How Much Are Broken Amazon Affiliate Links Costing You?

Nobody can tell you the number from the outside, and you should be careful with any article that does. The cost depends on your views, your audience and the products you link to. What you can do is work it out for your own channel, and it only takes a few figures you already have.

The reason this matters is that a broken link never sends you a bill. Your video keeps its views, your description keeps its link, and the money simply stops arriving. Because nothing announces the loss, most creators never put a number on it, and a loss with no number is easy to ignore.

This article shows you a simple way to estimate it, using your own reports rather than averages from someone else’s channel.

Before doing any maths, it helps to know that "broken" covers a few different problems, and they do not all cost you the same amount.

• 01The product is no longer available. The link opens, but the viewer cannot buy what you recommended. Under Amazon’s rules, a click on a properly tagged link still opens a session, so other qualifying purchases during that session can still count. You lose the sale you were counting on, but not always everything.
• 02The page is gone. The product was removed and the link leads to an error page. The viewer has nothing to buy and usually leaves.
• 03The tracking tag is missing. The link opens the right product and everything looks fine, but nothing is credited to you at all.

The last one can be especially costly, because it looks completely healthy. We explain how to spot it in our guide on how to tell if a link is an Amazon affiliate link. The first one is common on older videos, and we cover it in what "currently unavailable" means for your links.

You need four figures. All of them come from places you already have access to, and none of them need to be exact.

• 01Clicks. Your Amazon Associates reports show how many clicks your links get. If you use a different tracking ID for each video, you can see clicks for each video on its own.
• 02Ordered items. The same reports show how many items were ordered. Divide ordered items by clicks and you get your rate of items ordered per click. Amazon’s reports show this for you, labelled Conversion in the summary and Product Conversion Rate in the table. It counts items, not orders, because one customer can order several items at once.
• 03Average item price. Look at the price of the products you usually recommend. A rough figure is fine.
• 04Commission rate. This depends on the category Amazon has filed the product under. Our article on Amazon affiliate commission rates explains where to find yours and why two similar products can pay different rates.

Use your own numbers, not someone else’s. The number of clicks and items ordered varies a lot between channels, so an average taken from a different niche can be badly wrong for yours.

Here is the calculation for one link, written out in plain steps:

• 01Monthly clicks on the link × your items-per-click rate = items ordered per month
• 02Items ordered per month × average item price = sales per month
• 03Sales per month × commission rate = what the link earns per month

Here is a worked example. These are made-up numbers to show the method, not averages. Say a link gets 50 clicks a month, your rate is 5 items for every 100 clicks, the product costs $60, and the category pays 3%.

• 0150 clicks × 5% = 2.5 items ordered a month
• 022.5 items × $60 = $150 in sales
• 03$150 × 3% = $4.50 a month from that one link

This is an estimate, not an exact measure of what you lost. It tells you what the link earns while it works, which is a fair guide to what it costs you while it does not.

That looks small, and that is exactly why it gets ignored. Now multiply it. Over a year, $4.50 a month is $54. If 20 of your videos each have one link like this that has quietly broken, that is over a thousand dollars a year that never arrived, and nothing ever told you it was gone.

Your own numbers may be much bigger or much smaller. A channel that reviews expensive products can lose more from a single broken link than a small channel earns in a month. The point of the method is that you stop guessing.

Most creators check links when a video is new, and then never again. But many videos keep getting views for years, often from search, long after you have stopped thinking about them.

Those older videos are also more likely to have links that no longer work, because products get discontinued, replaced by newer models or removed from Amazon over time. So the videos you look at least are often the ones quietly losing the most. We wrote more about this in why old YouTube videos lose affiliate revenue.

A quick way to see this on your own channel is to sort your videos by views over the last 90 days in YouTube Analytics. Any older video near the top of that list is worth checking first, because a broken link there has more potential to cost you.

There is another possible cost that does not appear in your affiliate report. A viewer who clicks your link and lands on an error page, or on a product they cannot buy, learns something about your descriptions. Next time, they may not bother clicking.

You cannot measure this one easily, so it is not part of the calculation above. But it is worth keeping in mind. Working links are not only about this month’s commission. They are part of why viewers trust your recommendations at all.

Once you have an estimate, the next step is simple: find out how many of your links are actually broken. You can do it by hand, by opening each video description and clicking through every link. That works, but it takes a long time on a big channel, and it needs repeating, because links keep breaking after you check them. Our guide on how often to check your Amazon affiliate links covers a sensible routine.

If you would rather not check every description by hand, AffiliScan scans your videos for Amazon links that are broken or point to products that are no longer available, and shows you which ones to fix first. When you find a broken link, our guide on how to fix broken Amazon affiliate links on YouTube walks through the fix step by step.

Whichever way you choose, the order is the same. Work out roughly what a link is worth, find the broken ones, and fix the videos with the most views first.