If you run a blog, a newsletter, a YouTube channel, or any other content-based business, affiliate marketing is probably one of your income streams. You recommend products, people buy them through your link, and you earn a commission.
The problem most affiliate marketers run into: tracking which content is actually driving clicks and sales, especially when you're promoting multiple products across multiple platforms.
Most people's solution is to just use the raw affiliate link from the merchant's dashboard. That works, but it leaves you with very little visibility into your own performance — and raw affiliate links often look long, ugly, and suspicious to readers.
Here's a better setup.
The problem with raw affiliate links
An Amazon affiliate link looks like this:
https://www.amazon.com/product-name/dp/B08XYZ123/?tag=yourtag-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1
Problems with sharing this directly:
- It's 80+ characters of noise
- The
?tag=yourtag-20part tells readers immediately that it's an affiliate link, which some people deliberately avoid clicking - If Amazon changes their URL structure, old links can break
- You have no idea which piece of content drove the click — your Amazon dashboard just shows total clicks across all your links
A tracked short link solves all of these:
links.yourblog.com/best-camera→ redirects to the Amazon page- You see click data (when, from where, on what device)
- You can update the destination URL without changing the link if a product gets delisted
- It looks clean and intentional in your content
The two-layer affiliate tracking setup
Layer 1: A branded short link
Create a short link for each affiliate product you actively promote. Use a clear alias that describes the product, not a random string:
links.yourblog.com/camera-picklinks.yourchannel.com/host-recommendationlinks.yournewsletter.com/tool-of-month
gometrify handles this — connect your domain, create the links, and each one gets its own click dashboard. Set up your free account →
Layer 2: UTM parameters on the destination
This is optional but powerful. When you shorten the link, set the destination to the affiliate URL with UTM parameters added:
https://www.amazon.com/product-link?tag=yourtag-20&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=camera-review
This tells Google Analytics where the click came from. Now you can see not just that someone clicked the affiliate link, but whether they came from your blog post, your YouTube description, or your newsletter.
Use our Free UTM Builder to build these properly without typos.
How to organize your affiliate links
Once you're promoting more than 10–15 products, link management gets unwieldy. A few principles that keep it clean:
One link per product, per channel. If you promote the same product on your blog and in your newsletter, create two separate links. This tells you which channel is driving affiliate revenue, which is extremely valuable for deciding where to focus your content.
Use descriptive aliases. links.yourblog.com/camera-pick is much better than links.yourblog.com/aff1. You'll have these links in your content for years — the alias should be self-explanatory.
Keep a simple spreadsheet. Track: the gometrify link, the destination affiliate URL, the product name, the commission rate, the content it's published in, and the monthly click count. This makes it easy to see which links are worth updating and which products are worth promoting more heavily.
Disclosing affiliate links properly
In most countries, you're legally required to disclose when you're using affiliate links. In the US, the FTC requires clear disclosure. In the UK, the ASA has similar requirements.
A simple, honest disclosure works fine: "This post contains affiliate links. If you buy through these links, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you."
Put this near the top of your content, not buried at the bottom. Readers who see it early are more likely to trust you, not less — it signals that you're being transparent.
Reading your affiliate analytics
After your links have been live for a few weeks, look at these numbers:
Click volume per link. Which products are readers actually clicking on? High-volume links on old content are great candidates for updating and re-promoting.
Click-to-commission rate. Divide your affiliate commissions from a product by the number of clicks that product link received. This gives you a rough earnings-per-click figure. Products with high EPC are worth promoting more; products with lots of clicks but low commissions might mean the merchant's conversion page is weak or the product isn't right for your audience.
Device split. Are your readers clicking affiliate links on mobile or desktop? If mostly mobile, make sure your link destinations load well on phones — a slow mobile checkout page kills conversions.
Geographic data. Some affiliate programs (notably Amazon) have different commission rates in different countries and some products are only available in certain regions. If 30% of your affiliate clicks come from a country where the product isn't available, you're leaving money on the table — you might need a geo-redirect or a different product recommendation for that audience.