Noom’s onboarding funnel runs 120 to 140 screens. Some 3-screen funnels convert above 10%. “The length does not matter. Bigger is not always better,” as Jacob Rushfinn put it. Part 2 of the FunnelFox panel gets tactical on how web-to-app funnels actually get built.

Part 2 of the FunnelFox webinar panel, with Rocketship HQ as partner. Shamanth Rao moderates Jacob Rushfinn (CEO, Botsi), Andrey Shakhtin (CEO, FunnelFox), Patrick Stuart-Constant (CEO, Sociaaal), Mike Gadd (VP Customer Success, Singular), and Elise Zareie (Head of Paid Social, Lingokids). If Part 1 was about the shift, Part 2 is about the mechanics.

On the panel:

Shamanth Rao (Rocketship HQ):   / shamanthrao  Rocketship HQ (partner): https://rocketshiphq.com
Original webinar recording:    • From traffic to revenue: how paid acquisit…  
FunnelFox (webinar host): https://funnelfox.com
Jacob Rushfinn (Botsi):   / jacob-rushfinn  
Andrey Shakhtin (FunnelFox):   / andrey-shakhtin  
Patrick Stuart-Constant (Sociaaal):   / patrick-stuart-constant 
Mike Gadd (Singular):   / mike-gadd-27a16427  
Elise Zareie (Lingokids):   / elise-zareie  

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: You can short-circuit it, but there’s going to be a learning phase, just because there are so many moving parts.

If I had to double-click on one aspect of what you said, Jacob — you spoke briefly about long funnels, and this is something a lot of people talk about: “Oh, my funnel’s longer than yours.” How do you suggest people think about funnel length, if at all?

Jacob: The length does not matter. Bigger is not always better. I think often, to start, start smaller — because you have more variables if it’s longer, and a shorter number of screens allows you to actually understand what’s working.

When you look at competitors in the market that have super long funnels, they didn’t get there on day one. They started with something more manageable and controllable, and iterated and tested into those longer funnels. So when you see a 50-page or 100-screen funnel, it’s not like they launched with that. You’re seeing years and years of work and iterations.

Start with something smaller that you can manage — 10 or 15 screens. But really, it doesn’t matter. Just whatever can get the sale. Oftentimes you A/B test, and it’s easier with A/B tests to add something than to take something away. So usually teams add other conversion tactics, other communication, other questions, other selling and motivation. That’s what I would suggest as well: increment iteratively to get to a longer quiz funnel.

Shamanth: Right. So it’s an incremental, long-term process. Starting with a long funnel overnight is probably not the best thing.

Elise, you’ve certainly seen a lot of funnels. What’s your perspective on long funnels, in light of everything Jacob said?

Elise: I think it’s very vertical-specific. There are some verticals where it makes sense to have a lot of questions, because the result of your funnel is going to be a custom plan that answers a lot of specific questions. And there are some funnels where you want to bring the user as close to your app as soon as possible, so you just have a few screens and then get to the solution.

I was surprised when I got into it myself that for some products, long funnels work really well, and there’s actually not that much drop-off question to question. Because when someone is 15 questions deep, why not answer the next 15? Why would they quit there? They want to know. And there are a lot of UI and UX mechanics you can add to your funnel design to make them aware of that progression, so they want to keep going just to finish the bar.

So it really depends on the vertical you’re in, and I don’t think bigger is necessarily better.

Shamanth: If I might follow up — what verticals do you see longer funnels working better for, and what verticals do shorter ones suit?

Elise: For longer, I’d say anything like weight loss, health and fitness. That’s quite personal, and you need a solution that’s not only physical but also a bit emotional, so you want to build a really precise profile.

For shorter, any app for children where it’s the parents who go through the funnel but the app is for the child. Parents don’t really want to answer a bazillion questions about their kids. They just want to get to the app, they just want the product. The personalization isn’t for them, so it doesn’t really make sense to add a lot of questions.

Shamanth: Interesting. Patrick, if I might lob the ball at you — your apps are what I’d describe as entertainment, AI, utility. What’s your perspective on funnel length?

Patrick: Obviously the sort of funnels you use vary a lot depending on the app.

We’ve just launched our first agent for consumers, which is a very easy to use, very safe version of OpenClaude. We launched it 10 days ago, so we’ve just started iterating on the funnels for that. It’s really fun to do, because a personal assistant by definition is supposed to get to know you very well, so there are a lot of cool things to work with on that side.

