How to study a competitor's funnel and build your own

It takes about a week, in six steps:

1. Pick three to five businesses that sell something close to what you sell, to the clients you want.
2. Read their live ads in the Meta Ad Library, and in LinkedIn's or Google's library if you sell to companies.
3. Tap through each ad on your phone and screenshot every public step. Stop at the form.
4. Fill in one teardown table per business and name its weakest stage.
5. Ask five past clients what made them buy.
6. Rebuild your own three stages in your clients' words, plan next week's posts from them, and write the follow-up messages for people who ask to hear from you.

Spread it over a week: two businesses a day for the reading, one evening for the tables, and the client questions sent on day one so the answers are back by Friday.

Pick three to five businesses that sell something close to what you sell, to the people you want as clients. With more than five you stop reading closely. Five places to look:

1. The testimonial page of a programme your clients join or a course your peers take. The people quoted there often run businesses in your market, and the Reel starts here ^[2].
2. Instagram's About this account. Open a profile you already know, tap the menu, then About this account. For some accounts it lists Accounts with shared followers, the public accounts with the most followers in common ^[3]. That's a ready-made list of who else your audience follows.
3. The Meta Ad Library, searched by your clients' problem, like "career change coach" or "sell my flat". Any ad with that term, or run by a Page with that term in its name, may appear ^[4].
4. Ask your own clients who else they looked at before they hired you.
5. Google, with the exact phrase your clients would type, and the LinkedIn Ad Library if you sell to companies.

Keep the ones still advertising. Then check how long each ad has run, since the Ad Library prints the date an ad first appeared at the top of it ^[1]. A business seldom keeps paying for an ad that brings in nothing. You can't see their results, though, so treat a long-running ad as a hint and keep looking.

In Postmosis you can follow up to 5 public Instagram or TikTok accounts and see their growth and best posts, so the businesses you study stay in one place. See the social media audit

The Meta Ad Library is Meta's public, searchable record of the ads running across its apps ^[1]. Anyone can view and search it without logging in. You only need a Facebook login to download a search, or to see ads with age-restricted content such as alcohol or gambling ^[4]. Here's the search, step by step, on a laptop or in your phone's browser:

1. Go to facebook.com/ads/library ^[1].
2. Select a country, and pick the one where your clients live, because results change with it ^[1][4].
3. In the Ad category drop-down, select All ads ^[1]. The other categories are issues, elections or politics; properties; employment; and financial products and services ^[5]. If you're an agent, the properties category (Meta's help calls it Housing) searches housing ads by Page, city or state ^[1].
4. Type a keyword or an advertiser's name in the search bar ^[5]. Results for a name are grouped by Facebook Page ^[1]. A keyword search returns every ad whose text matches it, and that can be a lot: a US search for "business coach" on October 30, 2026 returned about 20,000 ^[6]. Search a few keywords to find names, then search the names.
5. Narrow the list with the filters: impressions over a date range, and the platform the ad ran on, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or Meta's Audience Network ^[1].
6. Open each ad worth reading with See ad details ^[1].
7. Save it: click Options, then Copy ad link, and paste the link into your notes ^[1].

Search the way your clients talk. A coach might try "burnout" or "career change", an agent "sell my house" with the name of her town, a freelancer "Shopify store" or "logo design", and an employment lawyer "unfair dismissal". Then search the names of the businesses you picked.

Each ad in the results tells you more about your market than its picture and words do. Here's what to read on it, and what it means for you:

• The date it started running, next to its Library ID, as in "Started running on 26 May 2026" ^[6]. An ad a rival has paid for since spring is one your clients may have seen for months.
• The platform icons ^[1]. If every rival runs on Instagram and none on Facebook, you know where your clients scroll.
• "This ad has multiple versions", or a count such as "3 ads use this creative and text" ^[6]. Several versions of one ad show you what a rival is testing on your clients right now.
• The ad's own media and text ^[1], which show you the problem and the promise your clients hear most often.
• See ad details, with information from the advertiser's About section and, for a lead ad, more about its lead form ^[4]. You learn more about what they ask a prospect without sending anything.
• The advertiser's Page in the library, with when it was created and its name changes ^[1]. A rival that rebranded last year may be chasing a new kind of client.

On your phone there's a shortcut. In Instagram, go to the business's profile, tap the menu, select About this account, and under Active ads you'll see every ad that account is running across Meta's apps ^[7]. You need to be logged in for About this account, though the library it opens is open to anyone ^[7]. Paused, cancelled and finished ads don't appear ^[7].

