Marketing teardowns: free funnel and landing page audits, done in public.
Apex has no client results to publish, so it publishes its thinking instead — applied to real, live marketing, out where the reasoning can be checked instead of taken on faith. A teardown reads a business's ads, its landing page and its follow-up exactly the way a free audit call reads yours.
What is a marketing teardown?
A marketing teardown is a plain audit of one business's live, public-facing marketing — the ad, the landing page, the offer, the follow-up — read the way a real visitor experiences it, not the way an internal deck describes it. It names what's working, what's leaking, and why, and every claim traces back to something a reader can go check themselves.
Some people search for a marketing teardown, others a funnel teardown or a landing-page teardown, and some are really just looking for a free marketing audit example instead of another sales pitch. All four land here, because that's the honest description of what this is: a real audit, done for free, on a business that never asked for one, published so the method can be checked, not just the conclusion.
Most agency "audits" lean on one of two shortcuts: their own clients as case studies, which Apex can't do honestly because it has none to publish, or someone else's private analytics dressed up to sound authoritative. This series uses neither. Every finding has to survive a simple test — could a reader open the same page, the same ad-library entry, the same public form, and see exactly what the piece describes.
| Evidence | Where it comes from | Used in a teardown? |
|---|---|---|
| Live site & funnel | Whatever a visitor can load, click through and fill out right now. | Always |
| Public ad libraries | Meta Ad Library, Google Ads Transparency Center — public by law, not by favor. | Always |
| Published pricing | Numbers the business itself has put on its own site. | Always |
| Submitting a form or placing a call | Filling in a real business's form or ringing its phone to time the reply. That is a cost imposed on a person, not on a page. | Never, to a small business |
| Private analytics | Traffic, ad spend, revenue or conversion data from a dashboard Apex doesn't own. | Never |
| Insider or leaked material | Anything not visible to an ordinary visitor — a login, a leak, a tip. | Never |
If a finding can't be traced to a row marked "Always," it doesn't go in the piece.
What are the rules of Apex's teardown series?
Five rules, applied without exception, because a proof engine that exempts itself from scrutiny isn't proof of anything. They cover where evidence comes from, who a teardown is and isn't about, and what happens when one turns out to be wrong — so a reader can check the analysis instead of taking Apex's word for it.
Public evidence only
Every finding traces back to something anyone can go look at themselves — a live page, a public ad, a published price. If it isn't visible to an ordinary visitor, it doesn't go in the piece.
No private data, ever
No client account, no competitor login, no leaked file, no third party's analytics dashboard. A teardown that needed insider access to write wouldn't be a public teardown — it would be a breach.
Patterns over people
The subject is the category, not the company. A teardown reads what's common across a group of businesses in one market and one vertical, rather than singling out one owner for a mistake most of the category is also making.
Method published with every finding
The reasoning ships next to the conclusion — what was checked, how, and when — so a reader can retrace the steps and reach a different conclusion if the evidence supports one.
Corrections, published
When a teardown gets something wrong, the correction goes up where the original claim was, not buried in a silent edit. Being checkable only means something if being wrong is handled the same way.
What is the first teardown Apex has published?
One. This series just started, so there is no back catalogue and no publishing history to point to yet — only the first study, live now, covering a single vertical and market, with more added as each one is finished rather than on a fixed schedule.
Sacramento roofing websites
Twenty-one real roofing homepages serving the Sacramento metro, checked against seven questions a storm-damaged homeowner is effectively asking: is the phone tappable, is there any after-hours signal, does anyone promise a response time. Findings are reported as aggregate counts — no company is named for a shortcoming. Nothing was submitted and nobody was called.
It's also the vertical Apex knows best off the page: the roofing & home services playbook and the flat-rate Founders Pack for roofers are both built around the same speed-to-lead and follow-up problems this study went looking for. Future studies move to the other verticals Apex serves — e-commerce and DTC, SaaS and B2B, and law firms — plus whatever categories readers ask to see next.
How is a published teardown different from the free audit call?
Same method, different privacy. A teardown applies the analysis publicly to a business that never asked for it, as a sample anyone can read before ever talking to Apex. The free audit call applies the identical analysis to your own marketing privately, live on a screen-share, and nothing from that call gets published anywhere.
The free audit call is where this stops being about someone else's business. The same rules apply in spirit — evidence over assertion, findings you can check against your own account — except the account is yours, the call is private, and what happens after is entirely up to you. Full terms for how engagements work after that call are public on the pricing page, and everything Apex builds as part of one is documented on the services page.
Can I request a category or market for the next teardown?
Yes. Apex picks categories partly from its own verticals and partly from what people ask to see studied next — send the category or the market and it goes on the list, with no guarantee on timing since there isn't a fixed publishing schedule yet.
Send the request to contact@apexgrowthcorp.com with the category, the market, and — if there's a reason it's on your mind — what prompted it. Requests inside the four verticals Apex already works in (e-commerce and DTC, SaaS and B2B, roofing and home services, law firms — the full list is on the industries page) are the most likely to get picked next, but nothing here is off the table.
Questions about the teardown series.
Want this same read applied to your own marketing?
The free audit call is the private version of what a teardown does in public — your ads, your landing pages, your follow-up, read the same way, on a screen-share, with nothing published. Single-territory roofers can also apply directly to the Founders Pack.