Statistical testing: sample size, lift and full factorial designs
How to size a test from the lift you need, read a confidence interval instead of a green tick, and run a full factorial design that reveals interactions.
Growth Hacking Strategies
Data driven approaches to rapid, sustainable business growth
Commission Based Pricing Month by Month: The Worked Example
One invented hamper shop in Leeds, £1.8 million a year, walked through twelve months of my commission model: the baseline agreed before the start, the base rate or the commission each month (whichever is higher, never both), exactly what the commission is calculated on, a slow case and a bad case, what happens when you want out, and what the same year would cost on a package.
How much data do you actually need? Performance campaigns, A/B tests and forecasts, with the numbers
Sample sizes, spend per platform, time at a small daily budget, kill rules for losing ads, how many tests fit your traffic, which channel fits your stage and what a forecast needs, with every formula and table.
The customer loyalty journey: from segments to experiences
One loyalty project, four methods: behavioural segments, elasticity per segment, a loyalty loop and a moments questionnaire, planned month by month on a hotel group.
What is a smart website? Pages that adapt to the ad that brought you here
Most businesses pay for ads that promise one thing and then send everyone to a page that says another. A smart website closes that gap: one canonical page for search engines and cold visitors, shaped versions that continue the ad a visitor clicked, remembered only with consent, tested against real enquiries, and edited through the client portal instead of a CMS.
Loyalty: the three Rs, the spectrum, and designing earn and burn
How to tell whether a loyalty programme changes behaviour or just pays for it: the loyalty spectrum, the three Rs, earn and burn design, incremental margin against a control group, breakage by cohort, the points liability three ways, and the legal limits on expiry and rule changes.
Server side tracking: the technical guide to fixing your broken analytics
What a tagging server on your own domain fixes and what it does not: Google Tag Manager server side, the Meta Conversions API, GA4 Measurement Protocol, enhanced conversions and deduplication, built so consent still decides every forward.
Zero click content: how to win when nobody visits your website
More and more people meet your work in a feed or an AI answer and never visit your site. What to publish when the click does not come, on LinkedIn, in a newsletter and on answer first pages, and how to measure it through brand search and by asking people.
Community led growth: how to win by actually being helpful
How to grow a business by being genuinely useful in Reddit, Discord, Slack and trade communities: why communities push marketers out, the one rule for every post, when to mention what you sell, the UK law on undisclosed posting, and how to measure what analytics cannot see.
Dynamic pricing and algorithmic marketing: the complete technical playbook
How to build a nightly loop in a Solidus shop that reads competitors' public prices, stock, costs and elasticity, sets each product's price inside limits, moves ad budget towards profit, and stays inside UK consumer and competition law. Formulas, worked examples and Rails code.
Dark social: most sharing happens where you cannot track it
Most links are passed on privately in WhatsApp, Slack, Teams and email, and your analytics files those visits under direct. Where the famous 80% figure really comes from, why a shared link loses its source, how to measure private sharing without tracking anyone who said no, and how to make recommendations more likely.
Cookieless marketing in 2026: the first party data strategy that works whatever Chrome does
Chrome kept its third party cookies, and it barely matters. What Safari, Firefox and the consent banner really remove, what first party data is and is not, and how to measure without following people.
SEO vs AIO vs GEO vs AEO: the complete guide to AI search optimisation
Four acronyms for four outcomes: found, lifted, cited and recommended. What SEO, AEO, GEO and AIO each mean, what actually moves each one, how they stack, what the lost clicks cost in numbers, and how to measure all four without buying a dashboard.
Data roles in practice: how engineers, analysts and scientists grow SaaS and ecommerce
Fifteen concrete jobs that data engineers, analysts and data scientists do for a SaaS business and an online shop, in the order they should be done, each rated for importance and worked through with invented numbers you can check.
Data engineer, data scientist, data analyst: who does what
Three job titles that sound alike and are three different jobs. One coffee subscription business followed through all three roles, what each costs to hire in the UK, the order to hire them in, and what goes wrong when you skip one.