What you can see depends on the kind of ad and where it ran ^[4]:

That table holds the one setting worth trying. If the business you're studying runs ads that reach the UK or the EU, set the country to one of them. Those ads stay in the library for a year after their last impression, with reach and targeting by age, gender and location ^[4]. For the UK, that covers ads that ran after 1 July 2025 ^[5]. Everywhere else, you only see an ad while it's live, so screenshot as you go.

A new ad shows up within 24 hours of its first impression, and edits show within 24 hours too ^[5]. Spend stays private for ordinary ads, so the library tells you what a business says and how long it keeps saying it. It never tells you how well an ad works.

For every ad you keep, write down:

• The first line, kept in your private notes so you can compare openings across businesses.
• Who it speaks to and the problem it names.
• The promise it makes about a result, and how soon.
• The proof it leans on, whether that's a client result, a number or a credential.
• The offer behind the button, and the page the button opens.
• Its start date.
• How many versions are running, because several versions of one ad usually means a test is on.

Then hold your own last five posts up against the same list. If every rival names the client's problem in the first line and your posts open on a tip, that's the first thing to change this week.

Below is the text of an ad from a business that sells to the same clients I do. I'm a [what you do] for [who you help].

Pull out:
- who it speaks to
- the problem it names
- the promise (what result, by when)
- the proof it uses
- the offer and the call to action
- what it asks the reader to do next

Don't quote back more than six words in a row from the ad.
Then tell me which of these my own last five posts are missing.

[paste the ad text]
[paste your last five posts]

If your clients are companies, the ads worth reading are often on LinkedIn or Google, so consultants and lawyers who sell to businesses should check both.

LinkedIn's Ad Library is a public database of ads that have run on LinkedIn ^[8]. You can search it by company or advertiser name, payer name, keyword, country and date range. Each entry shows the ad preview, its format, the advertiser, the payer and whether the ad is restricted. For ads aimed at the EU you also get impressions, who the ad targeted and when it ran ^[8].

Google's Ads Transparency Center lists advertisers and the ads they've run on Search, Display, Gmail and YouTube, and you search it by advertiser or website name before filtering by date and location ^[9]. If a rival consultant pays to appear when someone searches your service, that's where you'll see it.

A consultant who works with finance teams might search LinkedIn's library for "month-end close" and see which firms her buyers get ads from, and what each one offers first: a guide, a webinar or a call. An employment lawyer can search Google's center for the firms that pay to show up when someone types the name of their problem.

An ad is the front door. The funnel is everything after the tap, and you can walk most of it on your phone, the way their clients do. Work through each business in one sitting:

1. Tap the ad's button, or the link in their bio, from your phone.
2. Screenshot every screen in order, and name each file with the business and the step.
3. On the landing page, note the headline, the promise, the proof (client quotes, numbers, logos) and the one thing it asks you to do.
4. On a quiz, read each question as you go. Stop at the screen that asks for your name, email or phone number.
5. On an application form or a booking page, scroll it and screenshot the questions and how soon the first slot is, then close it without sending or booking.
6. For a webinar, note the title, the promise and how far away the date is. The registration form is where you stop.
7. If a post says to comment or DM a word, note the word and what they promise to send, and leave it there.
8. Read their last nine posts and their link in bio. That's the top of the funnel for everyone who never saw an ad.

Some steps stay out of sight, like the emails after sign-up, the DMs and whatever happens on the sales call. Mark those boxes as not seen, because a teardown goes wrong the moment a guess gets written down as a fact, and move on to the next business.

Then walk your own funnel. Tap your bio link as a stranger would, open your booking page or your quiz, and fill in a teardown table for yourself, exactly as you did for each rival. You'll often spot your own weakest stage in a few minutes: a bio link to a homepage with no next step, a booking page that wants ten answers, or a last post from five weeks ago.

Put each business on one table, one row per stage, so you can compare them side by side. Copy this into a spreadsheet or a note:

Business: [name]    Studied: [date]    Where I found them: [testimonial page / shared followers / ad library / client]

Stage | What they show | What they ask for | Promise | Proof | Next step | Friction | Seen or not seen
Post or ad |
Landing page |
Quiz, free guide or webinar |
Form or booking page |
Follow-up emails and DMs | | | | | | | not seen
Call and offer | | | | | | | not seen

Weakest stage:
Why:
What I'd do differently for my clients:

Then hand your notes to an AI to tidy up and question. The prompt keeps it honest about what you didn't see:

You're helping me study how other businesses in my market win clients. I'm a [what you do] for [who you help].