And then there are other apps we have, especially on the entertainment side, where basically the less friction we have to the aha moment — the quicker we get people into the app — the better they usually perform.

Shamanth: So for the more casual entertainment apps you want shorter funnels, because people are just coming to have fun, versus the agent side of things, which has a reason to ask you questions.

The meta point I’m taking away from all of your inputs is to really understand what we’re trying to accomplish with the funnel, and what the user is trying to accomplish — maybe put on your jobs-to-be-done hat to understand that.

Andrey, you certainly see a lot of different funnels and you probably have a lot of data points. What do you typically notice in terms of what corresponds to funnel length, and is that something people should even worry about?

Andrey: I agree with Elise’s point that it’s vertical-related.

The longest funnel, I believe, is Noom’s — Noom is a weight loss app. It’s between 120 and 140 screens in total. It just depends on how many questions and how many screens you need to convince users to try out your product.

If you just show the user three screens that say, “Okay, we will help you lose weight,” it’s not enough, because it’s more of a psychological thing that involves emotions and the context of the user’s lifestyle. You need to gather all that information from the user to personalize it.

We also see some short funnels — three to five screens — with conversion rates above 10%, which is good. It works differently for different products. In general, you need to come up with the right questions, the right amount of questions, and questions that are actually relevant to convince users. That’s the main framework here. Don’t just chase numbers.

Shamanth: For sure. Now, to switch gears and talk about the platform hell we were discussing — Mike, over to you.

When your MMP is saying one thing and your ad network, which could be Meta or Google, is saying another; you have SKAN for apps and you don’t for web; they’re all reporting different numbers — and we’re not even talking about App Store referrers and App Store Connect. So how do you suggest folks make spending decisions when there are so many different sources? What reporting format would you recommend?

Mike: Sure. I think the first thing is to not try to make everything match, because you’re just going to give yourself a really big headache. What you’re seeing on the networks is always going to be different from what you see in your MMP, and that will also be different from what you see in Google Analytics. So that’s a big part of it.

I also think that when you’re making decisions, it’s best to decide what your source of truth is. Generally we’d recommend the MMP — use your MMP as your source of truth and optimize off the back of that. But then use the other sources and the other things you’re measuring as a way of doing a check. It shouldn’t be that your sources are wildly different or trending in different directions.

You also shouldn’t discount SKAN. There are a lot of people saying, “Oh, SKAN is dead, no one uses it anymore.” It’s still a very good impartial check to make sure that what you’re seeing is reasonably accurate in terms of overall values. So I’d say don’t discount anything, but also don’t try to make them all match — and make sure you’re able to make decisions based on what you’re pretty sure is your source of truth.

Shamanth: Right, and I think we should start with the assumption that they’re never going to agree. If you’re comparing source A versus source B, use the MMP, because that’s about as impartial as you can get. Otherwise you can look at the different measurement systems just to level-set.

Andrey, what’s your perspective on how you’d suggest people handle platform hell?

Andrey: We saw a few cases where numbers just had gaps, and some dashboards showed incorrect numbers. Sometimes it’s just a discrepancy in user attribution.

Having different platforms and different sources of truth helps here. You can use the data from your MMP, for example. On web, you can extract all the payments from the payment provider — and if you have multiple payment providers, an external billing solution will help with that, because it consolidates all your payments in one place. Then you compare that data with your dashboards.

Mostly we recommend focusing on ROAS when you’re evaluating ad creatives and campaigns. Don’t default to conversion rates or proxy metrics like CPM. We’ve seen that within one funnel, conversion rate can vary a great deal depending on the ad creative — one creative shows a 3% conversion rate, another shows 10% — and the ROAS will be the same.

Shamanth: I can imagine. And obviously this matters, because you need to be able to measure what you’re doing.

To switch gears a bit: some of you have talked about how you really need to measure down-funnel, but a lot of UA and growth marketing teams only have visibility into what happens very up-funnel, because that’s what the platforms expose. Activation matters, but that’s not what a lot of growth marketing teams see. For instance, if you had a meditation app, do you want the user to start their first meditation? The UA team doesn’t really see that.

So how would you suggest teams stay accountable for activation and down-funnel metrics — maybe full-funnel metrics? Jacob, I’d love your perspective on this.

