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The [aap_link] Shortcode

Docs › Shortcodes

renders a plain inline text link to a product, tagged and tracked. No image, no box, no layout — it is the shortcode for linking mid-sentence, and the one you will use most often once the article is written.

In one linethe 6L model renders an ordinary link inside your paragraph.

Every attribute

Attribute Default What it does
asin empty Required. With no ASIN the shortcode renders nothing.
text Check Price on Amazon The anchor text.
class empty One extra CSS class, for theme styling.

What it builds

The URL is assembled from your saved marketplace and partner tag, not from anything you pass in:

https://<marketplace>/dp/<ASIN>?tag=<partner tag>&linkCode=ll1

Three consequences worth knowing:

  • The ASIN is upper-cased for you. asin="b08n5wrwnw" works.
  • The marketplace defaults to www.amazon.com if none is saved, so a UK site that has never set one will send readers to the US store. Set it on the Amazon API tab — see partner tag and marketplace.
  • With no partner tag saved, the tag is simply omitted and you get a clean, unattributed Amazon link. It works perfectly and earns nothing, which is exactly why it is easy to miss.

Check one link before you write fifty. Publish a draft, hover the link and read the status bar. If there is no tag= in the URL, stop and fix the partner tag first — every link you write until then earns zero, and nothing on screen tells you.

Styling and tracking

Every link is rendered with the classes aap-text-link and aap-track. The second one is what click analytics counts, so removing it in a theme override silently switches off your click tracking.

Your class value is appended to those two and is sanitised as a single CSS class name. Passing several space-separated classes will not work as expected — add one class and do the rest in your stylesheet.

Anchor text is where the money is

The default Check Price on Amazon is honest but generic, and repeated eleven times in one article it reads like a template. Specific anchor text converts better and is more useful to a reader skimming:

Instead of Try
Check Price on Amazon the 6L model
Click here this cordless version
Buy now see the current price

Keep it descriptive of the destination rather than commanding, and let the disclosure do the work of saying it is an affiliate link. Disclosure requirements are here — note that inline text links still need one on the page, even without a product box to attach it to.

Text links are the quiet workhorse. They add no images, no layout shift and almost no weight, so they are the one product element you can use freely without hurting Core Web Vitals. On a long review, a handful of inline links usually out-earns a second product box.

Common questions

Can I link to a search or a category instead of a product?

Not with this shortcode — it builds a /dp/ product URL from an ASIN and needs one. For a non-product destination you need an ordinary link with your tag added by hand.

Does it open in a new tab?

That comes from the link-target setting on the Display tab, along with the rel attributes, and applies to every product link the plugin renders. It is not a per-shortcode choice.

Why does my link have no tag on it?

No partner tag is saved. The link is still built and still works, just without attribution, so nothing appears broken. Fix it on the Amazon API tab and the existing shortcodes start earning immediately — they are rendered fresh on each page load, so there is nothing to go back and edit.

Do these count in click analytics?

Yes, through the aap-track class that every link carries. If a theme or a caching plugin strips classes from links, tracking stops even though the links keep working.

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