Below are my notes on [business], stage by stage, taken from their public pages only.

1. Fill in this table: stage | what they show | what they ask for | promise | proof | next step | friction.
2. Where my notes say "not seen", write "not seen". Don't guess what happens there.
3. Name the weakest stage: the one that asks for the most compared with what it has given so far. Give your reason in two sentences.
4. List three things they do that my clients would care about, in your own words. Don't repeat any sentence from their pages.

[paste your notes and describe your screenshots]

Here are my teardown tables for [three to five] businesses that sell to the same clients I do.

1. At each stage, what do most of them do?
2. Where do they differ?
3. Which stage is weakest across all of them?
4. What could I do at that stage that none of them do, given what my past clients told me? [paste their answers]

Answer with a short table, then five lines. Don't invent anything my notes don't show.

You can't see a competitor's numbers, so you judge each step by its friction: how much it asks for, compared with what it has given you so far. Look for these:

• The ask jumps: the ad is friendly and free, then the very next page wants a phone number and an income.
• The promise changes between steps, with a result and a time in the ad that the page never mentions again.
• Proof goes missing where the ask is biggest, with client quotes all over the homepage and none on the application form.
• The quiz result has no next step, or the booking page shows no free slot for a fortnight.
• The handover is vague. The thank-you page says someone will be in touch, and gives no time or name.

Take the testimonials with a pinch of salt. A testimonial page shows the best results a business has, picked by the business. In the US, the FTC reads a specific result in an endorsement as a claim about what others can expect, and "Results not typical" doesn't change that ^[10]. So a page full of big turnarounds tells you what a business promises, and very little about what most of its clients get.

Your own funnel you can count. Write down how many people reached each step last month: post views, link clicks, quiz starts, forms sent, calls booked, clients signed. Fix the step where the count drops furthest first.

A competitor's funnel shows you what someone else says to their clients, while your past clients can tell you what made them say yes to you, in words you can use. Send this to five of them, by text or email:

Hi [name], I'm rebuilding how people find me, and I'd value your honest answers. A quick reply by text is perfect.

1. What was going on when you started looking for help with [problem]?
2. Where did you first come across me?
3. What nearly stopped you from getting in touch?
4. What made you book the first call?
5. Who else did you look at, and why did you pick me?

Thanks. Nothing you say goes on my website without asking you first.

Read the answers side by side. The problem as they described it becomes your post topics, and the thing that nearly stopped them goes next to your form with an answer. The reason they booked becomes your call to action. Ask before you quote anyone by name.

No past clients yet? Ask people who nearly hired you, or three people who fit your ideal client, the same questions about the last time they paid for help like yours.

The study pays off in your posts, because they're the top of your funnel. One week of reading leaves you with three things to post about: the problems rival businesses keep naming in their ads, the doubt your past clients had before they booked, and the step everyone else does badly. Turn each one into a post:

1. A post that names the problem the way a client described it to you, with their permission or in your own words.
2. A post that answers the doubt that nearly stopped your clients, like what the first call involves, whether you work with people like them, or how long it takes.
3. A post that ends on one small step, such as a comment keyword for your checklist, your quiz, or a booking link for this week.

Making the carousel takes less time with the Instagram carousel guide, and the content pillars guide helps you keep these three kinds of post coming every week.

The Postmosis content calendar builds a weekly plan that balances your posts across the funnel, with each slot opening a draft, and sends your phone an alert when a post is due.

Build yours in three stages, and keep it that small until it works:

1. Posts that name the problem the way your clients did, each ending with one small step.
2. One small step that gives something useful: a free guide, a short quiz or a comment keyword.
3. One conversation: a booking link or a short application, with your clients' proof right beside it.

Then look at the weakest stage you found across the businesses you studied, and make that stage your strongest. If their booking forms ask nine questions, ask three, and if their quiz results lead nowhere, give yours one clear next step that you'd be glad to get yourself.

I'm a [what you do] for [who you help]. Below are my past clients' answers to five questions about why they hired me, and the weakest stages I found in other businesses' funnels.

Draft a three-stage funnel for me:
Stage 1: three post ideas that name the problem the way my clients described it. Each ends with one small step.
Stage 2: one small step (a free guide, a short quiz or a comment keyword) and what the person gets from it.
Stage 3: one conversation (a booking link or a short application) with no more than three questions, and the proof to show beside it.

