How to Run a Successful Black Friday Affiliate Marketing Campaign 

Black Friday is one of the biggest events of the year – if not, the biggest. Many shoppers wait patiently for this day so they can grab great deals on the products and services they love. 

That's a huge opportunity for brands to boost their earnings, but it's also a competitive one. One of the best ways to stay ahead of the competition is to make affiliate marketing your ally. 

In this guide, we'll show you how to set up your affiliate program for Black Friday and Cyber Monday so it's ready to perform, from planning to post-sale. 

Why Run a Black Friday Affiliate Campaign? 

Because shoppers are spending, and they're comparing before they buy. And your affiliates can boost your sales even more. 

Online spend keeps setting records. According to Adobe Analytics, US shoppers spent $11.8 billion online on Black Friday 2025 (up 9.1%) and $14.25 billion on Cyber Monday (up 7.1%). It was the second year in a row that Black Friday grew faster than Cyber Monday. For 2026, Adobe forecasts $12.9 billion on Black Friday (up 9.2%) and $15.1 billion on Cyber Monday (up 6.2%), within a $275.1 billion online holiday season. 

Affiliate partners are where the 2025 money moved. According to Awin's 2025 recap, brand-partnership sales rose 12% over Black Friday itself, while cashback sales fell 5% and comparison sites rose 7%. 

Plus, premium placements on large networks are getting more expensive, which is a reason to build direct relationships with your own affiliates. 

I Don't Have an Affiliate Program Yet. Should I Launch One for Black Friday?

Maybe. It depends on what you expect from it and what you already have in place.

Be realistic about the first part. Affiliates plan their content weeks ahead, and a brand-new program won't have an established network of partners by November 27. 

If you're hoping to launch this week and get a flood of sales from strangers, you'll probably be disappointed. What a late launch can do is turn your existing fans into your first affiliates, give you a live test of your tracking, and leave you with a working program for the December gifting weeks and for next year.

If you decide to go for it, keep it small. Aim for a handful of active affiliates, not hundreds. If three or four of them send real orders over Cyber Weekend, that's a good first season. 

If you decide to wait, use the next few weeks to get ready instead: choose your commission structure, write your affiliate terms, collect a creative kit, and build a short list of affiliates you'd like to recruit. Then launch in early January, when affiliates are planning their year and your program won't be competing with every other brand's sale. 

Now, let’s walk through 9 steps to ensure you set up your Black Friday campaign for success.

1. Start Early

The idea that Black Friday starts in November is old news. The more useful idea is that it now runs for the whole month.

Rakuten's consumer panel data pointed the same way: increases in gross sales over 2024 were about twice as high early in November as late in the month. One UK consultancy, Vervaunt, saw advertisers launching VIP presales with affiliate partners as early as November 1, using content and influencer partners to build wishlists early, then saving high-incentive partners (cashback and voucher sites) for the conversion spike in Cyber Week.

Plan weeks out if you can. Your affiliates plan content weeks ahead. A blogger writing a gift guide or a creator scheduling a video series needs your offer in October, not on the Monday before. 

Think in phases, not a single day. Early access for your best affiliates and their audiences, the main Black Friday push, then a Cyber Weekend and Cyber Monday close. 

2. Review Last Year's Performance

Before you decide anything, look at what happened last November and December. You'll want to know three things:

1. Who drove sales. Pull your top affiliates by revenue and by number of orders for the full holiday window, not just Black Friday itself. Your LeadDyno leaderboard and per-affiliate stats show this.
2. What those sales looked like. Average order value, new versus returning customers, and which products or codes drove them.
3. Who has gone quiet. An affiliate who performed well last year and hasn't promoted since needs a conversation, not an automated email.

Then sort your affiliates into groups. Affiliate segmentation makes the rest of this guide much easier, because you'll treat each group differently: 

If this is your first Black Friday with an affiliate program, you don't have last year's data. Use the last 90 days instead and rank affiliates by recent activity. 

3. Create a Dedicated Black Friday Campaign 

A campaign has two parts that need to work together: what you're offering shoppers, and what you're offering affiliates. 

The shopper offer

‍Decide what the sale actually is before you do anything else. Adobe expects discounts of up to 30% off listed price during Cyber Week, so a modest offer will be competing against deeper ones. If you can't match that on price, compete on something else: a bundle, a free gift with purchase, early access, or a reward from a partner brand. Awin's data on brand partnerships suggests this is working for retailers who want to protect margin rather than cut price. 

The affiliate offer

Give your affiliates something that's only available to them, such as:

• Bonus commission for orders above a set value
• Early access sale for subscribers
• Bundle or gift with purchase with code per affiliate
• Limited-run product
• Sitewide sale

It's important to give your affiliates a reason to promote. Black Friday is crowed. What is the benefit for them to promote your campaign?

4. Finalize Your Promotional Deals

Affiliates can't plan content around a deal you haven't decided on. Settle the details early and send them in one document.

Your Black Friday brief should include:

• The offer in one sentence, plus the exact discount or perk
• Start and end dates and times, with time zone
• Which products or categories are included, and which are excluded
• Promotional codes and whether codes can be combined with other offers
• The sale landing page URL, if any 
• Your commission rates for the period (see step 5)
• Who to contact with questions, and how fast you'll answer

Decide now whether the sale runs through Cyber Monday and what happens after. Rakuten's data shows click growth on Cyber Saturday, Sunday, and Giving Tuesday (December 1 in 2026), and affiliates will want to know if offers still apply. 

