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Amazon Attribution links are tagged URLs that let you measure how off-Amazon traffic, affiliate clicks, social ads, email campaigns, converts into product page views, add-to-carts, and purchases on Amazon. Amazon Attribution is a free advertising and analytics measurement solution that provides insight into the on-Amazon impact of your marketing strategies across non-Amazon channels including search, social, display, video, email, and affiliate/influencer campaigns.
If you run an affiliate program that sends traffic to Amazon listings, these links are the only way to tie publisher-level performance back to actual sales. This guide covers exact creation steps, naming conventions we use across 50+ publisher programs, and the errors that silently break your tracking.
Amazon Attribution Links Are Tagged URLs That Track Off-Amazon Clicks to Purchases
An attribution link starts as a standard Amazon product URL (e.g., amazon.com/dp/B0XXXXXX) but gets wrapped with Amazon’s tracking parameters when you generate it inside the Advertising Console. Amazon Attribution works by assigning unique tracking tags to your marketing efforts outside of the Amazon ecosystem, which are appended to the links you share on social media or email campaigns. When a customer clicks on a tagged link and lands on an Amazon product page, Attribution tracks their behavior and attributes any subsequent purchase to the original marketing source.
What an Attribution Link Contains vs. a Standard Amazon Product URL
A standard Amazon product URL contains only the ASIN and marketplace domain. An attribution link appends campaign, ad group, and publisher identifiers as query parameters so Amazon can log the click source. The system generates unique tracking URLs that look like standard Amazon links but include tracking parameters identifying where the traffic is coming from. These parameters are what feed the Attribution dashboard with click, detail-page-view, and purchase data.
How Attribution Links Differ from Amazon Associates Affiliate Links
Amazon Associates links carry a publisher’s associate tag (e.g., ?tag=yourstore-20) and pay the affiliate a commission directly. Attribution links do not pay the publisher. They track conversions for the brand and feed into Amazon Brand Referral Bonus reporting. Amazon’s Brand Referral Bonus lets you earn a bonus when you use non-Amazon advertising to help customers discover products in the Amazon store, with bonuses accumulating as credits that offset referral fees when you use Amazon Attribution tags.
The distinction matters: if your affiliates use Associates links, they get the commission data; if you issue Attribution links, you get the conversion data and the Brand Referral Bonus credit averaging 10% of product sales (sell.amazon.com).
How to Create Amazon Attribution Links Step by Step
Creating a Campaign in Amazon Advertising Console
Sign in to the advertising console, expand the global navigation to find “Measurement and Reporting,” select “Amazon Attribution,” go to the campaign manager, select “Create campaign,” and on the “New campaign” page choose the “Create manually” option. Name the campaign after the traffic source or affiliate program, something like AffiliateProgram_Q2_2026, so reporting stays readable six months from now.
Selecting ASINs and Generating Unique Attribution Tags
After naming the campaign, select the ASINs you want to track conversions against. It is recommended to create one ad group per non-Amazon marketing channel, tactic, or creative. Each ad group receives a unique attribution tag that measures Amazon conversions for the products selected during order creation. Each ad group you create under the campaign generates its own attribution link. If you’re tracking five publishers promoting the same product, create five ad groups, one per publisher, so you can isolate performance.
Assigning Links to Specific Publishers or Traffic Sources
Within each ad group, select the publisher from the dropdown or add a custom publisher name. In the “Publisher” drop-down option, choose where the link will be placed. If the publisher’s name is not shown, choose “New” and then add the publisher’s name. Then enter the destination URL (your Amazon product detail page or Brand Store page) and click Create. Copy the resulting attribution link and distribute it to that specific publisher. This one-link-per-publisher approach is what makes per-affiliate reporting possible.
Bulk Link Creation for Programs with 50+ Affiliates
Manual creation becomes impractical once you’re managing dozens of publishers. Use the bulk upload option to create multiple tags at once for Google search and Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns. You can measure up to 100,000 Google search keywords or 8,500 Facebook or Instagram ads by uploading a single file. For affiliate programs specifically, the manual-then-export workflow is more common: create ad groups in batches, download the attribution tags CSV, and distribute links via your affiliate network’s communication tools. Bulk creation usually takes around 10 minutes, and you’ll get an email once everything is ready.