44 growth hacks you can start this afternoon
A checked list of 44 small fixes across the website, SEO, AI search, email and paid advertising, each one something you can start in an afternoon. Invented impact figures removed, every outside number sourced, and the consent rules built in.
The psychology of stressful projects: when one expert beats an entire team
Why some complex, high pressure projects go better with one experienced developer than with a team: the communication paths every new person adds, the meeting tax, experience as pattern recognition, and the psychology of carrying a project alone.
The £400 an hour AI disaster cleanup business
Fixing vibe coded software has become a business of its own. Why AI built projects with no tests and no documentation break, what a rescue involves hour by hour, and why the bargain quote so often costs the most.
Why companies hire me, and why I could never go back to nine to five
Why companies bring me in rather than employ someone, and why the easy answer misses the point. It is about time, what the UK working time rules allow an employer to ask, and the freedom I trade for the intensity.
Time to market: the critical path to shipping products that matter
How to ship sooner without shipping worse: what lateness really costs, how to find and protect the critical path, the over engineering trap, why speed and stability go together, and why customers, not meeting rooms, should set the requirements.
The complete guide to digital marketing testing methods
A/B tests, A/B/n tests, bandits, multivariate tests, holdouts, geographic tests, audience splits and time based tests: what each one answers, what it needs and where it breaks.
Segmentation: strategy before algorithms
What a segment really is, the five tests it must pass, a priori versus post hoc splits, and why one churn model per segment beats one model for everyone.
Is AI another dot com bubble waiting to burst?
What the dot com crash really looked like, what the biggest AI spenders report in their own filings, where AI genuinely earns its keep, and the hidden costs a business should price in before it spends.
Onboarding and habit formation: the science of making products stick
How to find the early action that predicts retention, clear the path to it, and build habits that last: cohort analysis, the Hook model, what the 66 days really mean, habit stacking, checklists, head starts, the goal gradient and the UK rules on onboarding emails.
Conversion and UX psychology: the science of why users click or bounce
Hick, Fitts, Miller, the peak end rule, the serial position effect, cognitive load, friction and framing: what each piece of research actually found, what it does not prove, and how to use it to review a page, with worked examples.
Behavioural economics frameworks: the science of how customers actually decide
The two systems of thinking, the biases behind a purchase, defaults, friction, hyperbolic discounting, mental accounting, choice overload and status quo bias: what the original studies found, how well they have held up, where UK law draws the line, and how to measure each one.
Referral and viral mechanics: engineering exponential growth
The maths and psychology of referral programmes: the viral coefficient, what a value below one is still worth, why cycle time is about timing until you pass one, and the UK rules every refer a friend scheme has to follow.
Social proof and trust: the psychology of why we follow the crowd
Why people copy other people when they are unsure, the six kinds of social proof, what the research says about reviews, and the UK law on fake reviews, with worked examples and code to test it on your own pages.
Vibe coding: the hidden cost of AI built architectures
Where AI built prototypes break when real customers arrive: the database first, then the framework, then the language. What each popular framework is really for, the warning signs to check, and how to recover.
Scarcity, urgency and loss aversion: the psychology of now or never
Scarcity, urgency, the fear of missing out, the endowment effect and the IKEA effect: what the research found, when each one helps, when it destroys trust, which tactics UK law now bans, and how to measure them past the click.
The maths behind it all: growth marketing mathematics explained
Ten pieces of maths that turn growth data into decisions: lifetime value against acquisition cost, payback, cohorts, survival curves, Bayesian tests, bandits, attribution and mix models, power laws, price elasticity and retention, each with a worked example.
Less famous conversion psychology: what the evidence supports, and what UK law rules out
Goal gradients, fresh starts, implementation intentions, defaults, status tiers, social comparison and risk reversal: the original studies, how well each has held up, worked examples, and the tactics UK law now bans.
Pricing psychology: what the research shows, and where UK law draws the line
Anchoring, decoys, charm prices, tiers, reference prices, partitioned prices and loss aversion: what each original study found, how well it has held up, how to test it on your own shop, and which tactics UK law now bans.
