What Should Happen to Campaign Pages After the Sale Ends?

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, 11.11 and end-of-season sales generate some of the most valuable traffic of the year. Then the campaign ends, someone deletes the landing page, and every ad, email, social post and backlink pointing to it starts returning 404.

The best time to plan this is before the campaign, not after.

Use an evergreen URL for recurring campaigns

Instead of creating /black-friday-2026, use a stable URL such as /black-friday and update its content each year.

Benefits:

• Backlinks and rankings collected over years stay on one URL.
• Newsletters and bookmarks from last year still work.
• You don't need a new set of redirects every season.

If you already have year-specific URLs, 301 redirect the old ones (/black-friday-2024, /black-friday-2025) to the evergreen page.

Don't delete the page when the sale ends

Between campaigns, keep the evergreen page live with a 200 status and useful content:

• a clear message that the campaign has ended,
• when the next campaign is expected, with a newsletter signup,
• links to current deals, best sellers or main categories.

This is better than a 404, and better than redirecting to the homepage, which visitors find confusing.

Product-specific landing pages

Some campaigns use temporary pages for a single product or bundle. When they end:

• If the product is still sold, redirect the campaign page to the regular product page.
• If the bundle no longer exists, redirect to the most relevant category.
• If there is nothing relevant, a 404 or 410 is acceptable, but only after traffic sources are cleaned up.

For more on choosing targets, see Redirect Strategy for Discontinued Ecommerce Products.

Check paid traffic first

Ads are the most expensive source of campaign 404s. Before you unpublish any page:

1. Pause or update ads, sitelinks and shopping feeds using that URL.
2. Update email automations and pinned social posts.
3. Then change or remove the page.

We showed how broken landing pages waste budget in Google Ads 404 Traffic: How Broken Landing Pages Waste Paid Clicks.

301 or 302?

• Permanent change (campaign page retired, merged into evergreen URL): use 301.
• Temporary swap (the evergreen URL temporarily points somewhere during a flash sale): use 302 or 307.

Details are in 301 vs 302 vs 307 vs 308 Redirects.

A short pre-season checklist

• Decide the evergreen URL for each recurring campaign.
• Map old year-specific URLs to it with 301s.
• Prepare the "campaign ended" version of the page in advance.
• List every place the URL is used: ads, emails, influencers, partners.
• Monitor 404s daily during and after the campaign.

Summary

Campaign pages don't need to become dead ends. Use evergreen URLs, keep pages live with an "ended" message, redirect temporary pages to relevant products, and clean up ads before unpublishing. During peak season, no404 alerts you the moment a campaign URL starts returning 404, before the lost clicks add up.