Rules:
- Use my clients' words where you can, and mark where you did.
- Never reuse a phrase from another business.
- Don't invent results, numbers or client stories.
- Flag anything I'd need a client's permission to share.

[paste your clients' answers]
[paste the weakest stages]

For the posts at the top, the hook generator gives you openings to test, and the video script template turns one client problem into a short video.

The Reel ends on DM scripts ^[2]. A DM sequence works when the person asked to hear from you: they commented your keyword, took your quiz or booked a call. Messages to people who didn't ask are cold outreach, and sending them with a bot on LinkedIn breaks its User Agreement ^[11]. Write three messages and send them yourself:

1. Straight away: send what you promised, plus one question about their situation.
2. After they reply: answer what they said in two or three sentences, then offer the next step once.
3. If they go quiet: one short check-in a few days later that's easy to ignore. Then stop.

Write follow-up messages for someone who asked to hear from me. I'm a [what you do] for [who you help]. They [commented KEYWORD on my post / took my quiz / booked a call], and I promised them [what you promised].

Message 1, sent now: give them what I promised and ask one question about their situation. Under 60 words.
Message 2, after they reply: answer what they said in two or three sentences, then offer the next step once.
Message 3, only if they go quiet for four days: one short, friendly check-in that's easy to ignore. After that I stop.

Write like a person texting: contractions, no exclamation marks. No pressure lines, no fake deadlines, no claims about results.

In Postmosis, Write has an idea source called Reply to a comment on your post: paste a comment and the post opens by quoting it, then answers it, so a question from your funnel becomes your next post. See the post writer

A quiz funnel is a sales funnel that uses an interactive quiz to sort and qualify visitors by their answers ^[12]. The visitor answers a few questions, gets a result that fits them, and sees one next step. Many ask for an email before showing the result, or on the results page ^[12], and Angus says most of the coaching funnels he looked at had a quiz ^[2].

A quiz suits your business when:

• Your clients don't know which service they need, and a few questions can sort them, like a career coach asking what kind of change someone wants.
• You sell more than one thing and want each person to see the right one.
• You need to qualify people before a call, for example a consultant who only works with businesses past a certain size.
• The result teaches something useful, so it's worth having even for people who never buy.

It's the wrong tool when:

• You sell one service to one kind of client. A short page and a booking link do the same job in fewer steps.
• Most of your work comes by referral, and people arrive already wanting you.
• The result would read like personal advice. A lawyer's quiz can sort people by the kind of matter, but the result should send them to a call, not tell them what to do.

Keep it short. Too many questions lower the completion rate, and a quiz should take under 2 minutes ^[12]. Ask about outcomes and problems, not your services.

I'm a [what you do] for [who you help]. Draft a quiz funnel for my clients.

- A title that names a problem my clients would recognise.
- Four or five questions about their situation and the outcome they want, not about my services. Multiple choice, three or four answers each.
- Three results. Each one names their situation in plain words, gives one thing they can do this week, and ends with one next step: [book a call / get my guide / reply to me].
- The whole quiz should take under two minutes.

Don't promise results. Don't write anything that reads like personal advice for their case.

If you post as yourself, a week of funnel study gives you post topics first of all. Every ad you read names a problem your clients already respond to, and you get to answer it in your own words.

It also shows you what your clients are being promised elsewhere before they ever meet you, so your posts and your first call can speak to that promise. And it shows you the step most of your market does badly, which is the cheapest place for you to be better.

It can't tell you what works for your business. That still comes from posting and counting what happens to your own posts, which the last steps of this method set you up to do.

The other half of the Reel crosses two lines, and both cost you more than they save.

The first is pretending to be a prospect. An AI agent that fills in a quiz, books a call or sends a DM as an interested buyer puts a fake lead in front of a real person. Picture it the other way round: a bot books your Thursday slot, you read its answers, prepare, and nobody turns up. A coach on the other end of a fake booking loses that hour just as you would. It also breaks the rules of the platforms you'd do it on. LinkedIn's User Agreement bans creating a false identity and using bots to "send or redirect messages" ^[11]. Instagram's Terms of Use say you can't impersonate others, and they ban collecting information in an automated way without Instagram's permission ^[13]. Meta's Terms of Service say the same about automated data collection on Facebook ^[14].

The second is copying a funnel word for word. Lifted copy reads like the business you lifted it from. Your clients hire you for how you think and talk, so borrowed sentences sound wrong by the first call. Meta's and Instagram's terms also ban posting anything that infringes someone else's intellectual property, copyright included ^[14][13].