TDD and BDD for APIs: testing web applications that talk to each other
Why testing between two applications is different from testing inside one, request specs in Rails and Django, OpenAPI documentation from tests, and consumer driven contract testing with Pact.
Background workers in Rails: how to keep one failing job from taking the whole application down
What background jobs are, how Sidekiq and the Rails 8 default Solid Queue run them, and the rules (independence, idempotency, isolated queues, monitoring) that stop one bad job from stopping everything.
Why I choose Rails or Django over PHP for software that has to last
My opinion, argued with the facts checked: conventions, safe defaults and a testing culture in the box make Rails and Django projects easier to change in year three. Where Laravel has closed the gap, I say so.
Cucumber and BDD: why I write the feature file before the code
What Behaviour Driven Development is, how Cucumber and Gherkin turn plain English into tests, the advanced features worth knowing, setting it up in Rails, and the mistakes I see most.
Dynamic pricing with AI: from elasticity to guardrails
How dynamic pricing actually works for a shop: estimating elasticity from your own orders, the markup rule, a demand model, the guardrails, and the UK price transparency and competition rules, with Solidus and Rails code.
How generative AI is changing product discovery
Shoppers increasingly ask an assistant instead of typing keywords. What that means for a shop's product pages, descriptions and structured data, with UK dates from Google and a Rails example.
Privacy first growth: how to personalise with permission
Browsers have closed most of the gaps and UK law asks for a yes before you personalise. How to build personalisation on consent, your own server and data people give you on purpose, with the Rails code.
What is an insight, and why most reports do not contain one
A finding says what happened. An insight names the decision it changes, prices it and states the risk. How to tell them apart, score them and write one.
When your AI starts fighting itself: the curious problem of competing eCommerce optimisation
What happens when rival shops run the same clever algorithm against each other? Bidding wars, the Nash equilibrium, why learning agents chase a moving target, and where optimisation turns into algorithmic collusion.
Lookalike audiences explained: finding more of your best customers on Google and Meta
How lookalike audiences work on Meta and Google today: seeds, sizes, setup, the 2026 shift to lookalikes as suggestions, what happens under the hood, and the UK rules for pixels and customer lists.
Consumer behaviour is the basis of marketing strategy, not the afterthought
Why strategy has to start from how people actually decide, why what customers say and what they do disagree, and how to turn a founder's belief into a question your data can answer.
The true cost of outsourcing business critical development
A low hourly rate is one line in a longer sum. How to price the hours, the rework, your own time and the risk, with a worked example and the story of a client who chose on rate alone.
The statistics every marketer actually needs
Mean, median, standard deviation, confidence intervals, p values and correlation, worked through on an invented hamper shop's orders so you can read marketing numbers honestly.
Why I left the Google Ads Partner programme, and why you might want to as well
The Partner badge rewards an optimisation score that rises when you accept Google's recommendations, and a recommendation can raise the score while it lowers your profit. Here is why I let mine expire, worked through for an invented Brighton tea shop.
Why I do not believe in consulting for growth and technology
Advice without the work rarely creates growth. Where a consultant is worth paying for, why so much advice never turns into results, and how to compare advice with a build in pounds.
Commission based growth marketing: what each way of paying an agency rewards
Hourly rates, retainers, a share of ad spend and commission each reward something different. Here is what, what goes wrong with commission, and the safeguards that keep it honest.
Why clear and consistent messaging is crucial for eCommerce success
Your advert, landing page, product page, email and checkout each make a promise. When the five say the same thing, buying feels safe. When they drift, customers stop to check, and in the UK a drifting price can also break the law.
What is a growth hacker, and how to tell real growth work from rebranded marketing
What a growth hacker actually does, the experiment loop and the access it needs, and five questions that separate real growth work from a marketing retainer with a new label.
A unified campaign automation stack: one customer record, permission attached, every tool reading from it
What a unified marketing stack really is for a small shop: one customer and event record, consent carried on every row, and the costs of building or buying each piece.
Why a playful UK brand voice can cost you trust in Germany and Austria, and what to change
A British voice that leads with jokes can read as evasive to German and Austrian buyers. I show what to change, from du or Sie and claims law to the Impressum, with before and after copy for an invented Bristol tea shop.
