Check your links before the season

There is no time to diagnose a routing problem while the budget is burning at four times the usual rate.

6 August 2026 · PAD team

The concentration problem

Retail, fitness and many subscription categories earn most of their annual installs in a short window: Black Friday, January, back to school. Spend during those weeks runs several times normal.

A link failure that costs you a manageable amount in April costs a multiple of that in the peak, and you find out afterwards.

What to check, in order

• Tap every live creative from inside Instagram and Facebook on a real iPhone
• Confirm campaign tokens reach the final store URL, not an earlier hop
• Verify the funnel's last button escapes the in-app browser
• Check every placement you cannot edit later: creator posts, printed codes, email templates
• Compare install objectives with traffic objectives as a sanity check

An hour of this before the season is worth more than any creative test you will run during it.

Freeze what you cannot fix later

Creator placements and printed material go out weeks ahead and keep sending traffic long after. Those need to point at an address you control, so the destination can change without reprinting anything.

During the season

Watch arrival rate rather than click volume. Platforms sometimes change behaviour without notice, and a peak week is exactly when you want to notice within hours rather than in the post mortem.

The iOS 26 Facebook user agent change is a recent example of something that broke silently for anyone whose detection was written earlier.

After

Compare click to install across objectives for the campaign period. If traffic campaigns underperformed install campaigns dramatically, that gap is the number to bring to next year's planning.