Hi, I’m Robert Kingston - owner of Optimisation Beacon, “Brisbane ex-pat” and resident of Melbourne, Australia who lives and breathes the web. I have worked in digital for over 6 years now in a variety of fields and roles including:
- Conversion rate optimisation (CRO)
- Web analytics
- Search engine optimisation (SEO)
- Pay per click (PPC)
- Webmaster
Starting out on the web (2006 - 2008)
Not counting my high school years where I developed and hosted some small websites out of interest, I first started working in 2006, with blogging guru Yaro Starak. Working for Yaro was an excellent experience as I took on a couple of his sites to manage (Mini Riders, Small Business Branding, 3GN Media and some others) whilst he focused on building out his Blog Mastermind program.
It was here where I learned much of the basics of managing large websites, optimising traffic and increasing ad revenue from AdSense and direct ad sales. I also got to write several articles for Small Business Branding and fly to the states to cover MPlanet 2006.
New Business Media: My first agency role (2008 - 2010)
A recommendation from a friend of mine (Thanks, Charm), landed me an exciting role at New Business Media on the Gold Coast. My role, as an online marketing consultant was to develop our services around the following areas and offer those services to clients:
- Pay per click management
- Search engine optimisation
- Conversion optimisation
- Social media marketing
Here, I worked with fantastic clients such as the Australian Institute of Fitness, BSmart Communications and Princess Polly. Adam, Wez, Mitch and I also entered ourselves into the Kokoda Challenge - a grueling 96km race (on foot!) through the Gold Coast hinterlands. We didn’t make it all the way, but I was happy to have made it at ~87km within 20 hrs.
During this time, I developed several of my own sites for the purposes of generating some AdSense revenue on the side. The sites were a hodge podge of categories like deceased estates, renewable energy, immigration and the environment. I sold some and I continue to run others to this day.
Developing CRO services at Experian Hitwise (2010 - 2013)
Back towards the end of 2009, I was recruited for a role at Experian Hitwise to develop the conversion rate optimisation services that we offered to clients. This was a very rewarding challenge. It enabled me to work on great clients such as City Beach, ME Bank, Find Investment Property, Slater & Gordon and Lumo Energy. Some of the highlights to date include:
- Running webinars and seminars on website optimisation
- Attaining >200% conversion rate lift in a single experiment for a client
- Developing Experian Hitwise’s CRO offering
It was here, through my passion for the web that I developed this website - yep, this one right here. It was built for connecting with other thought leaders in the web analytics and optimisation space, positing new ideas and testing others.
I worked with the team to develop a range of analytics services (if you’re a subscriber - and I hope you are - you would have noticed quite a lot of analytics-related posts to come out of this blog which are often related to what I provided to Experian clients). We focused on Google Analytics and even dabbled with Adobe Site Catalyst.
Contract analyst for hire from Optimisation Beacon (2013 - present)
Now I am working as a freelance/contract web analytics specialist from Melbourne, Australia. I’m relatively new on this journey, but it’s been very rewarding so far. I look forward to partnering with my clients and seeing wins from online testing.
If you’re interested in my services, please take a look at my services here.
Connect with me
Other interesting tid bits
- Favourite foods: Mexican (from Blue Corn in St Kilda, to Mamasita in Melbourne CBD), Korean
- Favourite TV shows: Special Ops Mission, Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, Bullshit, any documentaries worth their salt.
- Interests: Travelling, running, websites, music, trying new things, learning new languages…