Why I moved from growth hacking to data driven eCommerce growth
Why I left growth work on content sites for shops and subscription apps, and the four things that change when growth moves from tactics to measurement: margin, incrementality, cohorts and disciplined experiments.
Triggering ads from email activity, and emails from ad activity
How to let your email list shape your adverts and your adverts shape your emails: customer lists on Google and Meta, suppressing recent buyers, match rates, refresh timing and the UK law behind it.
The tragedy of the commons in marketing: shared attention and the cost of one more message
Every shop gains from one more email or ad while the cost of a tired audience falls on everyone. Hardin's pasture, Ostrom's answer, the inbox rules since 2024 and the arithmetic in pounds.
How to pick a growth or digital marketing agency or freelancer: what to ask, what to avoid and how to score them
What to ask an agency or freelancer before you sign, what each way of paying them rewards, which red flags Google itself warns about, and a weighted scoring method worked through for an invented Leeds coffee roaster.
Black box campaigns: how I steer Performance Max and Advantage+ when I cannot see inside
Performance Max and Meta's Advantage+ took the old levers away, but not the control. What still steers them, what the reports now show, and how a holdout tells you what the campaign really adds, shown on an invented Bristol coffee roaster.
The $300 million button, revisited: the quiet power of UX and microcopy in conversion
What Jared Spool's famous button story really shows, and what it does not. Then the small words that decide a checkout: button labels, guest checkout, error messages, help text, reassurance at payment and accessible labels, worked through on an invented Leeds candle shop.
Statistical significance and error margins in performance and growth marketing
What a p value really tells you, how wide the margin of error on a conversion rate is, and why a significant lift can still lose you money, worked through for an invented Leeds candle shop.
Strategic interaction models every growth plan should know
Your rival is doing the maths too. Bertrand, Cournot, Stackelberg, the prisoner's dilemma in brand bidding, repeated games, focal points and signalling, each worked through with invented British businesses and every step shown.
The StoryBrand framework for SaaS and eCommerce: clarifying value so customers act
Donald Miller's seven part StoryBrand framework, explained part by part and worked through on an invented Leeds software company and a Bristol tea shop, before and after. With the honest limits.
Optimisation under uncertainty: planning ad budgets and prices across scenarios
How to split an ad budget and set a price when you cannot know how the month will go: scenarios, diminishing returns, the shadow price of budget, the flaw of averages and the markup rule, worked step by step for an invented candle shop in Bristol.
Statistical thinking for growth: why averages mislead you
Why the average order value hides the shape of your data, and how the median, spread, quartiles, honest outlier handling and a look at segments give you numbers you can actually decide on.
Shipping, fulfilment and returns: what UK eCommerce brands overlook in Germany
Germans are used to fast parcels and free returns. Which carrier your customer meets, where to keep the stock and what that does to your VAT, when a German warehouse pays, and what returns really cost, worked through for a Manchester shop.
Webhooks and serverless functions for campaigns that react to your shop
How to let your shop tell your adverts and emails when something changes: signed webhooks, a queue, actions that are safe to repeat, and a schedule for what no webhook will ever tell you.
From keywords to concepts: semantic SEO and entity based optimisation
Since 2012 Google has tried to recognise things, not strings. What that means for your pages, what structured data really does (and does not do) for rankings, and how I make a business unmistakable to a machine without a keyword density target in sight.
Search intent evolution and SERP feature optimisation: winning the real estate beyond rankings
A Google results page is boxes, maps, products, videos and stars as well as links. How to read the intent behind a query from the page Google builds, which features a business can earn, the rules Google publishes for each, and how to measure what you hold.
Search Generative Experience and the changing landscape of organic traffic
Google's SGE experiment became AI Overviews and AI Mode, and both now sit in front of your organic results. What the click studies actually measured, how to estimate and measure the effect on your own site, and the controls you have since 2026.