Jacob: It’s never a simple problem that’s fully resolved, and the larger your company gets, the more team members you have. Some of it is just a collaboration and communication challenge — making sure your product, monetization, and acquisition teams are talking.

Ultimately you need to make the connection between the activation moment and revenue or trial conversion. So you’re proving to everybody that the more people are activated, the better your ads are going to do, the more revenue you’re going to generate, the more renewals will come through. First it’s just making sure people understand that relationship and connection. That comes with quantitative analysis, figuring out what your activation moment is. Once the team understands it’s all connected, it becomes a little easier, because it becomes part of how the company operates and thinks about success.

But even if everyone understands it, it’s tricky to make people accountable, just because that’s not typically how you’re measuring these things. The best way I know is to have guardrail metrics.

Typically when you’re measuring campaign success, you’re measuring ROAS on a cohorted basis, looking at new cohorts of users coming in weekly. Are these users profitable? Are we generating money from them? Are they hitting our revenue targets? Well, in those same cohort charts, you should also have activation rate, D7 retention, D1 retention, and trial cancellations. That lets you see the quality of those cohorts.

Sophisticated teams don’t only think about whether these users converted on start of trial, but what the quality of the cohort is over time — because we care about LTV, we care about the renewal rates coming in. So you want early indicators of success, leading metrics that let you predict whether this user is going to renew after a year or whether you’re going to see a drop.

All those metrics — did a user activate, did they cancel immediately after converting from trial, at what timeframe — plus retention metrics should give you guardrail quality metrics. Hitting ROAS targets isn’t enough. You should also be asking, do we have good quality users coming in? And if you don’t, you ask, “Well, what changed? Did our ads change, or did our product change?” These metrics tell you that something happened. They don’t tell you what happened — that’s a deeper investigation.

Shamanth: For sure. The moment you have one single target, it’s a system that everyone wants to game, and what I’m hearing you say is that you want guardrails around that.

Mike, what do you see when you talk to your customers, in terms of how they balance measuring for one single target versus actually ensuring holistic growth?

Mike: We spoke earlier about measuring that first renewal, or something along those down-funnel lines, which is really important.

But one of the simple things that gets missed quite a lot is just making sure you’re fully tying up your campaign data with your attribution and event data. It sounds really simple, but it does get missed. And if you’re not doing that, you can’t hold your UA teams accountable, because they can’t see where their campaigns are going and what’s resulting from them.

That’s why at Singular we put such a focus on making sure that’s one whole thing you can see, from the start of the campaign and your creatives all the way through to your down-funnel events. So I’d say make sure the basics are in place and you can actually see those metrics and tie them back to your campaigns. That’s the easiest way to start putting more emphasis on optimizing towards events that happen further down than just the subscription or trial starting.

Shamanth: So what you’re saying is: show the metrics, make it easy for everyone to see, so they really understand what’s happening.

Elise, your perspective on how teams can be accountable for down-funnel and activation metrics that aren’t really at the top of your dashboard — what have you seen?

Elise: As Jacob mentioned, having any kind of proxy event or KPI that allows us as the UA team to figure out whether our campaigns are actually moving the needle, or whether we’re not going after the right users. Because then, when we’re looking at campaign setup and creatives, we can tie in the kind of creatives that scale with the quality of the user, and further adjust what kind of creatives we’re making and how we’re rolling them out.

When we’re looking at metrics reported by Facebook’s ads manager directly, those are directional metrics. They don’t really translate into true performance from the measurement side, but they can help us see whether we’re going in the right direction.

So I’d encourage doing constant health checks on what the ads manager reports at the creative level, for example, and whether that matches the quality of the user getting into the app. You can’t really do one-for-one matching very well, but you can get an idea of the trend and plot it over time to see what things are doing.

That’s something I encourage doing at least monthly if you can, to make sure you’re going in the right direction — especially if you have a significant creative win or a creative shift. You want to make sure you’re still acquiring the right users.

Shamanth: We’ve seen that too. Sometimes a creative’s doing really well based on cost per trial, but the quality of your audience is terrible, the downstream retention is terrible. That’s something you definitely want to watch out for.

Excellent. Now, to move to the last leg of our webinar, let’s tee up a couple of quick-fire questions.

Andrey, a paywall or pricing change you’ve seen that made a massive difference — what’s one example you can share?

