About Host Digital
Hey, I’m Alan. On this page you’ll find my a little more about me.
HOW I GOT HERE
2006 – start working in a London marketing agency. Generalist 360° digital marketer.
2009 – join another London marketing agency. Specialise in performance marketing.
2013 – start specialising in website conversion rate optimisation.
2014 – marriage, 3-month honeymoon, general hiatus.
2015 – start Host Digital, a ‘data-driven marketing’ consultancy.
2018 – have a baby girl.
2020 – have a baby boy.
2020 – Airbyte launches, open-sourcing the movement of data.
2020 – GA4 comes out of beta, moving event-driven web analytics into the mainstream.
2022 – Dataform (framework for managing SQL-based data operations) is integrated as a part of BigQuery.
2023 – ChatGPT goes mainstream, upending traditional machine learning workflows and AI-driven data tools.
2024 – Devin (the first AI software engineer) is released – an autonomous bot equipped with an in-browser coding environment.
2025 – Explosion of autonomous AI agents to orchestrate and optimize marketing workflows.
When I started in digital marketing:
- Google had just bought a company called “Urchin” which they relaunched as “Google Analytics”.
- Mobile internet was entirely text-based (a “baby internet”).
- The average cost per click on Adwords (now Google Ads) was $0.32.
- Search engine optimisation was entirely gameable (e.g. buying links from link directories was a thing!).
That was the wild west. I spent half my time just keeping up with the pace of change.
At the time, I was working in digital marketing agencies. But I found that agencies – who are supposed to be marketing specialists – are rarely data-driven.
So now I’m in AA recovery (‘after agency’!). At Host Digital, our focus is business intelligence: we grow customer acquisition and retention with strategic use of 1st party assets.