The Geniuslink tool is a fantastic way to globalize your Amazon Affiliate links to maximize the commissions you can get from traffic around the world. See our article on globalizing links for a full run down of the service.
There are plenty of WordPress plugins which will also globalize links but the advanatge of Geniuslink is the customizability it offers. You can manually configure your affiliate links in granular detail, overridding the automatic settings and inserting your own products and rules for visitors from different countries.
Many times the automatic product match on Geniuslink will do a very good job, automatically locating close or matching products on the other Amazon stores and you can simply save the link as it is. As long as you have inserted your individual Amazon Affiliate IDs for each program, it will tag each product with the correct ID so you get the commission in each country.
Depending on the niche you are in and the products you are promoting however, it may sometime be useful for you to override these automatic settings and customize a product, inserting a different product to the one the Auto-match feature found for you. Let’s look at how to do this in more detail.
How the Geniuslink Auto Globalizer Works
The Geniuslink Auto Product Globalizer Feature
When you initially paste an Amazon product link into Geniuslink, it will run an Auto Match link globalizer feature. See the video above for a demonstration of this.
What Geniuslink is doing with this Auto-match feature is searching all the Amazon stores for an exact or closely matching product and inserting it in automatically with the correct affiliate ID so you get credit for any purchases made on that store.
Incidentally, see our article on setting up Amazon Onelink to make sure you get credit for referrals even if the customer ends up buying off a different Amazon store to the one your link initially sent them to. This is a good thing to pair up with Geniuslink to maximize global commissions.
If it cannot find an exact match, it will default to search results for the product on that store, and if it cannot even find relevant search results it will default back to the initial link you pasted in.
For some products this feature works perfectly and you don’t need to alter it; for others you may want to customize the redirects a little more. You may want to insert your own products manually and apply that link to a certain group of countries different from what Geniuslink sets automatically.
Overriding This and Inserting Your Own Product Links
To do this, you simply make sure your link is set to Advanced Link in the settings, and then a box will appear below the “Default” link you pasted in allowing you to insert more product links. The tab on the left allows you to set the rules you want to apply to this link, like country, language, operating system and so on. There are lots of options.
Paste the custom product link into the box from Amazon. When you are doing this manually though, it is absolutely crucial you manually insert your affiliate ID yourself, since Geniuslink only does this for you on the Auto-match feature down at the bottom and will not insert IDs for you when you are putting your own links in at the top. You need to do this yourself.
To do this, you need to make sure you are logged into each Amazon site you want to paste links from, and use the Sitestripe at the top to manually get the Text Link for the product, which will have your affiliate ID embedded in it. Using the full longer link is preferable here.
Paste this into your Geniuslink dashboard and then select the countries you want this link to apply to, plus any other rules, on the left hand side. This will automatically override any Automatic country rules that are set down at the bottom in the green boxes. The link will go to the product you define for the countries you define and cancel out any automatic redirects for that country.
This is how you manually customize Geniuslinks to pick your own products and country rules plus other settings if you like. You can insert as many custom rules as you like for as many different countries as you like, and any of these rules you set will take precedence over what Geniuslink would normally do automatically down at the bottom of the page.
Using the Advanced Link feature you can create very complex and intricate links with lots of different rules and qualifiers. For example, you can set to link a certain product you define for all visitors from either Spain, Portugal, Brazil and Mexico on a Mac OS and with Spanish as their browser language to that link.
You can also set up Split and Choice pages, where customers are sent to a selection of different products either on a random predetermined split on a 50/50 basis or some other ratio (Split Page) or are presented with a page themeselves where they click which store or product they want to go to (Choice Page).
There are many other ways to set up links as well. In this way the Geniuslink feature offers a level of control and customizability not available in most other link globalizer plugins or programs.
Globalizing affiliate links is useful for maximizing your commission across all the traffic you receive worldwide
Reasons You Might Want to Customize Links
For many cases you may not even need to use this advanced feature as the Auto-match will find the matching products you need anyway and you can just “set and forget” the link. There may be a number of reasons you want to override what Geniuslink does though.
Firstly, the Auto product match feature on Geniuslink is very good but not perfect and will sometimes says there is no exact or close match when in fact there is if you look a little deeper. Sometimes there is no substitute for an real human being going through the Amazon stores and finding out matching or related products. AI and alogrithms are good but not perfect.
In cases where you really want to be able to link to a product on a certain store but Geniuslink is telling you there is no match, it is worth searching through the site yourself and seeing if you can find close enough match, since the Auto feature will miss close matches sometimes.
If you do find a close enough match, the Advanced Link feature allows you to override what Geniuslink would have done automatically and send the customer to a suitable product on the right store.
Secondly, even if Geniuslink does find a matching or close product, in rarer cases you may not actually want to link to this because of issues of compatibility or some other region specific issues (DVDs, Games Consoles, Plug sockets etc).
In some cases you want to find what we could call a Compatible Equivalent match rather than an exact to-the-letter product match; in other words, the equivalent product that is compatible with the plug sockets, hardware, DVD players etc. in the country the visitor is browsing from.
In these cases it certainly makes sense to set custom Advanced Links for some countries, since the Auto-match alogrithm isn’t thinking about product matching in quite those terms. It just wants to find the same product on each store and is not taking in account compatibility issues across countries and regions.
Factors to Consider
There are other factors to consider though when setting up your own country specific redirects. The Automatic redirect settings of Geniuslink have been chosen very carefully and will in many cases do a good job.
By default visitors from most countries without an Amazon store worldwide will be routed to amazon.com, since it is the biggest store with the most products and the widest array of delivery and payment options. Some European countries will be sent to the UK store since it is closer. Here is the official word on this from Geniuslink themselves:
“Our translation is automatically carried out for all Amazon product links, and will always attempt to send a shopper to their local storefront, regardless of whether you’ve got an associate ID for that country or not. We made this choice to create the best possible experience for the shoppers.
One exception to this behavior is when we can’t find any kind of product match (or search results) with our 5-step translation process, in which case we’d return to the original URL.It’s possible to override this automatic localization behavior if you want, but this would involve building out an advanced link with plenty of country based rules. It’s usually easier to sign up for as many of the Amazon storefronts as you can, in order to get affiliated for all of your international clicks without building tons of advanced links…
With regards to your question about countries that don’t have a local storefront, we usually route them along to Amazon US most of the time – it’s got the best international shipping and the largest selection. In Europe, we route to Amazon UK for the same reasons.”
There are also some other considerations to take into account when setting up custom links for different countries:
- Delivery times and costs.
- Import rules and tariffs in different countries
- Product compatibility
Different stores have different countries they can deliver to and different delivery costs and time estimates, so it is important to factor in delivery costs and times on top of product prices to determine whether the customer will reaonably buy from that store.
Some countries also charge hefty tariffs on imported deliveries in certain product categories or in some cases even forbid the importation of certain products altogther so it may be worth checking this out.
In probably the majority of cases the Geniuslink Auto-match feature will do pretty much the best job as it is. The country specific redirects have been set up to take all these factors into account. However the Advanced Link feature is there if you need it to insert your own products and set your own rules on occasion.