The honest version gets you nearly the same insight. Walk only the public steps and stop at the form: read its questions, screenshot it and close the tab. Then ask your own past clients what made them buy. Their answers tell you what no competitor's funnel can, which is why someone picked you.

This method starts from a Reel by Angus Sewell (@angus.sewell), posted on October 15, 2026 ^[2]. His method begins on the testimonial section of a coaching programme's sales page. AI finds each testimonial person's social accounts and their Facebook ad account, then a series of AI sub-agents goes through each person's funnel "pretending to be like a real super interested prospect" ^[2]. The AI takes the best bits from every funnel and reworks them into one. He says most of them have quiz funnels, and he ends on a quiz funnel Claude made for him and a set of DM scripts ^[2].

The research half is sound. A testimonial page is a list of people who bought a programme, and many of them run businesses in the same market. Their ads are public, and so are the first steps of their funnels.

The Reel is a funnel too, and you can read it without typing a word. The caption asks you to comment "funnel" to get the prompts sent to you, and the Reel drew 3,221 comments ^[2]. Stage one is the Reel, stage two is the comment keyword, and stage three is a DM that opens a conversation. You can copy that shape for your own posts. The words stay yours.

Funnel hacking means studying, step by step, how another business turns a stranger into a paying client, then building your own path from what you learn. For you, that path usually starts with a post. Someone sees your Reel or your LinkedIn post, taps your bio link, takes a small step like a free guide, and books a call. Funnel hacking looks at how a rival coach, agent or consultant runs each of those steps, so you can see where your own loses people.

For a practice of one, the useful version is small. You pick a few businesses that sell to the people you sell to. You read what they show the public: the ads, the posts, the pages, the quiz, the form. You write down every step in a table. Then you build your own funnel from what your past clients say made them hire you.

The idea comes from Russell Brunson, co-founder of ClickFunnels, the funnel software, who first put it into words ^[15][16]. Growth hacking is a wider idea, and Sean Ellis named it in 2010 when he described a growth hacker as "a person whose true north is growth" ^[17]. That's a whole job, across a whole business. Funnel hacking is one task inside it, and you can finish it in a week.

A funnel is the path from someone first seeing you to them paying you. A marketing funnel is a model of how a potential customer becomes aware of you and decides to buy, usually drawn in three stages: awareness, consideration and conversion ^[15]. In a service business it tends to look like this:

1. Someone sees one of your posts, Reels or ads.
2. They take a small step: a free guide, a quiz, a webinar, or a comment with a keyword.
3. Next comes a bigger step: an application form, a booking page, a first call.
4. They get an offer or a proposal and say yes or no.
5. Follow-up messages keep the conversation open for the ones who said not yet.

A funnel strategy is the plan for each of those steps: what you show, what you ask for, and what happens next. It works when each step asks for a little more than the last and gives a reason to take it. A free guide asks for an email. A call asks for half an hour. A proposal asks for money. A step that asks for more than it has earned is where people leave.

People don't always move through it in order. At a roundtable hosted by UK Advertising at Cannes Lions and The News Movement, one speaker said awareness, consideration and conversion still apply "but not always in that order", and another said Gen Z "move in loops rather than lines" ^[18]. Younger clients often skip search engines and find people on TikTok or by asking an AI tool ^[18]. You'll know the client who watched your Reels for months, booked a call the day after one post, and only read your website afterwards. Each step has to make sense on its own for that person, and the first one they see could be any post you've made.

You need a phone, a spreadsheet and the free ad libraries for most of this. The libraries show what rivals say to your clients; paid tools add where a rival's traffic comes from and what software their site runs, which matters more to a business spending heavily on ads than to a practice of one.

If a site runs the Meta pixel, they're aiming to bring traffic in through Facebook and Instagram ^[15], so their ads are the place to start.

Funnel hacking has limits, and it helps to know them before you spend a week on it.

• Your market doesn't advertise. Plenty of lawyers and agents win work by referral, so the ad libraries come up thin. Study their posts, their link in bio and their reviews instead.
• The business you study sells something different in size. A funnel built for a low-cost course won't fit a service that needs a long first call.
• You copy the shape without the reason. A quiz works for them because their clients need sorting. If yours don't, it's an extra step.
• The funnel changes under you. An ad you saw last month may be gone, so date every screenshot.
• You study instead of building. After two weeks, stop reading and post the first piece of your own funnel.