Ecommerce Marketing
How to create campaign links for Black Friday
Black Friday needs named slugs before creative locks, UTM defaults the whole team inherits, and expiry so leftover ads do not sell a dead price.
Zipy editorial · 2026-08-19 · 8 min
Key takeaways
- Create the campaign object first. Links, QR, and bio buttons inherit the name.
- Split by channel and placement, not one mega-slug for the whole weekend.
- Set expiry or a post-event destination before you go home Wednesday.
Build the skeleton before the banners
The messy year is the year someone pastes a PDP with five handwritten UTMs into Meta on Thursday night. Create the campaign in the workspace first. Lock source, medium, and campaign name. Then mint slugs: email-hero, sms, paid-meta, paid-google, influencer-maya, window-poster.
Same checkout is fine. Same ID is not. You need to know whether SMS or the window QR burned the inventory.
Physical and inbox on one report
Packaging inserts, door decals, and table cards need dynamic QR in the same campaign as the email slug. Geo rules help if the deal is country-specific. Device rules help if the app store is the real destination for phones. Test-scan and test-click on Tuesday. Wednesday is too late for a broken CNAME.
The Monday after
Expiry or a destination change is not optional. Leftover ads and screenshots will keep circulating. Point leftover traffic at the current catalog or a “sale ended” page you are willing to stand behind. Export the weekend’s rows while the campaign is still named. Next year you will want last year’s split, not a pile of anonymous hashes.
FTC: mail, internet, or telephone order rule
Related: how-to-track-campaigns-with-utm · how-to-use-qr-codes-on-product-packaging