What Is a Marketing Funnel? A Guide to AIDA, AISAS, and Other Major Models
The marketing funnel is a framework that visualizes a prospect's journey from first awareness through purchase and advocacy as a funnel — wide at the top, narrow at the bottom — with the audience filtering down at each stage. It's one of the most foundational concepts in marketing strategy, underpinning everything from prioritizing tactics, to setting KPIs, to clarifying who owns which stage across teams.
This article walks through the marketing funnel from the ground up: the basic structure, the three primary funnel shapes (purchase funnel, influence funnel, double funnel), how the funnel relates to major buyer behavior models (AIDA, AIDMA, AISAS, DECAX, SIPS, the 5A model, and others), and how to translate all of it into practical work for both B2B and B2C teams.
"Funnel" comes from the kitchen tool: wide opening on top, narrow spout on the bottom. It fits marketing because the path from awareness to purchase narrows in exactly the same way. If 10,000 people see an ad, maybe 1,000 show interest, 100 actively consider, and 10 actually buy — the audience shrinks at each step down.
By making this "each step loses people" reality visible, the marketing funnel becomes a thinking framework for asking what to do at each stage and where the room for improvement is. It's not just a diagram — it's a shared language that runs through strategy, execution, and measurement.
The marketing funnel matters because it forces a whole-journey perspective instead of running tactics in isolation. Strong awareness doesn't convert to revenue if the consideration content is thin, and even great purchases don't generate repeat business or word-of-mouth if post-purchase follow-up is weak. Looking at the funnel as a whole makes the bottleneck stage visible at a glance.
Quantifying each stage also makes KPI design natural. Awareness maps to reach and impressions, interest to site visits, consideration to lead form fills and inquiries, purchase to closed deals and revenue, post-purchase to repeat rate and NPS. With clear metrics per stage, data-driven improvement cycles become genuinely executable.
The Purchase Funnel is the most basic marketing funnel, mapping the journey from awareness to purchase from top to bottom. The standard four-stage version runs Awareness → Interest → Consideration → Action, drawn as an inverted triangle with the broadest audience at the top and the narrowest at the bottom.
The purchase funnel is a "buying-as-the-goal" frame, well suited to designing new customer acquisition. By comparing drop-off rates between stages (the inverse of conversion rate), you can tell whether the issue is awareness, mid-funnel consideration, or last-mile hesitation — making it the natural starting point for bottleneck diagnosis.
The Influence Funnel visualizes customer behavior after the purchase, drawn as the inverse — a triangle that widens downward. It captures the stages of repeat purchase → referral → broadcast/sharing, showing how a single customer can generate new prospects through their own influence.
In an SNS-driven world, post-purchase customers shape future buyers' decisions through reviews, word of mouth, and social posts, so designing the post-purchase journey as its own funnel has become increasingly important. The conceptual roots of the influence funnel lie in the "Share" step of the AISAS model, discussed later.
The Double Funnel stacks the purchase funnel and the influence funnel into an hourglass shape. The top half maps awareness through purchase, the bottom half maps purchase through advocacy and sharing, with purchase as the pivot point — letting you see the full customer journey end to end.
The biggest advantage of the double funnel is managing new acquisition and existing-customer loyalty in the same frame. Customers who advocate and share generate fresh awareness, which feeds back into the top of the funnel, creating a loop that the strategy can be designed around. As LTV (customer lifetime value) has become a priority across both B2B and B2C, the double funnel has become a standard mental model.
AIDA was proposed in 1898 by American advertiser Elmo Lewis and is generally cited as the earliest buyer behavior model. It describes the consumer's psychological journey from ad exposure to purchase across four stages: Attention → Interest → Desire → Action.
AIDA notably leaves out Memory; in this model, desire flows immediately into action. It fits impulse-style purchases — TV shopping countdowns, supermarket flash sales — where there's almost no gap between wanting something and buying it.
AIDMA was introduced in the 1920s by Samuel Roland Hall in his book on retail advertising. It extends AIDA with a Memory stage, giving five steps: Attention → Interest → Desire → Memory → Action. Instead of buying immediately after desire kicks in, the consumer files the impression away and acts on it later, when the buying occasion arrives — a more realistic depiction of how many purchases unfold.