Best Practices for Managing Attribution Links at Scale
Naming Conventions That Map to Affiliate Network Sub-IDs
When you manage 50+ publishers across networks like Awin or impact.com, your Attribution campaign names need to map cleanly to the sub-IDs your affiliate network already uses. When an affiliate signs up to join a network, they are allocated a unique affiliate ID, Awin provides one publisher ID per affiliate, referred to as a PID, which is then embedded into the referral URLs. We use a four-segment naming convention in all managed programs:
[Network]_[PublisherID]_[ASIN]_[Quarter]
Example: Awin_PID12345_B09XYZ_Q2-2026
This format lets you join Attribution dashboard exports with your affiliate network’s transaction reports using a simple VLOOKUP or SQL join on the publisher ID segment. Across our managed Amazon affiliate programs, this convention reduced manual reconciliation time by approximately 4 hours per week per account, time previously spent cross-referencing mismatched publisher names between the Attribution console and network dashboards. Awin supports SubID parameters on every advertiser link, so you can label traffic by channel, creative, page, or campaign.
QA Testing Links Before Distributing to Publishers
Before sending any attribution link to a publisher, click it yourself and confirm three things: (1) it resolves to the correct Amazon product page, (2) the URL parameters remain intact after the redirect, and (3) clicks register in the Attribution dashboard within 48 hours. Amazon recommends confirming you’re driving traffic two days after implementing tags, then continuing to check campaigns weekly to optimize performance. A broken link that goes undetected for two weeks means two weeks of unattributed sales and forfeited Brand Referral Bonus credits.
Monitoring Link Performance in the Attribution Dashboard
You can access Amazon Attribution reports as downloadable Excel files to track success and identify best-performing tactics, generated on demand or scheduled to run ahead of time. Campaign reports provide daily performance metrics for all campaigns and ad groups. Key metrics to watch: click-through rate, detail page views, add-to-cart rate, and total purchases. Amazon Attribution reports use a 14-day attribution window. Review reports weekly and compare publisher-level conversion rates to identify which affiliates drive actual purchases versus those generating clicks that don’t convert. For a broader view of amazon attribution measurement, see our pillar guide.
Common Attribution Link Errors and How to Fix Them
Broken Tags from URL Shorteners or Redirect Chains
URL shorteners (Bitly, TinyURL) and multi-hop redirect chains frequently strip Amazon’s attribution parameters. If a publisher wraps your attribution link in a shortener, Amazon’s tracking tag disappears and the click becomes unattributed. The fix: require publishers to use the full, unmodified attribution URL. If shortening is unavoidable, test the shortened link end-to-end and verify the final resolved URL retains all query parameters.
Mismatched ASIN Assignments
If you assign ASIN B09XYZ to an ad group but the publisher promotes ASIN B09ABC using that link, the click still lands on B09XYZ’s product page, but the customer may bounce or buy a different product. Attribution will record the detail page view for B09XYZ, not B09ABC. Audit your ASIN-to-publisher assignments quarterly, especially after catalog updates or product discontinuations.
Links Not Registering in Brand Referral Bonus Reporting
The most common cause: the brand isn’t enrolled in the Brand Referral Bonus program. Amazon advises enrolling in the Brand Referral Bonus program to earn a bonus averaging 10% of product sales driven by non-Amazon marketing efforts measured by Amazon Attribution. Enrollment is a separate step from setting up Attribution, done in Seller Central under Brands > Brand Referral Bonus. You must use Amazon Attribution to send traffic; this technology is made available to brand-registered sellers to enable tracking and reporting on external traffic.
If you’re enrolled but still not seeing BRB credits, confirm that the attribution link was generated after enrollment and that the ASIN belongs to your registered brand. Credits take approximately two months to appear in your account (advertising.amazon.com).
Related Guides: Tags, Eligibility, and the Full Attribution Walkthrough
Amazon Attribution Tags: Tagging Methodology
For a detailed breakdown of how amazon attribution tags work at the parameter level, including tag structure, hierarchy, and advanced segmentation, see our dedicated tagging methodology guide. That post covers the technical anatomy of the tag itself, while this guide focuses on the operational workflow of creating and distributing links.
Back to the Complete Amazon Attribution Guide
This post is one piece of a broader resource. For the full setup process, eligibility requirements, account configuration, reporting optimization, and integration with your affiliate program, return to our complete amazon attribution walkthrough. If you’re specifically interested in how Attribution connects to referral fee savings, our amazon brand referral bonus guide covers enrollment, credit calculations, and category-level bonus rates.
The next step from here: audit your current publisher links. If any affiliates are using Associates links instead of Attribution links, you’re losing conversion visibility and leaving Brand Referral Bonus credits unclaimed. Switch them over, apply the naming convention above, and start reconciling network data against Attribution reports weekly.
