Black Friday falls on 27 November this year, and Cyber Monday on 30 November. That is a four day window in which nothing gets fixed. Whatever is wrong with your links at midnight on Thursday stays wrong until the sale is over, because the posts carrying them are already published and a good share of them are not yours to edit.
The links are also the part of a Black Friday campaign that gets built last, usually the night before, usually by pasting one URL into six places.
This guide covers what to set up in October, what you change at midnight and what changes without you, what happens to the link on 1 December, and which numbers tell you where the sales came from.
What goes wrong on the day
Five things, and all of them are decided before the sale starts.
You post the link early so it can circulate, which means for four weeks it points at a page that says nothing useful yet. Then at midnight somebody has to go and change it, and that somebody is you, at midnight.
You use the same link in the newsletter, the bio page, two stories, a YouTube description and a Pinterest pin. At the end of the weekend you have one number covering all six, so you know the campaign worked and nothing about which part of it did.
The product sells out at nine in the morning. The link keeps delivering people to a sold out page for the rest of the weekend.
Your click count comes back higher than it should be, because deal aggregators, price scrapers and link preview bots all touched the URL.
The sale ends. Your link 404s. Pinterest carries on sending people to it through December.
One link per channel, not one per campaign
Make a separate short link for every place the offer appears, and point all of them at the same landing page:
linx.ly/bf-emailin the newsletterlinx.ly/bf-igon the bio pagelinx.ly/bf-storyin storieslinx.ly/bf-ytin the video description
Each one keeps its own count, with country, device, browser and referrer attached to every click. Link click tracking explains what sits inside those fields.
Say the weekend brings 2,400 clicks. Split across those four links it might land as 1,310 from email, 620 from the bio page, 330 from stories and 140 from YouTube. That is a different campaign to the one the single number described. It says the list did the work, the bio page held up, and the video, which took a day to make, brought in fewer clicks than a story that took four minutes.
You cannot get that split retroactively. It has to be built into the links before you post them.
Building one link takes a minute
The technical part is short. Five steps, once per channel:
- Paste your campaign page URL into the link shortener.
- Replace the random slug with something readable:
linx.ly/bf-mailrather thanlinx.ly/x7Kq2. Put the channel name at the end so you are not guessing which is which in the report. - If the campaign page is on your own site, add UTM tags so the same traffic is labelled in your analytics too.
- Set the expiry date now: 30 November at 23:00, with your category page as the expiry destination. You will not remember to do this at the end of November.
- Copy the link and post it in the one channel it was named for.
A short link is a few characters. It fits in a story sticker, it does not eat an SMS, it survives being printed, and it makes sense when somebody reads it out loud. Tapped, it shows a clean address in the browser bar instead of 140 characters of parameters.
One edit instead of six
A short link has one destination and you can change it whenever you like. That sounds too simple to matter. On Black Friday it is the thing that saves the weekend.
Through October and November linx.ly/bf points at a teaser page: what the offer will be, when it starts, where to leave an email for the reminder. At midnight on 27 November you change that one destination. The newsletter, the pin, the bio button, the printed card and the video description all start sending people to the sale page, including the posts you can no longer edit.
One edit at midnight instead of six. When a product sells out at nine on Friday morning, it is the same ten seconds again.
A different page in the evening
Time-based redirection is a separate feature and it runs on the clock, not the calendar. You give the link a start hour, an end hour and a destination for that window. Between those hours the link goes there. Outside them it goes to its normal destination. The window repeats every day, and the hours are whole hours.
On a sale weekend the use for that is an evening slot. Send the link to a flash deals page from 20:00 to 23:00, and to the main sale page for the rest of the day. Same link in every channel, different page after eight, and the only thing your audience needs to know is when to come back.
The hour window repeats daily for as long as it is set, so a 20:00 to 23:00 slot runs every evening until you remove it. Test it on a spare link first, and take the window off once the flash offer is done.
What happens after Cyber Monday
Traffic does not stop when the sale does. Pinterest pins, forum posts and screenshots keep sending people for months, and the worst thing to hand them is an error page.
This is the part that does happen on its own. Give the link an expiry date and time along with an expiry destination: 30 November at 23:00, landing on your category page. From that hour the link stops being a sale link and starts being a link to the category, and nobody has to be awake for it.
The link keeps working. What changes is where it lands.
