The affiliate turnaround.

The challenge

Chegg is a NYSE-listed edtech company, and when I picked up the affiliate channel in October 2020 it was in decline. Order volume was slipping and almost nothing new was coming into the program. On paper it still contributed, but the trend line was pointing the wrong way.

The bigger problem was concentration. Around 80% of affiliate orders came from a small set of large partners. That made the channel fragile: if one of them pulled back or renegotiated, the whole line could drop overnight. Before I could grow the channel, I had to make it safe to grow.

What I did

• Surveyed partners to find the real friction, then fixed what was actually blocking them instead of guessing. The payout terms and reporting were where the complaints clustered.
• Rebuilt the commission structure and payout systems so partners were paid fairly, on time, and in a way that rewarded the behavior we wanted.
• Migrated the program to Impact Radius (Impact.com) to get cleaner tracking, better reporting, and infrastructure that could support hundreds of partners rather than a few.
• Onboarded more than 600 new partners through social campaigns, CRM reactivation of dormant accounts, and direct influencer recruiting.
• Ran a $400K influencer program across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia to bring in new audiences and feed the partner pipeline.
• Managed a $600K budget against more than $4M in revenue, keeping a close watch on CPA as volume climbed so growth never came at the cost of efficiency.

The outcome

Affiliate orders grew 150%. Just as important, the channel stopped being a single point of failure: large-partner concentration fell from 80% to 45%, so the program now stood on a broad base of active partners instead of a few big accounts.

At its peak the channel drove up to 10% of all company orders, and it did so at the lowest CPA of any marketing channel we ran. The line that had been declining became the most efficient way Chegg acquired customers.