5. Revamp Commissions for the Season

When affiliates choose which brand to feature, money matters. Review your current commission rates, your margins during the sale, and what comparable programs in your category pay, then work out how much room you have to go higher.

Do the margin math first

What discount do you want to offer? Consider all your costs, then add the commission rate on top and see what is left after commission. 

Make it temporary

Tell affiliates exactly when the higher rate starts and ends, and put the end date in your announcement. 

In LeadDyno, you can set start and end dates on a commission plan to limit which purchases qualify. 

Consider targeted increases 

Instead of going for a flat rate to all groups, consider custom commissions. For example, reward a defined result, not just more traffic you would have received anyway. Options that fit that thinking:

• A higher rate for new customers only
• Performance-based commission tiers tied to purchase counts or sales totals. 
• A higher rate for top performers while others stay at the standard rate
• A flat bonus per order above a certain value

Define the terms

Think about your terms too. Black Friday orders get returned often!  

In LeadDyno, for example, for commissions to be canceled automatically, the "When" setting on the commission plan needs to be longer than "Immediately."

Set it to match your return window so you don't pay out on orders that come back. 

6. Create Personalized Materials

Support your affiliate with campaign materials! 

Codes

Give affiliates their own assigned discount codes on supported integrations, so purchases can be attributed even without a referral-link click. 

LeadDyno supports tracking affiliates by discount code, which also gives affiliates a code to say on a podcast, show in a video, or print in a newsletter. 

For affiliates without personalized offers, give them a brand-approved code but remind them to use their individual referral links as well, so the sale gets attributed to them.

Marketing materials 

Get your assets ready early so affiliates can start producing content right away. Put everything in one place, and tell affiliates where it is. 

• Approved copy and talking points. Offer a few versions for different audiences: a gift-guide angle, a deal-hunter angle, a "treat yourself" angle.
• Images. Finished promotional graphics with the offer on them, plus a brand kit (logos, colors, fonts) and clean product shots.
• Banners in the common sizes. See our guide to affiliate banners.
• Codes and links. Approved codes and working links to the sale page. 
• Credibility material. Awards, press mentions, review scores, or other proof worth passing on. 

Keep the creatives simple, as you still want to give partners space to be creative. 

Website & Landing page 

Your website is where all sales happen, so make sure this is aligned with your campaign and avoid sending potential buyers to error pages. The sale page is where an affiliate's work either converts or doesn't. Another idea is to make one clean, themed landing page for the whole program, then offer personalized versions and codes to your best affiliates. Put the offer, the dates, and the exclusions in plain text on the page. 

7. Test Everything, Then Promote to Your Affiliates 

‍First, test. 

About two weeks before Black Friday, walk through the whole path yourself: 

• Click an affiliate link, add a product to the cart, and check out with a test order. Confirm the click, lead, and sale show up against the right affiliate.
• Repeat with a discount code and without the link, to confirm the code attributes the sale.
• Check that the sale page loads fast on mobile. Adobe expects mobile to account for about 57% of online holiday spend this season.
• Confirm your commission plan has the right rates and dates, and that new rates apply only where you intend.
• Open your affiliate portal as an affiliate and check that links, codes, and assets are all there.
• Review affiliate approval and self-referral settings. During the campaign, monitor unusual activity and investigate suspicious purchases before paying commissions. 

Then, promote.

Make sure you share all the details with your partners ahead of time and keep communication active.

Email marketing is your ally here! Use your affiliate newsletter for the big announcements, and automated emails to keep the day-to-day updates going without manual work. 

8. Monitor and Optimize

Once the sale starts, it’s important to keep an eye on it to ensure everything is running smoothly. 

Keep an eye on:

• Codes and link to ensure everything is working properly
• Unusual patterns to identify early fraud signal 
• Clicks and conversions by affiliate - see who's delivering and who stalled 
• Your communication channels to identify if any partner or customer needs support 

After the sale, pay affiliates on the schedule you promised, thank everyone (publicly for the top few), and sit down with the numbers within a week or two while it's fresh. 

If you have already defined your affiliate marketing KPIs, make sure to take notes on these numbers so you can compare for the next campaign and optimize. This can guide you on what worked well and what could be improved and works as your starting point next year.

Maximize Your Holiday Earnings

A Black Friday affiliate campaign has a lot of small parts: the offer, the commission rates, the codes, the landing pages, the creative, and the tests. They all have to work on the same day, and most of the work happens before the sale starts. 

And the work should not stop on Cyber Monday, either. The sale doesn't end the season. Gifting weeks, Giving Tuesday, and the last shipping deadlines in December are still ahead, so keep your best affiliates engaged and your offer visible. After the holidays, review the results and note what to keep, what to change, and which affiliates to bring back next year. 

LeadDyno is built to keep these parts in one place: affiliate tracking, commission plans, coupon code tracking, newsletters, and payouts. If you want to run your holiday campaign with it, book a demo and we'll walk through your setup.