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I plan on selling products through the Amazon affiliate program. What I know I can track is:
-what products people view on my website (default Google Analytics pageview behaviour).
-what affiliate links people click on my website (with GA _trackEvent).

What am I missing is:
-what products people end up buying after clicking on the affiliate links.

Does the Amazon affiliate program offers you any mechanism for linking a purchase with some data from your website?

I noticed that I was able to add custom parameters and values to my affiliate links and the link checker was still happy with them, if Amazon gave the links that initiated an order then I would be able to cross reference the orders using custom parameters...

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  • This is a great question.. Probably better on the Amazon forums. But Im going to add a bounty to see where it goes.
    – Frank
    Nov 26, 2012 at 17:19

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This is directly from Amazon Associates, the short answer is no you cannot track Amazon sales as conversions in Google Analytics.

The Amazon Associates reports will only reflect clicks that result in a session being created. This means the customer must click though your Associates link and the Amazon.com site must load.

Many third party tracking methods will use impression tracking to count clicks. These reports will provide a higher number of clicks that would not represent a site visitor going to the Amazon.com site.

Unfortunately, we do not have a way of integrating Amazon Associate sales into Google's Analytic tracking. However, I did want to thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and suggestions with us. I have passed your feedback and suggestions along to the appropriate department for consideration.

Please feel free to continue to send us your feedback and suggestions because this kind of feedback is invaluable to us. It helps us continue to improve our program.

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  • Thanks @Anagio, WIll reward bounty when the time allows.
    – Frank
    Nov 27, 2012 at 7:59
  • @Anagio: Do you have the link to the paragraph you appended? Without going as far as integrating Amazon Associate sales with Google Analytics there would be ways of measuring the conversion rate (see my suggestion in italic at the bottom of my question), but it doesn't look like Amazon offers any. Maybe they do not want their affiliates to have precise figures about this sort of metrics for one reason or another (maybe to protect themselves from having to answer about low conversion rates when they are effectively low).
    – Max
    Nov 27, 2012 at 11:41
  • @user359650 that was the email response from Amazon, I emailed them yesterday. There was no other information they gave. The problem with tracking conversions in GA from Amazon is your website would need to post unique data to Amazon once a visitor left. After a sale happened in Amazon same day next day next month Amazon would need to post back to your site with a web hook or call back with the sale data plus unique session or identifier which you sent to them. It may be against Google Analytics TOS to uniquely identify your visitors.
    – Anagio
    Nov 27, 2012 at 19:08
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    Here is a talk about tracking users: stackoverflow.com/questions/4030780/…. It seems that the whole legal argument revolves around the notion of "personally identifiable information". Unless mistaken I don't think a user id or session falls within that definition because without access to the users database (which is yours and private) one cannot personally identify someone based on an id or session. I have little hope Amazon will do more towards an integration with GA, I don't see what's there to gain for them.
    – Max
    Nov 28, 2012 at 14:32

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