What do they do all day? Summit’s Jak McLoughlin explains the affiliate manager role

I interviewed when I was 17 and started just after my 18th birthday, after college, where I studied accounting, business and media. I like media, I liked business and wanted to see what the best route to combine the two was. I didn’t like the idea of university – I don’t know why exactly – and didn’t want to move away from home at the time.

So, I thought I’d go down the apprenticeship route and digital marketing seemed to combine that creative side with media and business.

During the apprenticeship, I got to have a feel of all the channels we support; I had a month in one channel, and another month with another. I chose to specialize in affiliates because I enjoyed it.

Summit’s overarching mission is we want to make sure that customers buy from our clients over their competitors. In affiliate marketing, that means using specific websites, influencers across YouTube and Instagram and TikTok, and some major media corporations such as Bauer, Hearst and Conde Nast that we also work with.

Essentially, we pay those websites a commission and they promote our clients.

I split my time mainly between recruitment and optimization. We need to make sure we’re working with the best-suited partners for those specific brands. A cake decorating company is one of our clients, there’s a great number of influencers that we can look to work with. We have to start with a strong foundation and once that’s set, we can then start negotiating coverage, increasing the awareness of the brand or increasing our incentives across cashback and voucher code sites.

At the moment, price is king – so for clients, the affiliate channel is a great way to ensure you have the best price while not really discounting your products.

When it comes to optimization, there’s two main things we look at. The first is making sure that merchant pages are as up to date as possible with brand assets; this can lead to an uplift in sales because if a merchant page doesn’t look authentic, customers won’t click.

The team at Summit isn’t massive; we’re quite tight-knit and we support each other. So there’s accounts where it’s just me running a client. I’ll manage the entire account and do everything from checking websites to ensure links are correct to negotiating several thousand-pound tenancies with partners. On others, I’ll work with an exec.

The head of affiliates [Summit’s Immy Hussain] is my boss; he has been since the last stages of my apprenticeship. He has so much experience, he knows what he’s talking about and I’ve learned so much from him – to the point that although I’m not managing anyone as a manager, I feel qualified to do so should someone come in.

There are some clients that just do affiliate work, but the majority of our clients will work with the PPC team and the SEO team. We support each other and have regular internal discussions to make sure we’re on the same wavelength.

I want to go into a more overarching position in the future. I want to pick up PPC, SEO, get to the point where I’m a client manager and support all channels, rather than the specialized role I have.

As told to Sam Bradley