A channel that produces a thousand registrations describes activity, not value. To judge acquisition you need two more numbers beside the volume: what it cost to acquire those players and what they returned over time. Putting cost and value in the same view, per channel and per affiliate, is the difference between a budget that drifts to the loudest source and one that goes to the best. This guide sets out how to build that view without the common errors that make it lie.
Executive summary
Acquisition economics reads cost to acquire against the value acquisition returns, as a blended LTV to CAC ratio by source. It depends on spend being in the system and attached to the right cohort, on comparing cohorts at the same age rather than the same date, and on keeping definitions distinct so a discussion is about economics, not about which number someone meant. The output is a shared table a marketing lead and a finance partner can both act on. These are reference-design recommendations, not a description of an audited Bounty AI deployment.
Step 1: volume is a question, not an answer
Registrations and first deposits measure motion. They tell you a source is producing, not whether it is producing players worth having. A channel with strong headline numbers and a poor cost-to-value ratio is quietly losing money at scale; one with modest volume and excellent economics may deserve more budget than it gets. You cannot tell which is which from counts alone.
So the first step is to treat volume as the entry point and build toward economics: bring in the spend, attach it to the cohort it acquired, and prepare to read cost against value at equal cohort age. The steps that follow, spend ingestion, the blended ratio by channel and affiliate, attribution windows, and keeping net revenue distinct from deposits minus withdrawals, all rest on refusing to stop at the count. Each step below is shown with the product screens for the view it describes.