Programmatic SEO and content automation: scaling with strategy and structure
Building many pages from one template is fine. Building the same page 400 times with a different town in the headline is spam. How to tell the two apart, and how to build the first kind.
Where product ends and growth begins: closing the loop between features, funnels and feedback
Which features turn customers into new customers, why activation decides whether the loop ever starts, and how what users do and say should decide what gets built next.
Privacy driven search: what it really means for a British business
DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and Brave Search carry about 1% of UK search referrals, and most borrow Bing's or Google's index. The bigger privacy shift is in the browser and the law, and that touches every visitor you have.
Principal agent theory in agencies and retainers: incentives that actually work
Every way of paying a marketing agency rewards something, and it is rarely exactly what you want. Agency costs, fees on spend, ROAS targets, commissions, noisy measures, many tasks and who owns the account, worked through for an invented Manchester candle shop.
Pricing and payment in Germany: how German shoppers pay online, and what the law asks of your price
PayPal, buying on invoice and direct debit carry most German online turnover, and German price law shapes every product page. What a UK shop offers at the checkout, and how it shows the price, worked through for a Brighton shop.
Predictive automation using behavioural segments
How to spot the people still deciding, turn what they do on your site into an honest purchase probability, and send the message only where it changes the outcome, within UK profiling law.
Post Brexit, pre growth: what British businesses get wrong about expanding into Germany, Austria and Switzerland
Eight missteps I see British shops make in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, from treating DACH as one market to a card only checkout and English terms, each with the fix and a worked example from an invented Leeds yarn shop.
Pirate metrics (AARRR): how I use them to find the growth bottleneck
Dave McClure's five pirate metrics turn the vague question of growth into five counts. How to define each one, read the rates between them, and fix the stage worth the most.
Why Performance Max drifts in Germany, and how I structure asset groups to steer it
A copied British Performance Max campaign usually fails in Germany on structure, not culture. How consent thins the signal, how many asset groups that signal can carry, and what to split them on, shown on an invented Manchester shop.
Passage indexing and content fragmentation: designing for section based visibility
Google never started indexing passages. It ranks whole pages, and since 2021 it can notice the one good section inside a long one. What that means, what it does not, and how I structure long pages so the right section is found, quoted and linked.
Meta ads in Germany and Austria: a smaller signal, stricter rules, and how a British shop plans for both
Fewer Germans use social media, the pixel waits for consent, and the Digital Markets Act lets people opt out of profiling. What that does to a British shop's Meta campaigns, worked through in pounds.
Message, market and model fit: the three checks I run before spending a pound on ads
Before I scale any paid campaign I check three things in order: is the message understood, is the market big enough and reachable, and does each customer pay back once churn is counted. Worked through with an invented Bristol coffee subscription.
Merging first party data with SEO: the cookie stayed, the case for your own data did not change
Chrome kept its third party cookies, but most of your visitors are already out of reach. How to turn organic search into first party data you can use lawfully, and measure content by what each click is worth.
Mastering UTM tracking: the complete guide to clean campaign attribution in GA4
Every UTM parameter GA4 recognises, the channel rules that sort your words into buckets, one naming vocabulary, what breaks, and how the labels feed attribution. With an invented Leeds candle shop and three campaigns, in pounds.
Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) in growth strategy: positioning on what customers are really trying to do
What Jobs To Be Done is, where it comes from and what it is not, and how I use switch interviews, the four forces and opportunity scores to turn a customer's job into positioning, copy and ads. Worked through on an invented Manchester software company.
IndexNow, instant indexing and crawl budget strategy in a real time web
IndexNow lets your site tell Bing and other engines the moment a page changes, and Google does not listen. How to set it up to the documented API, what to send, and how to make Googlebot's visits count by reading your own logs.
How to rank in ChatGPT: what OpenAI documents, what nobody outside OpenAI knows, and what to do
ChatGPT has no ranking list, just two routes into an answer and one documented gate. What OpenAI, Microsoft and the research actually say, what is unknown, and how to measure your place.
The Hook Model and habit loops: repeat engagement without dark patterns
Trigger, action, variable reward, investment: what each step of the Hook Model does, what the habit research behind it actually measured, and where a useful habit turns into a hook nobody asked for, worked through on an invented Leeds coffee roaster.
