Head of Affiliates

Head of Affiliates

Department: Marketing

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: London

Compensation: £82,000 - £92,000 / year

Description

Go City is transforming the way people see and experience the world's greatest destinations. We give our customers total flexibility to choose the experiences, tours and activities they want to visit at incredible savings.

Backed by highly successful Private Equity firm Exponent and headquartered in Covent Garden, London, the business is highly profitable with 3+ million customers globally. We have ambitious plans to leverage these capabilities to drive the business' continued growth. Go City is excited for like-minded, problem solving individuals to join the team and make their mark on our future.

We listen to our customers, our partners and our team, to help improve our business every day. And that's where you come in! For more information and to explore at our products, visit

Key Responsibilities

The Opportunity

Go City's affiliate channel is one of our highest value revenue sources - and we're rebuilding it. We're moving from a manually operated, content-heavy program to a data driven channel with a diversified partner mix, automated tracking infrastructure, and smarter commissioning. This is a program leadership role for someone who wants to build something meaningful: take a channel already generating significant revenue and make it structurally stronger and genuinely scalable.

What You Will Do

• Own the program commercially
  • Accountable for global affiliate P&L - revenue, CPA, and ROAS at contribution margin level
  • Define and execute the growth strategy across all partner types: content, influencers, loyalty and cashback, subnetworks, deal and voucher, and emerging formats
  • Move the program from flat-rate last-click commissioning toward data-point commissioning based on pass type, margin, and customer value
  • Lead activation of partners across US, UK, DE, FR and beyond - working with data and engineering on advanced tracking requirements
• Build and manage partner relationships
  • Own Go City's top partner relationships - managing performance proactively and driving commercial conversations
  • Build the partner experience from the ground up: pack, assets, onboarding process, briefing cadence, and terms by partner type
  • Monitor performance beyond revenue - active rates, cancellation rates, churn rate and act on what the data tells you
  • Work with existing content partners to evolve how you work together - finding new ways to collaborate beyond traditional editorial placements - while identifying and recruiting new content partners with strong owned audiences across email, social, and video
  • Identify and recruit new partner categories including social-first creators, AI travel platforms, and non-traditional affiliate formats
  • Stay close to the impact of LLMs and AI search on affiliate-driven content traffic. Work with the Head of SEO on how AI Overviews and generative search are affecting partner visibility, and collaborate with the Head of Social Organic to develop and grow an influencer-based affiliate program
• Drive reporting and measurement
  • Build a consolidated reporting pack: program performance, partner performance, source market performance, and destination and pass mix - overlaid against overall business performance
  • Track the right metrics: revenue, orders, CPA, contribution margin ROAS alongside active rate, de-duplication rate, and cancellation rate
  • Understand attribution mechanics in depth and use that knowledge to make smarter commissioning decisions
  • Understand and be able to articulate the incremental value of the affiliate channel - how it interacts with paid search, SEO, and paid social, where it adds genuine lift, and where channels overlap. Use this to make smarter investment and commissioning decisions
  • Progress tracking infrastructure with the data team: S2S integration, cross-channel de-duplication, and data-point commissioning
• Lead and develop the team
  • Lead the affiliate team - currently two Affiliate Executive, with scope to grow
  • Set clear commercial briefs, give regular specific feedback, and build genuine channel expertise in your team
  • Coach your team on the channel - how affiliate works, how to read performance data, how to manage partners commercially, and how to think strategically about the program. Your team should be more capable because of the time you invest in them
  • Manage performance directly and early

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

Essential

• 5+ years in affiliate marketing with a proven track record of growing and scaling a program - globally or across multiple markets
• Deep knowledge of the full affiliate mix: content, loyalty and cashback, subnetworks, deal and voucher, and emerging formats
• Advanced platform experience - Partnerize, Awin, CJ, Impact or equivalent - including commission setup, tracking, and de-duplication
• Strong commercial acumen: frames performance in net contribution terms, understands the incremental value of the channel, and is not fooled by inflated last-click attribution
• Data-driven - builds reports, interrogates data, makes decisions from imperfect information without waiting for perfect infrastructure
• Working knowledge of affiliate attribution mechanics and S2S tracking
• Proven people manager - sets clear expectations, develops capability, addresses underperformance
• Deep understanding of how the affiliate landscape has evolved - how to work with different partner types based on their model and audience, and what best-in-class looks like across content, loyalty, subnetworks, and emerging formats
• An excellent communicator - able to explain channel performance clearly to senior stakeholders, represent the affiliate program in trading meetings without preparation, and build strong relationships internally and externally
• Always thinking about what is next for the program - aware of how the affiliate landscape is evolving, how partner types are changing, and what opportunities exist to keep the program ahead of the curve
• Experienced working cross-functionally with data and engineering on tracking and attribution dependencies

Desirable

• Travel, experiences, or marketplace sector background
• Experience activating a diversified mix of partners at scale
• Experience building affiliate reporting infrastructure from scratch
• Exposure to card-linked offer platforms or non-traditional affiliate formats

The bar: you can walk into a trading meeting and defend affiliate performance without preparation, explain why a partner is declining and what you're doing about it, and present a forward plan grounded in data. We're building a commercially intelligent program - not maintaining a commission rate spreadsheet.

Benefits

• Annual Go City Explorer Pass allowance
• Enhanced pension contributions. (5% employer)
• Life assurance: 4x your base salary
• Time off:
  • Annual leave: 25 days + bank holidays
  • Option to buy additional 5 days annual leave per year
  • Upgraded Family Leave
  • 1x Community day. Take a day off to give back to the community
  • Work from Anywhere for up to 4 weeks per year
• Health care cash plan
• Personal Learning Budget & dedicated time for development
• EAP providing access to counselling, finance support, etc.
• Cycle to Work Scheme