About Host Digital

Hey, I’m Alan. On this page you’ll find my a little more about me.

About Host

Hey, I’m Alan. On this page you’ll find a little more about me.

A PERSONAL TIMELINE

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.

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 data.

FREE GUIDE
THE PUSH & PULL OF ANALYTICS

Learn how to grow customer acquisition with strategic use of your customer data.

Discover the TWO ways to get data into the hands of D2C marketing decision-makers: push and pull.

FREE GUIDE

THE PUSH & PULL OF ANALYTICS

Ecommerce Toolkit

Learn how to grow customer acquisition with strategic use of customer data.

Discover the TWO ways to get data into the hands of D2C marketing decision-makers leaders: push and pull.