Many websites link to products on Amazon, this one included, in hopes of capturing commission from Amazon’s affiliate program. In order to be credited with the sales generated through their promotional efforts, the affiliate needs to affix a tracking ID (or tag; the verbiage varies) onto their links, like so:
https://www.amazon.com/https://www.amazon.com/?tag=adamcapr-20
Here are a couple of options to automatically tag Amazon links, within post content, with a specified tracking ID, using regular expressions.
v1: Raw
This first version will indiscriminately add a tracking tag to (or replace an existing one on) any amazon.com URLs:
v2: Clean
This second version extracts ASINs from amazon.com/dp/ URLs, then rewrites those URLs, so that extraneous strings and parameters are stripped before adding the tracking tag. Other, non-/dp/ amazon.com URLs will have the tracking tag assimilated in the manner above.
The advantage to implementing automation like this is that it lessens cognitive demands for precision and thus can expedite publishing processes.
Of course, it’s probably more prudent to curate Amazon short links (e.g., https://amzn.to/2Mkz6k2) which are less susceptible to the type of manipulations performed above. Web browsers and other services can more easily hijack full links, diverting revenue away from those who instituted them.
