About

About Host Digital

Highly customised, one-to-one consultancy

In the past, I have run CRO programs for The Times, The Sun and Gatwick Airport. I have run marketing activities for Hilton and Avis. I can help your business too.

I’m a consultant. Not an agency. My background is client services. I genuinely take the time to understand your unique situation (business context, yes, but also your people and internal processes). I go to your offices (if in the UK), I have regular calls with you.

I don’t disappear behind a curtain and ‘poof!’ come up with a solution that your developer can’t implement. That is quite a different approach to some CRO agencies that make it a policy never to meet their clients.

A bit about me

I’m a perennial Londoner (the jury’s out whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing).

I have qualifications in Google Analytics, from the ConversionXL Institute and the User Experience Qualification Board.

I prefer customer collaboration over processes, and responding to change over following a plan. You can rely on me to tell it to you straight.

I have made a career providing conversion rate optimisation (CRO) services – the practice of optimising a website to turn more visitors to customers – precisely because that is where creative and analytical thinking is needed the most. On a website, you need to persuade visitors to take action; at the same time, you must use data to work out the best way to do this.

I believe that a new paradigm needs to be created. One in which maths men and mad men operate side-by-side. Or better, where they are indistinguishable; something the IPA has defined as ‘Diagonal thinkers’.

CRO is hugely in-demand – I think for obvious reasons – but it’s at a critical tipping point. Lots of companies are starting to offer CRO services. It’s often tacked onto PPC and SEO services, for example. But true optimisers are polymaths – we are designers, copywriters, persuaders, statisticians, analysts and then some. True optimisers have a structured approach to all of this.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Explosive growth with conversion rate optimisation

Optimising visitor-to-customer rates on your website is usually the fastest route to e-marketing success. It’s this simple: deploying CRO services helps companies to realise fast-growth.

Perhaps you haven’t optimised your website yet and you’re not sure where to start. Or maybe you’re doing some conversion rate optimisation and are looking for a roadmap to get better results. Or perhaps you’re already doing lots of CRO and want to take things up a level. Whichever it is, get started by scheduling a 30-minute FREE call with me.

Conversion rate optimisation ≠ UX

CRO is so much more than design. The first step is to identify where your website is leaking money. That’s why I usually start by enhancing your Google Analytic setup to get accurate, relevant data.

If you get Google Analytics wrong, the whole optimisation programme is dead on arrival. You’d be amazed how often I’ve seen double-counting of pageviews, or pages not tagged, or a lack of funnel visualisation (your website does not have one funnel, it has multiple funnels!).

If you mess up this stuff, you can’t make decisions. Or worse, you make bad decisions. It all starts with quantitative data that has integrity.

Ah, there’s statistics too

Do you know how long an A/B test needs to run for? Do you know that evaluating ‘revenue-per-user’ as a KPI is a completely different statistical equation to evaluating ‘conversion rate’? Do you favour Bayesian or Frequentist analysis? The stuff we’re talking about will make your head spin (it does mine!). The reality is that most people don’t know their stats, even some so-called specialists. I’m talking 99% of them.

Are you SURE your A/B test is statistically sound? What is the potential cost to business if you mess this up?