What does an Acquisition Officer FTE own?
An Acquisition Officer FTE on ftes.ai owns the measurement of paid acquisition, in the Demand department of the e-commerce org chart. It is judged on contribution margin per channel and accountable for that number being fully loaded rather than a return on ad spend. It exists because the numbers ad platforms report are built to make spending look good, and a store that manages to them can grow revenue while losing money.
It does not own the buying. Media buying is being given away by the platforms, and the Performance Ads FTE on ftes.ai executes it inside hard caps. The Acquisition Officer FTE owns the honest number that decides where the next dollar goes.
Where do its numbers come from?
The Acquisition Officer FTE takes spend by channel, connected from Meta, Google Ads and TikTok or entered from a spend sheet, and reconciles it against invoices and platform reports. It takes fully-loaded margin per order from the Controller FTE, the cohort each customer belongs to and the channel that acquired them from the Customer Intelligence FTE, and returns and discounts from orders. From those it computes, per channel and per cohort, contribution after cost of goods, returns, discounts and shipping, and the fully-loaded cost to acquire each customer.
The platform-reported figures are kept beside the blended ones on every report, because the owner needs to see both and because the gap between them is itself a finding.
What is contribution per channel, with a worked example?
Contribution per channel is the revenue a channel's customers produced over the horizon, less cost of goods, returns, discounts, shipping and the channel's spend. A labelled worked example, illustrative only: channel D reports a healthy return on ad spend. Fully loaded, its customers return a third of what they buy, buy mostly on a discount code the campaign carried, and their contribution after those costs and the spend is negative. Channel B reports a weaker return on ad spend; its customers keep what they buy and contribute positively at ninety days. The platform ranks D first; contribution ranks B.
The report shows the decomposition for each channel, so the owner can see which line, returns, discounts or cost of goods, produced the gap.
What does it propose, and what waits for approval?
The Acquisition Officer FTE proposes reallocation: moving spend from channels with negative or weak contribution to channels with positive contribution, inside the caps per channel the owner set, with the cohort evidence and, where the claim needs one, a holdout, meaning a share of the audience that receives no spend so the channel's incremental effect can be measured. Every proposal waits in Approvals and is executed, on approval, by the Performance Ads FTE or the store's team.
It also proposes what to stop: a discount code in a campaign that turns contribution negative, or a channel whose customers never buy a second time.
What does the Acquisition Officer FTE never do?
It never buys media, changes a bid or touches an ad account, at any autonomy level; those belong to the Performance Ads FTE inside its own caps. It never reports a return on ad spend as the headline, never replaces the platform's figure with its own without showing both, and never claims incremental effect without a holdout. It never presents a channel's contribution as complete when the Controller FTE's cost coverage for the products it sells is partial.
It also never attributes a customer to a channel by a rule it will not show; the attribution model is printed on the report.
What does it report, and how honestly?
The Acquisition Officer FTE reports contribution per channel with its decomposition, fully-loaded acquisition cost by channel and cohort, platform-reported and blended figures side by side, spend reconciled against invoices, and reallocation proposals with their measured effect after approval. Horizons and the attribution model are printed. Where a channel's contribution depends on products with partial cost coverage, the figure carries a confidence band.
A reallocation that did not improve contribution is reported as such, with the hypothesis it proposes.
How does it work with the other roles, and in which tools?
The Acquisition Officer FTE reads the Controller FTE, the Customer Intelligence FTE and the Returns Officer FTE, and hands approved reallocations to the Performance Ads FTE. It reads spend from Meta, Google Ads and TikTok or a spend sheet, and orders, returns and discounts from Shopify, WooCommerce or BigCommerce.
It is usually hired once the Controller FTE has enough cost coverage for contribution to mean something, and before the store's next budget season.