Acquisition Manager (Paid Media & Ecommerce)

Responsibilities

• The role has two halves, and they are equally important. The first is buying the traffic: performance media is the largest single investment in the business and the primary engine of new customer growth. The second is trading the website that converts it.
• This is the first dedicated internal owner of both. You will not be buying media day to day, and you will not be building pages. You will set the strategy, trade the site week to week, direct our agency and development partners, and build the measurement that lets Arc invest with confidence. It suits someone who wants to own a channel outright and shape how it runs.
• The cost and volume of new customer acquisition: how efficiently Arc converts media investment into new customers, in every market it trades in.
• The performance media investment: how it is planned, allocated across markets, and phased across a trading year with pronounced peaks.
• Trading the website: the site as a commercial asset. How it converts, how the range is presented, and how well it performs through the moments that matter.
• The quality of acquisition measurement: the definitions, the reporting and the confidence the business can place in them.
• The contribution of our agency and development partners: the output we get, the value we receive, and how the relationships develop.
• Trading the website: - The commercial performance of the site: what is featured, where it sits and when it changes - Homepage, landing page and collection merchandising, and how the range is sequenced and presented - Product page effectiveness, including how well the product is explained and sold to someone meeting the brand for the first time - Onsite search, navigation and product discovery - Basket and checkout performance, and removing friction through to purchase - Making the delivery, shipping and service proposition visible at the points where it influences a decision - Launch readiness and execution on site, so that major product moments land properly in every market - Promotional execution on site, and working with operations on availability and stock messaging - The weekly trading rhythm: reviewing performance, reacting to what is and is not selling, and feeding that back into media
• Media strategy and investment: - The annual and quarterly media plan across paid social, paid search and emerging channels - Allocation between markets, and the case for shifting investment toward the strongest returns - Phasing across the year, capitalising on the launch windows that concentrate demand and buy most efficiently - The balance between generating demand and capturing it, including growing search in line with the branded demand the brand is already creating
• Agency direction: - Setting the brief, the targets and the reporting rhythm - Weekly performance conversations and quarterly business reviews - Shaping account structure, campaign architecture and audience strategy - Assessing value delivered and guiding how the partnerships develop

Requirements

• Has owned a paid social and paid search budget at meaningful scale in a direct to consumer or ecommerce business, and been answerable for its performance
• Has traded an ecommerce site commercially: merchandising, conversion and launch execution, rather than simply briefing a developer and waiting
• Genuinely numerate. Can build and defend an acquisition cost and contribution model, can tell when platform reporting has drifted from commercial reality, and understands incrementality well enough to design and interpret a test
• Has directed a performance agency rather than worked alongside one. Has set targets, shaped structure and held partners to account constructively
• A self starter who is comfortable building process in a small, fast moving team

Preferred

• Useful, but not essential
• - Premium or considered purchase categories, where price is not the lever
• - A strong conversion optimisation or experimentation background
• - Shopify or a comparable platform, hands on
• - Launch driven or highly seasonal demand
• - Marketplace advertising
• - Hands on experience with an incrementality or media mix tool