Which clicks are real
Black Friday inflates click counts more than any other week of the year. Deal aggregators scrape offer pages, price trackers follow links to check what changed, and every share on a platform with link previews pulls the URL at least once.
Requests from crawlers, link preview bots and headless browsers are filtered out before a click is recorded, along with traffic matching known abuse patterns. It matters here more than usual, because an inflated click count makes a healthy conversion rate look broken, and a conversion rate is what you use in January to decide what to run next year.
UTM tags stop at your own front door
UTM parameters are read by the analytics of the site the visitor lands on. If that site is yours, tag away: UTM parameters covers how the five fields work and what to put in them.
If the visitor is landing on somebody else's store, your utm_source is being read by their analytics, not yours. Use the short link for the click count on your side and the merchant's own tracking field for the sale on theirs.
If you are promoting somebody else's sale
Affiliate income concentrates into these four days harder than any other point in the year, and the two problems get worse together. Products sell out faster, so the destination breaks faster. Everybody posts more, so attribution matters more.
The setup is the same in shape: one short link per placement, the same placement name repeated in the network's subID field, clicks read on your side and commissions on theirs. Affiliate link shortener has the per-network details, including what Amazon Associates does and does not allow.
One addition for the weekend itself. Keep a second destination ready for every product you promote. When the deal sells out, repointing the short link takes ten seconds and fixes every post at once.
Print, packaging and anything offline
Every link you create also produces a QR code, and scans land in the same report as taps.
That is worth more in November than the rest of the year, because printed material commits you months ahead. A code on a flyer or an insert printed in October can point at the teaser page, the sale page and the category page in turn, and the paper never changes.
Do not build the plan on ranking for "black friday deals"
Search interest in Black Friday starts climbing in mid November and holds for about a month, which sounds like an opportunity until you look at what those searches do. An analysis of the 4,000 most popular Black Friday queries in 2025 found that only 11 to 21 percent of them produced a click on anything. The rest were answered inside the results page.
The head terms are also held by marketplaces and retail media, and a new page published in November is not going to rank for them by 27 November anyway.
Your Black Friday traffic comes from your list, your bio, your existing content and your ad spend. Links are how you find out which of those four paid off.
Working backwards from 27 November
- Early October: create the links, one per channel, with the slugs you can read out loud.
- Mid October: point every link at the teaser page, and set the expiry date and expiry destination now while you are thinking about it.
- Late October: publish the links. They show the teaser, which is doing its own job.
- Mid November: refresh the teaser page with the actual offer.
- 27 November at 00:00: change the destination on each link. That is the whole launch.
- 27 November, the rest of the day: watch clicks per link, not the total. If one channel is flat by mid morning, its post is the problem.
- 1 December: read clicks per link against orders per source. Write down the conversion rate for each channel. That is the sheet you open next September.
Frequently asked questions
When should I create my Black Friday links?
Early October. The link needs to exist before you can put it anywhere, and everything printed or scheduled has to reference a URL that already works.
Can one link point somewhere different during the sale?
Two ways. You can change the destination whenever you like, and that single edit updates every post carrying the link. Separately, time-based redirection sends the link to another page between two hours of the day, every day, which is how you run a flash slot from 20:00 to 23:00 without a second link.
What happens to my Black Friday link after Cyber Monday?
Give it an expiry date and time with its own expiry destination, such as 30 November at 23:00 landing on your category page. The link keeps working after that hour, it just stops being a sale link, which matters because pins and screenshots keep sending traffic for months.
How do I know which channel drove the sales?
Use a separate short link per channel for the click count, and the same channel name in your UTM tags or the network's subID field for the sale. Clicks come from one side, orders from the other, and they match up by name.
Do bots inflate Black Friday click counts?
They try. Requests from crawlers, preview bots and headless browsers are filtered before a click is recorded. Deal aggregation is heavier in this week than any other, so the filtering matters more here.
Can I use the same link on printed material?
Yes, and it is the strongest case for a link you can repoint. Every link generates a QR code, and because you control the destination, paper printed in October can still send people somewhere sensible in December.
The short version
Build the links in October, one per channel, with names you can say out loud. Point them at a teaser page so the midnight launch is one edit rather than six. Set the expiry date now, so the ending happens without you. Read clicks per link rather than the total, then match those against orders by name. The campaign is four days long. The setup is the only part of it you can still control.