Affiliate Manager

📋 Description

• • Excel is a rapidly growing leader in digital advertising and performance marketing, specializing in connecting insurance brands with high-intent consumers at scale. We are recognized by Inc. 5000 as one of America's fastest-growing companies, a testament to our innovative approach and impactful results. Our core business involves operating top-tier insurance websites, which we strategically promote through paid search marketing. This allows us to deliver a consistent flow of qualified leads to our partners, including major insurance carriers, brokers, and agencies, who are seeking to acquire new customers.
• • Our vision is to simplify the process of acquiring great customers, and our mission is to empower insurance brands to scale their customer acquisition efforts effectively. We operate under a set of core values: Embrace Simplicity, XL Impact, Customer Centricity, Extreme Ownership, and Laser Focus. These principles guide our daily operations and strategic decisions, ensuring we deliver exceptional value to our partners and foster a high-performing internal culture.
• • We embrace a remote-first work environment, believing it fosters peak performance by maximizing efficiency and personal freedom. Our culture is built on a foundation of highly aligned but loosely coupled teams, promoting extreme ownership, a growth mindset, curiosity, and personal accountability. We thrive on the creativity and diverse input of our team members, fostering an agile and innovative atmosphere where we continuously seek high performers to help shape the future of performance marketing.
• • This is a fully remote position, requiring candidates to be located within Ohio. While remote, occasional travel is expected for local team meetups, industry conferences, and company-wide summits throughout the year. We are looking for individuals who excel at building strong relationships, possess a keen analytical ability, and thrive in roles where they can take full ownership of outcomes. The ideal candidate will be adept at evaluating new opportunities, ensuring they align with our standards for positive and compliant growth.
• • In this critical role, you will be responsible for vetting, onboarding, and managing a diverse portfolio of business affiliates who are instrumental in placing and selling traffic to Excel. Your primary objective will be to ensure that all affiliates adhere to industry best practices, drive compliant and high-quality traffic, and consistently improve their performance metrics. By cultivating genuine value and transparency in our partnerships, you will build strong partner trust and make a direct contribution to our company's revenue growth.
• • This position embodies complete ownership. When affiliate performance flourishes, you will be instrumental in scaling those successes. Conversely, when quality or compliance issues emerge, you will be empowered to address them decisively and effectively. You will manage the entire lifecycle of our partners, from initial onboarding and technical integration to ongoing performance monitoring, strategic optimization, and the rigorous enforcement of our established standards. Success in this role hinges on strong judgment, a comfort with data analysis, and a proactive bias toward action.
• • Key responsibilities include **Affiliate Vetting & Onboarding**: evaluating inbound affiliate opportunities and referrals, assessing partner legitimacy, compliance, and scalability, and coordinating the necessary contracts and onboarding paperwork. You will also partner closely with our technical teams to facilitate integrations, set up tracking mechanisms, and ensure launch readiness.
• • Furthermore, you will be involved in **Quality & Performance Management**: overseeing a portfolio of affiliate partners, diligently monitoring their performance against internal Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This involves in-depth analysis of reporting dashboards, customer feedback, and call transcription data to meticulously assess traffic quality and the overall consumer experience. You will proactively identify optimization opportunities and implement data-driven strategies to enhance results. A crucial aspect of this role is monitoring fraud compliance indicators and taking swift, appropriate action when standards are not met, which may include implementing caps, pauses, or wind-downs. You will also support decisions regarding payouts and pricing, ensuring they are aligned with performance and quality outcomes.
• • Finally, **Partner Communication & Internal Collaboration** are vital. You will serve as the primary point of contact for your assigned affiliate partners, communicating performance insights and strategic recommendations with clarity and professionalism. Effective collaboration with cross-functional teams, including Revenue, Compliance, Tech, and other Affiliate teams, is essential for resolving issues and scaling high-performing partners. Maintaining accurate workflows and comprehensive documentation within project management tools like Asana is a key requirement for ensuring operational efficiency and transparency.
• • We are seeking a candidate with 1-3 years of experience in B2B account management, affiliate marketing, performance marketing, insurtech, or SaaS. Strong analytical and problem-solving skills are essential, with a proven ability to interpret performance and quality KPIs to inform strategic decisions. Excellent written and verbal communication skills are a must, enabling clear, concise, and persuasive interactions. The ideal candidate will be reliable, self-directed, and demonstrate extreme ownership and accountability, being proactive, organized, and focused on measurable outcomes. Comfort analyzing call data, lead performance, and web traffic, with a strong emphasis on quality metrics, is crucial. A high level of comfort managing complex workflows, dependencies, updates, documentation, and cross-functional collaboration within a structured project management tool is also required.