AAWP (Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin) Review – How to Increase CTR

Please note that I may earn a small commission from purchases made through product links in this article at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products I use now, have used in the past, or would use if there was a personal need.

Last updated: May 29, 2022

If you’re an affiliate marketer like me, then you know how challenging it can be to convince your visitors to purchase the product you are actively promoting.

Not only do you need to write excellent content that will have your readers engaged, you also need to present your content in such a way that visitors will click on your affiliate links or buttons.

That’s where AAWP comes in. The Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin is a tool specifically designed to increase the CTR on your affiliate website.

In this review I am going through the main features and I am also sharing some of the results I have achieved with using AAWP.

Try AAWP

AAWP was first developed by a Germany-based developer in 2016 and the product has since earned a lot of respect in the affiliate marketing world.

It is a flexible plugin that helps you design great looking tables, boxes and widgets to make visitors click through to Amazon so you can earn more commission.

In other words, AAWP is much more than just a plugin that lets you create Amazon links, like EasyAzon does for example.

AAWP is very much focused on design, user experience and conversion. No matter how awesome your content is, if you don’t have great looking tables, widgets or buttons in your content, only a small portion of your visitors will click through to Amazon.

My Results with AAWP

The below graph is taken from my Amazon Associates account for one of my affiliate sites. It shows the 7 days following the day I installed and set up the AAWP plugin on this particular site.

What matters in this graph is the red dots which represent clicks. The clicks from this site to Amazon grew from around 500 per day to around 800 per day, and then stabilized around the 900 mark in the following weeks.

I hadn’t done anything else to the site during those weeks and looking at the items that were ordered, there was a very strong correlation between items promoted in the AAWP elements and actual items ordered on Amazon.

This can also easily be verified, because any sales generated via AAWP is tracked as an API link click within your Amazon Associates dashboard. In addition, you can also create a custom tracking ID for AAWP so you’ll know exactly how many sales you’re generating.

Testing with Amazon Tracking IDs

It’s important to point out here that in the AAWP settings page, you can only set one Amazon tracking ID. However, you can easily override that tracking ID by using the tracking ID parameter in the shortocdes. For example, like this:

[amazon box="ASIN" tracking_id="yourtrackingcode-20"]

This obviously offers great opportunities to fully test the effectiveness of this plugin. And testing is incredibly important in the exciting world of affiliate marketing.

Since buying and configuring the plugin, I’ve spent quite some time working out which elements (comparison tables, product widgets, sidebar widgets, etc.) convert best to further optimize CTR (click-through rate) and increase affiliate revenue.

Overall, I can say that AAWP helped me increase CTR on this particular website with almost 100%. Needless to say that I’m very happy with these results!

One thing to point out here though is that I wasn’t using any comparison tables or fancy widgets at all before using the Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin.

I know, I know, silly me. It’s just that I was really bored with all these comparison tables on almost every single affiliate site out there. They all looked the same and I didn’t want my sites to be like that. But reality is that a well-designed, professional looking comparison table converts extremely well. Fact.

So if you currently already have something in place on your site, like comparison tables, to increase CTR, you may not immediately achieve the same results as I have.

Try AAWP

AAWP is actually very feature-rich and when first installing the plugin, you may be a bit overwhelmed. Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it may seem at first glance.

Let’s go through the most important features of the AAWP plugin, together with my thoughts on them.

Note:
With all the hype around Instant Pots, I am using Instant Pots as the guinea pig in the examples. I don’t have an affiliate site around Instant Pots, and I don’t recommend you start one either, because this niche is ridiculously saturated.

1. Comparison Tables

The main reason for me to purchase an AAWP license is because I was in desperate need of good looking comparison tables. I had a good look all the options available on the Internet, but I was most drawn to the comparison tables generated by AAWP.

Here is an example of a comparison table with 3 products:

What’s great about these comparison tables is that they are fully customizable, either by changing up some of the settings in the plugin, or by defining your own custom CSS elements. So the colors and the buttons you see in the image can easily be changed to whatever you prefer.

In addition, you can also add as many product rows and details as you like. So for example, you can add price, Amazon Prime status and even reviews.

It’s very important to point out here is that these product details are pulled directly from the Amazon API. They are real-life data, so you’re not in danger of breaching Amazon’s terms and conditions.

Here’s another example of a comparison table, but now with only two products, different colors, and some more details:

To include an AAWP comparison table in your blog post, all you need to do is add this tiny piece of code once you’ve created the table. Too easy!

[amazon table="6917"]

2. Product Boxes

My second favorite feature in AAWP is the product boxes.

Have you ever used the Amazon Card Type native shopping ad, or worse, the Amazon text+image widget? They really don’t look very good.

The AAWP product box on the other hand looks awesome. It looks professional so that your website visitors are much more likely to click on them.

What’s even better is that these product boxes are highly customizable with different templates and styles. And just like with the comparison table, you can also change the colors, fonts, pretty much everything, with custom styling.

