if you cannot see what is working. Data first, then strategy.
The Step Most People Miss
Here is where it falls apart for a lot of people. You go through the trouble of creating five different tracking IDs on Amazon, you feel good about yourself, and then you keep using your deep linking tool exactly the way you always have. The problem is that GeniusLinks does not magically know that this particular link is going on YouTube and that one is going in your Facebook group. It just uses whatever you told it to use when you first set up your account, which is your default store ID.
So every link, from every platform, comes back tagged with the same default. Your Amazon report looks exactly like it did before you started. Two steps, not one. Set up the IDs on Amazon, then tell your deep linker about them.
Setting Up Groups in GeniusLinks
In GeniusLinks, the feature you want is called Groups. Think of a group as a container that says “when I am posting here, use these settings.” One group per platform, matched up to one tracking ID per platform.
- Log into GeniusLinks and go to Groups from the home screen. If you have never done this, the list will be empty. That is normal.
- Click to create a new group.
- Name it something obvious. If it is for a new YouTube channel, call it “New YouTube.” Whatever makes it easy for you to identify later in a dropdown. You do not need to fill in a description, I never do.
- Save it.
Once it saves, you will notice the affiliate settings on that group say Default. That is because when you first set up GeniusLinks, you had to give it one overall store ID, and every group inherits it until you say otherwise. That default is exactly what we need to override.
Overriding the Default Affiliate Program
This is the part where people get tripped up, because the thing you need to click is not the obvious thing.
- In your groups list, find the group you just made and click on the word Default. Do not click the group name itself. Clicking the name takes you to performance stats, which is not where you want to be right now.
- Click Add Program. Give it a second to load.
- Choose your location. For most of us that is Amazon US, but this works across a whole bunch of different geos if you are running international traffic.
- Paste in the tracking ID you created over on Amazon. So if you made a Facebook one, go copy it out of your Associates dashboard and drop it in here.
- Click Connect this program. You will get a confirmation popup and that is it.
Go back to your groups list and you will see that group now shows one override. That is the signal that it is wired up correctly. Repeat for every platform you post on.
Using Your Groups Day to Day
Once the groups exist, using them is simple. When you are creating a link, whether through the GeniusLinks browser extension or by pasting a product URL into their dashboard, you just pick the right group from the dropdown. Posting to YouTube? Select your YouTube group. It pulls the product from the page and tags the link with the correct ID automatically.
I have a whole stack of these groups now, one for every channel I run. It takes about two minutes to set each one up and then you never think about it again. Every link you generate from that point forward is correctly attributed.
What This Actually Unlocks for You
The reason I care about this so much is that clean attribution is the foundation for every other decision you make as an affiliate. Once your tracking IDs are actually reporting correctly, you can answer questions you could not answer before. Which platform sends buyers versus browsers? Which product category performs on which channel? Is that new channel worth the effort?
That is the same problem I built Oink to solve on the product research side. You should not be guessing about which products are worth making content for, and you should not be guessing about where your commissions are coming from either. Get the data flowing correctly and the strategy gets a lot more obvious.
If you do not have GeniusLinks yet, the link is in the video description below. Their reporting is solid and it is genuinely affordable per month for what you get. And if you have not set up your custom tracking IDs on the Amazon side yet, go watch that video first, because this one builds directly on it.
Two steps, not one. Set up the tracking IDs on Amazon, then create the matching groups in GeniusLinks and override the default. Skip the second half and you are back to flying blind. If you want more tools that take the guesswork out of being an Amazon influencer, come check out Oink for Influencers.
