A sales funnel is the model of the stages a person passes through from first contact to becoming a paying customer, drawn as a funnel because each stage has fewer people than the one before.
Definition
A sales funnel is the model of the stages a person passes through from first contact to becoming a paying customer, drawn as a funnel because each stage has fewer people than the one before. A common framing is awareness → interest → consideration → conversion → retention.
The funnel is both a way to describe user flow and a diagnostic tool: by measuring the drop-off between each pair of stages, you can see where the biggest losses are and where a fix would return the most.
The funnel is a simplification — real journeys loop, skip stages, and involve multiple sessions and devices — but it remains useful because it forces attention onto conversion rates between steps rather than only on top-line volume or final sales.
In context
In iGaming acquisition, the funnel is usually instrumented as impression → click → landing-page view → registration → first deposit → qualified/retained player. Each transition has its own rate and its own owner: creative and targeting drive click rate; landing page and offer drive registration rate; onboarding, payment options and bonus drive deposit rate; product and CRM drive retention.
Attributing a performance problem to the right transition is what makes the fix efficient — pouring more budget into the top of a funnel that leaks at registration just buys more leaked users.
Affiliates and operators often own different parts of the same funnel, which is why deal structure and tracking matter. A CPL affiliate is paid at the registration step and has limited visibility past it; a CPA affiliate is paid at qualified deposit; a RevShare affiliate's income depends on the retention stages the operator controls.
Cohort analysis extends the funnel past the first deposit into the weeks that determine real value, and a funnel that looks healthy to the deposit step can still be unprofitable if the retained-player stage is weak.
Worked example
An operator finds click-to-registration is strong but registration-to-deposit is well below benchmark. The funnel view points at the step between the two: the deposit page offers only two payment methods, neither popular in the target GEO.
Adding local payment options lifts the deposit rate by a third without any change to traffic or spend.
Related terms
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