Here’s an example of a product box that I’ve configured the way I like them:

See the product title and list elements? The beauty is that you have full control over this. You can configure the length of these elements (amount of characters) and how many list elements you’d like to have included.

Here is the same product box but with different settings. Note that I’ve replaced the button with the actual price:

And this is the simple piece of code to include an AAWP product box in your blog post:

[amazon box="B00FLYWNYQ"]

3. Bestseller Lists

The Bestseller List feature allows you to display an X amount of bestselling products based on a given keyword.

All you need to do is enter a product keyword and AAWP will display all bestselling products that match this keyword.

AAWP displays the products in Product Boxes, as described above. This is awesome, because it means you don’t have to configure things twice and everything will simply have the same look and feel. Consistency is important!

So in this shortcode I am displaying the two bestselling Instant Pots:

[amazon bestseller="instantpot" items="2"]

A feature that is very similar to the Bestseller Lists is the New Releases Lists. You guessed it, this feature displays newly released products within a certain product category.

You can find all new releases in all product categories on the Amazon website. All you need to do is drill down to the product category you are looking for and then grab the corresponding code:

[amazon new="289825" items="2"]

The drawback of this New Releases Lists feature is that you don’t have full control over which products are displayed because it is per product category. So if you want more control, its best to use a simple Product Box or a Bestseller List.

4. Sidebar Widgets

AAWP’s widgets are simple yet great looking product widgets that you can easily add to the sidebar of your WordPress website.

The widgets are available as Bestseller Lists, as New Releases Lists and as Product Boxes, and they can be dragged onto the sidebar via the WordPress Widgets section.

Here are a few examples:

All you have to do is submit a product code or product group code, and AAWP will generate awesome looking widgets.

You can also configure how many products you want to include and whether you want small or larger images.

5. Text Links

The most basic feature, but perhaps also the most essential, is text links. Using AAWP, text links are always nofollow and they open in a new tab by default, the way it should be.

AAWP also lets you configure an optional icon to be placed next to the link (such as a cart icon), and you can also include geotargeting if you like.

These settings are site-wide, and you can then use individual settings per link to further customize each link the way you want them to be.

This is the simple code to insert a basic Amazon affiliate link into your blog post:

[amazon link="B01NBKTPTS" /]

This will by default use the product’s title as the link text. This is not always desirable, so you can override that by including a custom title:

[amazon link="B01NBKTPTS" title="this product" /]

6. Displaying Images

This feature may be one of the most important features of AAWP for some of us.

Technically, an Amazon Associate is not allowed to save and load images from their own sites. They need to be served via Amazon.

But displaying images via Amazon SiteStripe gives you really small images that are often also low quality. There’s also no flexibility in regards to choosing which image you want to display. It’s just one product image you get. Annoying, right?

This is where using AAWP can be super helpful. With shortcodes and parameters, you can pick and choose whichever image belonging to a product you would like to display. You can also pick different sizes, add an ALT description, heck you can even tell the shortcode how to align the image.

Check out this example:

[amazon fields="B00FLYWNYQ" 
value="thumb" 
image="4" 
image_alt="instant pot" 
image_size="large"]

This is the output:

What that shortcode does, it pulls the 4th image belonging to Amazon product with ASIN code B01LZGUAAU. It displays that image in large size, with ALT text “instant pot”.

Easy!

7. Geo Targeting

AAWP uses a third-party online service to implement geo-targeting. This optional features allows you to redirect website visitors to the nearest Amazon shop after clicking on an Amazon affiliate link.

For this to work you will need to have a different Amazon Associates accounts for each country you would like to include.

If you’re already using Amazon’s OneLink functionality, there’s no need to also activate the geo targeting feature. Although it must be pointed out that AAWP supports more countries than Amazon’s OneLink currently does.

Try AAWP

As you can see, AAWP offers a ton of great features. What I like most about AAWP is that is super customizable, which allows you to make the elements look as good and professional as you like.

There are tools out there that can make a real difference to your online business, and AAWP is one of those tools. Why spend so much time, energy and money on building a niche site, and then forget about the things that really matter? CTR is one of those things that is crucial to the success of an affiliate website.

And AAWP is perhaps the perfect plugin to help increase that CTR on your site. So go ahead and purchase yourself a license. They have a 30-day money back guarantee, so you have nothing to lose. But trust me, you won’t be asking your money back!

Drawbacks

One of the drawbacks of AAWP is that the user interface of the plugin within WordPress is a bit confusing. It requires a bit of getting used to. But once you get it, the plugin is quite easy to use.

The other thing I need to point out is that AAWP doesn’t search for Amazon products. This means you will need to go into Amazon, find the products you want to promote, and use the correspoding ASIN codes to generate the fancy tables and widgets.

For some this may be a drawback but for me personally it really makes no difference. I actually prefer to use Amazon to search for products, I don’t want to do this within my WordPress dashboard.

AAWP Pricing

Here’s an overview of the AAWP pricing schedule. As you can see, it’s very affordable, and since the ROI is excellent there’s hardly any reason not to invest in this plugin.