| name | acquisition-funnel |
| description | Design and analyze an acquisition funnel from audience exposure through qualified visit, lead or signup, activation, and downstream value with channel economics and quality safeguards. |
Acquisition Funnel
Use when marketing needs to understand how prospective users move from first contact into meaningful product adoption.
Procedure
- Define target audience, acquisition source, qualified entry, signup or lead event, activation, and downstream value event with consistent windows.
- Map the journey and major friction or qualification points across ad, content, referral, landing page, sales, signup, onboarding, and product as applicable.
- Instrument counts, conversion, latency, cost, and cohort identity at each stage using authoritative outcomes.
- Segment by channel, message, audience, campaign, geography, device, or sales motion where quality may differ.
- Measure acquisition quality through activation, retention, expansion, or revenue rather than cost per click or signup alone.
- Identify intentional filtering versus accidental leakage and check whether the funnel is attracting the wrong audience efficiently.
- Model channel economics using cost per qualified activated or retained customer where the data supports it.
- Prioritize the bottleneck whose improvement has the strongest downstream value rather than optimizing every stage independently.
Decision rules
- Cheap acquisition is not good growth when downstream quality is poor.
- Optimize the system, not isolated click or signup rates.
- A lower conversion rate can be healthy if qualification improves customer fit.
- Preserve cohort source so later retention can be connected back to acquisition.
Quality gate
The funnel is decision-ready when stages and windows are reproducible, acquisition cost is connected to downstream customer quality, intentional qualification is distinguished from friction, important channel segments are visible, and the highest-value growth constraint is identified.