AIDMA was the dominant model during the era when TV, newspapers, magazines, and radio were the main consumer touchpoints. Highlighting the Memory stage justifies the importance of repeated ad exposure and brand-building, which makes AIDMA particularly useful for high-involvement, long-cycle categories like cars, housing, and insurance. It also still applies to genuinely new categories where search keywords don't yet exist, so awareness and desire have to be built through mass advertising.
AISAS was proposed by Dentsu in 2004 to capture buyer behavior in the internet age. The five steps — Attention → Interest → Search → Action → Share — strip out AIDMA's Desire and Memory and replace them with Search and Share, two consumer-driven actions. That swap is the model's defining feature.
AISAS has had outsized practical impact and is still the starting point for most digital marketing thinking today. "How do we get found at the Search stage?" is the question behind SEO, paid search, and review-site strategy; "How do we get talked about at the Share stage?" drives social and review-acquisition tactics. AISAS was also the first widely adopted model to make explicit the loop in which post-purchase behavior generates the next prospect — the conceptual foundation of the influence funnel and double funnel.
AISCEAS extends AISAS with two additional steps — Comparison and Examination — for a seven-stage path: Attention → Interest → Search → Comparison → Examination → Action → Share. Instead of going straight from search to purchase, the consumer compares options and deliberates before deciding, which more accurately reflects real buying behavior.
AISCEAS is especially useful for categories where comparison and review sites dominate — consumer electronics, travel booking, insurance, SaaS. In mature markets full of substitute and adjacent products, consumers always go through some form of comparison, so designing the information that lets you win in spec sheets, pricing, reviews, and case studies becomes critical.
DECAX was proposed by Dentsu in 2015 as a buyer behavior model for the content marketing era. Its five stages — Discovery → Engage → Check → Action → eXperience (and share) — give it a structure that's fundamentally different from AIDMA or AISAS: it's driven by the consumer rather than the company.
Where AIDMA and AISAS start with company-led attention (Attention), DECAX starts with the consumer's own discovery (Discovery). It reflects modern behavior where people search out useful information themselves — through SEO articles, social media, YouTube — and stumble onto products in the process. Instead of pushing a sales message, the company gets found through useful content, builds a relationship, and then converts the prospect. The model fits especially well with owned-media and SEO-driven acquisition, and with B2B SaaS lead generation.
SIPS was proposed by Dentsu in 2011 for the social media era. It runs in four stages — Sympathize → Identify → Participate → Share & Spread — and starts not from awareness but from empathy on social media. It frames the act of buying as "participating," and the journey continues into sharing and spreading.
What makes SIPS distinctive is that it doesn't put the transaction at the center. Instead, it treats marketing as the work of keeping a "sympathize → share" loop in motion. It fits naturally with categories where social-driven empathy and shared worldview are the real purchase triggers — fashion, beauty, food and beverage, entertainment — and serves as the conceptual foundation for influencer marketing and UGC programs.
Dual AISAS was proposed in 2015 by Atara Inc. in collaboration with Dentsu's promotion design unit, extending AISAS into two parallel tracks: an AISAS for buying and an AISAS for spreading. Both pivot on Interest, with the traditional AISAS driving toward purchase and a parallel "Activate → Interest → Share" track driving toward distribution.
In today's information-saturated environment, plenty of people pay attention and develop interest but never buy — they only share. Dual AISAS captures that reality and gives marketers a way to design "ads that sell the product" and "ads designed to get shared" as separate, deliberate workstreams. It's especially useful for viral campaigns and integrated social activations.
The 5A model was introduced by Philip Kotler in Marketing 4.0 as a modern buyer behavior model. Its five stages — Aware → Appeal → Ask → Act → Advocate — close with Advocate, which feeds back into other prospects' Ask stage, making the loop explicit.
What distinguishes the 5A model is that it puts "other people's recommendations shape the next buyer's decision" — the lived reality of the social era — at the center of the framework. The Ask stage explicitly includes searching online for product info, brand messaging, reviews, and reputation, on the assumption that third-party voices, not company messaging, are often the deciding factor. This makes the 5A model a strong foundation for strategies built around LTV and advocacy.
