Overview
- Company
- One of the world's most downloaded ride-hailing platforms — dozens of countries, more than a thousand cities, and a growing set of services beyond city rides.
- Industry
- Ride-hailing
- Markets
- 21 countries, rolled out over 3 months
Challenge: Driver acquisition was expensive and hard to scale
Drivers reached the platform through several routes, and almost none of them were controllable acquisition channels. Some registered organically, some came through offline recruitment, and a share arrived through passenger campaigns — they saw an ad written for riders, installed the app, and signed up to drive instead. Welcome volume, counted as organic, but it can't be turned up on demand, and it arrives on messaging that was never built to explain how earnings work.
Buying drivers directly was the obvious alternative, but this approach had a ceiling of its own. The reason sits in how the ad platform learns.
Both audiences — drivers and riders — share one app, so both feed the same signal back to the ad platforms, and riders — far more numerous — dominate it. Every campaign the team pointed at drivers pulled in a heavy share of users who would become passengers, and that skewed the optimization for the whole campaign. As a result, the cost per driver stayed too high.
“Any campaign we run through the ad platforms picks up a large volume of users who will become passengers, and that ruins the optimization. On average, almost any campaign works well for passengers and badly for drivers.”
The team worked through everything the ad platform offered: custom product pages, driver-focused creatives, campaigns segmented by audience. Same pattern every time: strong for passengers, weaker for drivers.
Web funnels were already where the client wanted to go. What they lacked was internal capacity to build funnels at scale.
TikTok was one of the client's paid UA channels, and the account team there was familiar with FunnelFox, so they recommended us.
💡 FunnelFox is a platform for subscription businesses monetizing on the web: web funnels plus the payment infrastructure behind them — subscription management and billing, multiple PSPs with smart routing and orchestration, revenue recovery, tax management, and chargeback prevention.
Solution: Web funnels gave campaigns a driver-only signal
A web funnel changes what the ad campaign optimizes toward. The event is no longer an install, which any user can produce, but completion of a driver quiz. Someone who answers questions about their license, their city, and the hours they intend to work has already told you what they're there for. Passengers don't finish that quiz, so they no longer shape what the campaign optimizes toward.
The channel scaled to 21 countries in three months
The team started with a three-month pilot in one country. The obvious concern was that a web funnel adds a step to the user journey, and steps cost conversion.
They tested two variants in parallel:
- a short flow with basic eligibility questions,
- and a longer version with an earnings calculator and deeper qualification.
Both performed at roughly the same level, which showed that extra steps weren't the constraint the team had assumed.
The next question was whether the results would hold across other countries. The country where the client ran the pilot was a mature market for them, with high brand awareness, so there was real doubt about how the results would translate elsewhere.
“Our biggest worry was the first scale-up. The country where we rolled out the funnels first is a mature market for us — we've been there a long time, and awareness is high. There was a real risk that other regions wouldn't launch as well, and we wouldn't get statistically significant results.”
The results held. Over the next three months, the team launched funnels in 21 countries, and the pattern was consistent across them.
💡 The market with the weakest funnel conversion still beat app campaigns. In one of the countries tested, the drop-off between the first and second quiz screens was unusually high, yet driver acquisition cost still came in below the app-based benchmark.
As the funnels scaled, monthly quiz volume grew to 1.6M users by August. It's not a KPI itself, but a clean measure of how far the channel had expanded.
Quiz volume, per month
1.6Mby Aug '26
Source: FunnelFox internal dashboard.
The same approach didn't work for passengers
The team ran the same play on the passenger side, and the economics didn't work out. The asymmetry is in how the two audiences decide:
- A driver choosing a platform is choosing where to work for months, which justifies a few minutes spent understanding the offer.
- A passenger is choosing a single ride, and competitors put their promotion straight in the creative, so there's little reason to work through a quiz first.
The result was expected.
“The passenger test didn't show good results, and honestly we weren't too upset — it was expected. A passenger doesn't much care who they ride with. A driver isn't registering for one ride, he's choosing the company he'll work with for a long time.”
The team plans to return to passenger funnels after studying in-app passenger behavior more closely.
Results: 2–8x lower driver acquisition cost across 21 countries
Driver acquisition cost dropped by 2–8x. Every live funnel delivered drivers below the platform's standard acquisition cost, including the market with the weakest funnel conversion.
The acquisition mix got healthier. App campaigns had been the only way to buy drivers. Web funnels added a second channel, which let the team cut app campaign budgets and still keep driver acquisition inside its target cost.
FunnelFox's impact
- 2–8x
- lower driver acquisition cost, by region
- 21
- countries live in 3 months
- 100%
- of funnels under target cost
“FunnelFox didn't just bring the cost of acquiring a driver down, it diluted our acquisition split. We reduced budgets on app campaigns, which brought the cost down there too. And we can now acquire drivers at a DAC that pays back for us.”
The channel reached 21 countries in three months. FunnelFox delivered it turn key — technical setup, quiz logic, and the content that fills the quizzes — at a pace internal capacity alone wouldn't have supported.
“FunnelFox is a great solution for us. The team quickly understood what we needed and helped us build high-performing funnels from the start. They provided fast support, helped with the quiz logic and content, and enabled us to launch in 21 countries in just three months. And that was especially valuable given the deadlines we usually set for ourselves, because we want to move faster and get results faster. And here we worked really well together.”
Next: moving driver registration into the web itself
Today the funnel hands the driver off at the app. It qualifies them and sets an earnings goal along the way, then registration, document checks, and the push to a first ride all happen in the app and the platform's CRM. For 2027, the team is planning a larger project with FunnelFox: moving registration into the web and testing the whole flow again from there.
If your app acquires both supply and demand sides
Campaign optimization follows the side of your app that generates more events. If one side is far more numerous, in-app campaigns aimed at the other side will keep drifting toward the wrong user, and no amount of creative or targeting work reverses that.
A web funnel gives you an optimization event the ad platform can't confuse: an action only the audience you want will complete. How much you gain depends on how considered the decision is. Supply-side users choosing where to work will spend minutes on a quiz. Demand-side users comparing a single purchase generally won't.