I've been using amazon affiliate network for a long time. However, in the past 12 months I've seen a steady decline in click through ratio, and conversions. My best year was 2013, $12K in sales, then 2014 a sharp decline, and today, nothing. We're talking not even any click throughs, well, not specifics anyways. Anyone else seeing a steady decrease in engagement? I'm baffled by the spikes to the bottom
You mean with same traffic and your commission drop from $12K to nothing? I have a sport site and the conversion also very low, is less than 1%.
Yeah, I've seen systematic declines over time. Most recently, it was because Amazon dropped the support for some of their affiliate tools. I had 800+ "iframe" tools set up across my scary movie site. I've had to switch things up, but still, it's really a decline.
If you have sites with lot of traffic, you should try this plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-auto-affiliate-links/ . I created it especially for these cases: it will take you ages to put affiliate links or other affiliate tools in 800+ posts. This plugin automatically add affiliate links in your content. Since the links are inside the content they will not angry the visitor and the click trough rate will be higher.
For my case, I do see a spike up initially, thereafter it went steadily downs. I traced through and it was because some of my pages were not loading and Google delisted those pages. Once I fixed it and slowly built back the backlinks, traffic starts coming back. However, the click-through wasn't as high as last time. Perhaps you might want to cross-check your webpages on Google using "site:<your-site.com>" to see if the number of pages are still indexed.