Andrey: If I have to take only one example, I think the most common practice right now that helps app developers boost revenue on web is introductory offers — where you apply a discount on the first billing cycle. So one month with a discount, another month, and then the fourth month at full price. I think that’s the most common practice right now.

Shamanth: Jacob, what have you seen?

Jacob: A few. Multi-page paywalls — breaking down that Blinkist trial approach to simplify information across multiple pages. Those can be a big win.

Always a big win is moving from a single annual plan, or from monthly or quarterly, to a “view all plans” screen, which drives more annuals. And I’ve also seen trends around paid trials — showing an annual plan with a seven-day trial, or a paid trial that’s $4 for 30 days. Those are a few big trends I’ve seen on the in-app purchase side.

Shamanth: These are variables you wouldn’t have seen tested so much even two or three years ago, which suggests to me that people are testing a lot more variables lately. Very interesting to see.

And on the acquisition side, what’s a recent creative win you’ve seen that you can share? Patrick, if you want to take that.

Patrick: It was one ad. Often, because we’re category leaders, we don’t have competitors we can really copy — so we look a lot at what people are doing in completely different industries or verticals.

This was an ad inspired by one from Liquid Death, who are obviously really good at their marketing. It was basically reacting to some users’ comments who couldn’t understand how to work the app, and making fun of them. That performed really nicely for a few months for us.

Shamanth: Elise, any examples of standout ads lately?

Elise: I can talk about an app I was consulting for a few months ago. On their best performer, they had some negative comments calling the app out for spying — saying the app is just a spy. It was an AI app.

So we took that spy comment and turned it into a skit. We asked some creators to dress as spies and do James Bond moves, with very simple hooks, and that worked really well, because people really saw the humor. We were making fun of our own app. We weren’t being very serious about the messaging.

That was a really good success. We had good cost per trial, but also organic uplift in how many people shared and commented on it — and that’s something I care more and more about. Taking negative comments and turning them into hooks, doing social listening, being aware of what people say about your app, and not just launching in the dark and looking at the data. Actually interacting with the social engagement.

Shamanth: Also things that are really hard to do with AI.

Elise: Yes.

Shamanth: The example Patrick gave too — it’s not going to be easy to come up with those ideas using AI. You could execute them with the help of AI, but the actual ideation would be really hard.

If we had to go around the room for one piece of advice for a UA team that’s scaling — conventional or non-conventional. Quick rapid fire, we have four minutes to go. Mike, if you want to get the ball rolling.

Mike: Sure. I think the key thing is to make sure you’ve got everything mapped out in terms of how you’re going to track it. Make sure you’ve got that unified measurement stack sorted and working before you scale. Don’t try to scale fast and then fix it as you go, wondering why none of the numbers make sense.

Shamanth: Patrick?

Patrick: I would say scale both the number of ads you’re producing and the number of people you have in your creative team. Really inject that creativity into it. And scale their salaries too — it works nicely.

Shamanth: Jacob, what would you have as advice?

Jacob: Focus on monetization. I think people underestimate the power of increasing ARPU. A 10% increase in ARPU could be a 50% increase in your margin for scaling ads. So if you increase monetization, you should be able to spend more and scale further.

Shamanth: For sure. And the mix between your plans, I’ve increasingly seen, makes such a huge difference. So yes, 100% — test more monetization.

Andrey?

Andrey: For a team scaling their volumes on web, I’d suggest diversifying the channels — ad networks like Meta, TikTok, Google — and also different channel types: web-to-app with payments on the web funnel, and the landing page and in-app funnel as well. It’s all a different audience, and you need to tap all of it simultaneously.

And for web payments, take care of payments at the very beginning, because it’s a huge lever for your growth.

Shamanth: Elise, what piece of advice would you have?

Elise: On web funnels: if your team is interested in making them work and scaling them, you need dedicated ownership that lives inside your UA team.

There are some great tools out there to build web funnels, and some great resources, but you need one person or one team that really owns it, scales it, and builds a specific roadmap. Otherwise it’s not going to work.

Shamanth: Excellent. Thank you all so much for sharing your wisdom and your insights. This is a great place for us to wrap up.

Thank you again for your time, everyone — and have a great rest of your morning, evening, or afternoon, wherever in the world you are.

Andrey: Thank you, guys. Thank you very much.