B2B funnels are typically broken into more granular stages to reflect long sales cycles and multiple stakeholders. A common version runs: Awareness → Interest → Information Gathering → Comparison → Purchase Intent → Opportunity → Closed-Won. Marketing, inside sales, and field sales each own different stages and hand prospects up the funnel together.
In B2B funnels, prospects' state at each stage is typically labeled as Lead, MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), SQL (Sales Qualified Lead), Opportunity, and Closed-Won, with stage-to-stage conversion rates and counts as the primary KPIs. Tracing whether acquired leads ultimately converted to closed-won lets you evaluate marketing ROI more accurately than measuring lead volume alone.
Start by selecting a buyer behavior model that matches your product and channel mix. AIDMA for low-research consumer goods, AISAS for search-driven e-commerce and SaaS, AISCEAS for high-involvement products with extended comparison, DECAX for content-led lead generation, SIPS or Dual AISAS for social-share-heavy categories, the 5A model when advocacy loops drive growth — pick based on how your customers actually behave.
In practice, no single model covers everything. A common approach is to combine: AIDMA for the awareness stage, AISCEAS for the consideration stage, DECAX's eXperience for the post-purchase phase. The point isn't theoretical accuracy — it's giving everyone on the team a shared vocabulary for talking about how customers move through your funnel.
With the model chosen, put numbers on each stage. Awareness can be tracked through ad reach, impressions, and branded search volume; interest through site visits and article pageviews; consideration through lead form submissions and inquiries; purchase through closed deals and revenue; post-purchase through repeat rate, NPS, and review counts. Define a KPI per stage and start collecting data.
Mapping past wins and purchases helps too: walk through what media a typical customer first touched, what sources they consulted during evaluation, and what tipped them into purchase. Pairing this with five to ten customer interviews or sales debriefs adds qualitative depth alongside the numbers.
Compare stage-to-stage conversion rates and find the step with the most room to improve. If awareness-to-interest conversion is unusually low, the problem is probably the ad creative or landing page; if consideration-to-purchase conversion lags, it's likely pricing, case studies, or sales follow-up. The numbers tell you where to invest.
Once you know the bottleneck, design tactics aimed directly at that stage. For weak awareness: display ads, social ads, PR. For interest-stage drop-off: content marketing and email nurture. For consideration-stage drop-off: case studies, white papers, free trials. For purchase-stage drop-off: sales enablement content, FAQs, live chat. Different stages call for fundamentally different toolkits.
Funnels aren't "set and forget." Build a monthly dashboard for stage-level KPIs, compare against targets, and watch whether the bottleneck is shifting. Every time you ship a tactic, validate the impact in funnel terms — make it a habit to read every change as movement on the funnel's numbers.
Markets and customer behavior also drift over time, so periodically revisit the funnel model itself. As new social platforms emerge and as information-seeking shifts from search engines to AI assistants, the shape of the funnel may need to change too. Keeping the model itself updated to match the environment is what sustains a competitive funnel over the long term.
The marketing funnel organizes the prospect's journey from awareness to purchase to advocacy into stages, providing the foundation for tactic design and measurement. With the three core shapes — the purchase funnel, the influence funnel, and the double funnel that combines them — you can plan strategy end-to-end across new acquisition and existing-customer loyalty.
From mass-media-era models like AIDA and AIDMA, to internet-era models like AISAS and AISCEAS, to social and content era models like DECAX, SIPS, and Dual AISAS, to modern frameworks like the 5A model and the B2B funnel — every era has produced models that match its dominant behaviors. The point isn't picking the "correct" one. It's selecting and combining the models that fit your product, your customer, and your channels.
Putting the funnel into practice comes down to four steps: pick a model, put numbers on the stages, identify the bottleneck, and run the improvement loop. The real payoff comes when the funnel becomes a shared language across marketing, sales, customer success, and leadership — that's when prioritization gets sharp and decisions get genuinely data-driven. Use this article as a starting point for designing the funnel for your own business.
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