Acquisition Funnel

---
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
1. Define target audience, acquisition source, qualified entry, signup or lead event, activation, and downstream value event with consistent windows.
2. Map the journey and major friction or qualification points across ad, content, referral, landing page, sales, signup, onboarding, and product as applicable.
3. Instrument counts, conversion, latency, cost, and cohort identity at each stage using authoritative outcomes.
4. Segment by channel, message, audience, campaign, geography, device, or sales motion where quality may differ.
5. Measure acquisition quality through activation, retention, expansion, or revenue rather than cost per click or signup alone.
6. Identify intentional filtering versus accidental leakage and check whether the funnel is attracting the wrong audience efficiently.
7. Model channel economics using cost per qualified activated or retained customer where the data supports it.
8. 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.