Geo-targeting allows you to redirect your website visitors – when clicking on Amazon affiliate links – to the nearest Amazon shop.
Practical example
You’re running a German website and presenting products from Amazon.de shop. A visitor from France clicks on an Amazon affiliate link and will be redirected to the same product on Amazon.fr instead of the German shop.
This way you don’t lose a conversion which might be the case when forwarding him to the German shop.
Geo-targeting for Amazon links
In order to use geo-targeting for Amazon links you have to enable the feature via plugin settings (tab “features”). Additionally it’s mandatory to signup for all Amazon affiliate programs individually. After this you have to enter your local tracking ids into the corresponding fields at the settings page (tab “Amazon API”).
A geo-targeting redirect will only work if the corresponding local tracking id is available.
Privacy information
To determine the country of origin, the current IP address of your page visitor will be analyzed. This happens via the interfaces of some free online services.
On the plugin settings page, you can choose between the following services:
- geoip-db.com (Standard)
- ipdata.co
- ipinfo.io
(As of today: Plugin version 3.8.4 or newer)
The location itself will be temporarily stored via cookies.
This article is also mentioned in our GDPR article.
How to test your GeoTargeting configuration in AAWP
First of all make sure the GeoTargeting feature is enabled under AAWP > Settings > Functions.
You may also need to configure a localized tracking ID for each country you want to redirect to, under AAWP > Settings > Amazon API after checking the box for using multiple tracking IDs there.
How it works
When someone first visits your website, AAWP will detect the country and then save the detected country in a cookie. That means that changing your IP to another country after you’ve already visited the website won’t change the GeoTargeting to another country as it only detects this on the first visit for optimized site speed. It also won’t work if you are logged in to your WordPress Admin!
A quick test
The best way of testing is to first connect to your VPN to change your IP address to another country. Only after the VPN is connected you open a Private Browsing / Incognito window in your browser. By using a private browsing window you prevent any cookies from previous sessions from interfering with the test and it also makes sure you’re not logged in to your WordPress admin. Links should now redirect to the country your IP address belongs to. Note that you can set up AAWP to redirect to the same product ASIN or to Search. In many cases a product may not be available under the same ASIN in another country so we usually recommend to set it to redirect to Search instead. You will find that setting under AAWP > Settings > Function.
Further testing
If it’s not working correctly yet, you may want to check if the country detection is working at all and if the cookie with the country code is set.
In your private browsing session, right click anywhere on the page and choose “inspect”. This will open the developer panel in the browser. Go to the Application tab and there open the Cookies section on the left and finally click on your domain name to see the cookies that are set by your website. There should be a cookie with the name “aawp-geotargeting” and a two letter country code.
If the aawp-geotargeting cookie isn’t there you can try switching to another Localization Service under AAWP > Settings > Functions and see if that solves the issue.
If the cookie is set, but for the wrong country you can delete the cookie and reload the page. If it still resets to a different country than what you expected it’s probably an issue with your VPN/IP address.