From zero to loyal hero: growth through retention and referral
How to measure retention honestly, put a pound value on every point of it, raise it in the first weeks, and build a referral scheme that pays and stays inside UK law.
The growth flywheel: compounding loops instead of linear funnels
What a growth loop really is, the one number that says whether yours is doing anything, and why a loop that never runs on its own still makes every pound of marketing go further.
Geo personalised ads and content: show each visitor the facts that are true where they are
How I use location in ads, landing pages and email: which location sources to trust, how the ad platforms decide who is in an area, and how to prove the lift with a holdout.
How data processors can get you fined: vetting vendors and transfers under UK GDPR
Every tool in your stack that touches customer data is a legal relationship. What Article 28 asks before you sign, how the 2026 transfer rules work, and how I rank vendors so the review time goes where the risk is.
GDPR as a strategic advantage: trust, churn and loyalty, with the evidence checked
Does data protection really build trust and cut churn? I separate what UK adults say, what experiments show and what real companies saw, and show how to measure it yourself.
Consent by design: email capture, lead forms and onboarding under UK GDPR and PECR
Two UK laws decide whether you may email someone you collected. How I build sign up forms, checkouts, gated guides and onboarding so every address on the list is one you can actually use.
Dark patterns and UK law: how UX becomes a legal liability
Pre ticked boxes, banners without a reject button, shaming pop ups and countdown clocks that reset. Which UK law each one breaks, what the ICO and CMA expect, and what I build instead, worked through on an invented Leeds tea shop.
Game theory in growth strategy: pricing, positioning and strategic interactions
Your price is only half of the decision, because your rival is choosing too. Payoff matrices, dominant strategies, Nash equilibrium, repeated games, credible threats and reaction functions, worked through for two invented Bristol coffee roasters.
Beyond awareness: building full funnel growth frameworks that do not leak
How to count all five stages of a funnel, from awareness to advocacy, put a pound value on every leak, and fix the one that is worth the most first.
Decision theory for founders: choosing under uncertainty with expected value
How to choose between options when you cannot know how they will turn out: the payoff table, expected value, utility for when the bad year could sink you, regret, decision trees, and what a pilot is worth before you pay for it.
Data warehousing for marketing automation: from four tools to one customer
How a data warehouse such as BigQuery or Snowflake joins your shop, analytics, ads and email data on the customer, turns segments into queries that run every morning, and sends them back to the tools that act.
What data science actually delivers for growth
Data science delivers better decisions, measured, not dashboards. The five step loop, a way to price a better decision, and three small models at an invented Brighton garden centre chain.
Cross language attribution: measuring one set of campaigns across the UK, Germany, Austria and Switzerland
The same campaigns in two languages across four countries, and three systems that each count the orders differently. How I keep country and language apart, map everything to a market, correct for consent per market and reconcile the platforms against the orders.
Cross border setup: the legal, tax and compliance steps a UK business takes to sell into Germany
No German company needed, but a short list of registrations, three people in the EU who answer for you and German shop terms. The steps in order, with the law behind each and a Bristol shop's first quarter in pounds.
Cross border PPC: how I build paid search and social for several countries from a UK base
How I set up Google Ads and Meta for several countries from one UK account, what localisation means beyond translation, and how to split the budget by the return on the next pound, shown on an invented Leeds software company.
Core Web Vitals and user experience: what speed, response and stability mean for your business
What LCP, INP and CLS measure, why Google grades them at the 75th percentile of real visits, how much they weigh in Search, and how to diagnose a slow page from the top, worked through on an invented Manchester furniture shop.
Cookies, consent and the ePrivacy mess: why selling into Germany and Austria needs a different tracking setup
The UK cookie rule changed in February 2026. Germany and Austria did not follow. What a British shop must do in each market, what fires when a visitor says no, and what that does to the numbers in your ad account.
Competing in markets with homogeneous vs differentiated products: a data driven approach
Selling the same product as everyone else and selling something only you make are different games with different rules. How the two markets differ, the four numbers that tell you which one each product line is in, and what each one rewards, worked through for two invented Bristol shops.
The Clarity Framework: how I use UX, copy and analytics to remove friction from conversion
My four layer review for pages that get interest but not action: copy, flow, visual, and speed. With an invented Brighton software company's demo request flow, measured with consented events, step rates and a proper test.
ChatGPT vs Gemini: how each one finds your content, and what that means for your business
ChatGPT search and Google's AI features fetch and cite pages by different routes, opened by different switches. Here are both routes, what the UK usage figures really say, and a plain monthly way to measure whether either tool cites you.
Causal inference in marketing: from correlation to cause with propensity scores and instruments
Why the customers who got your campaign always look better, and how potential outcomes, propensity score matching and instrumental variables find the effect the campaign actually caused.
The Bullseye framework for channel selection: how I decide what to scale and what to drop
How I use the Bullseye framework from the book Traction to pick one marketing channel: list all 19, test three small, score the results on expected value, then focus.
Testing before scaling: how I use Austria or Switzerland as a bridge market before entering Germany
Why I test a UK brand's German proposition, prices and delivery promise in Austria or Switzerland first, with the sample size, the z test and the cost of learning per market, shown on an invented Leeds outdoor clothing brand.
Bootstrapping local market growth: how to win a new city without a big budget
The six step sequence I use to open a new city or region on a small budget: choose by evidence, plug the leaks, local search, measured partnerships, and the marginal cost that says when the next city opens.
Beyond SEO: winning visibility in the age of AEO and GEO
Search engines now answer before they link, and the page quoted in the answer is the one that is seen. How a question becomes an AI answer with citations, the three things that decide whether you are in it, and what I do on the sites I build.
Beyond aesthetics: a social media strategy for lifestyle brands that has to convert
How a fashion, homeware or food brand turns a lovely feed into orders: the story first, platforms chosen on Ofcom's evidence, a funnel with one objective per stage, measurement that respects consent, and creators sized as bets. Worked through with an invented Brighton homeware shop, in pounds.
Why working with me as a contractor can benefit you
What a full time hire really costs in the UK once National Insurance, pension, holiday, recruitment and redundancy are counted, what a senior contractor costs for the same year, and the number of days at which the answer flips.
Beating price wars and big players in the homogeneous product market
When a bigger rival cuts the price of a product you both sell, matching feels safe and usually loses money. The economics of price wars, elasticity, contribution, suppliers, switching costs and bundles, worked through for an invented Leeds tyre retailer.
B2B SaaS sales in Germany: procurement, legal review and the stakeholder layers explained
How a UK SaaS sells into a German organisation: the six stages from discovery to go live, the data processing agreement, the works council, German contracts and payment on invoice, shown on an invented Leeds company and its Hamburg buyer.
Auto bidding on your own data: feeding margin, lead quality and stock into Google and Meta
How to feed margin, lead quality, stock and consent state into Google Smart Bidding and Meta's Conversions API, with the formulas, the weekly loop and a worked example from an invented Brighton supplier.
Auction theory and bidding strategy: how I set paid search bids with maths
What Google's ad auction really does to your price, why the textbook second price rule breaks across several positions, and how to set a maximum bid and a Target ROAS guardrail from your own margin and conversion rate.
The AIDA model rewired for 2025: attention is not enough any more
What Attention, Interest, Desire, Action still does for an online shop today, how to count the funnel at every stage, and why one better stage is worth more than more attention.
AI content in search: detection, ranking and ethical use
Google does not punish AI written pages, it punishes pages made to game the rankings. What its guidance and spam policies really say, why AI detectors fail, and how I use the tools myself.
Accessibility law for online businesses: what the Accessibility Act, the Equality Act and WCAG 2.1 AA ask of a shop, a SaaS product and a corporate site
The European Accessibility Act has applied since June 2025 and names online shops. The UK Equality Act has asked for reasonable adjustments since 2010. Both come down to WCAG 2.1 AA. What that means in practice, with a Leeds checkout audit worked through.