Michael Taylor

I got access to GPT-3 in 2020 and DALL-E in 2022 and have been automating my work with AI ever since! I created a Udemy course on Prompt Engineering with 50k+ students, and have written a book on Prompt Engineering for O'Reilly (June 2024). I work full time as a freelance AI engineer as well as on my own generative AI projects.

I founded and grew Ladder, a growth marketing agency to over 50 employees in three countries, helping companies like Monzo Bank, Time Out and Booking.com as well as 200 or so other startups. I was an early adopter of Growth Hacking techniques and learned to code when Optimizely came to Europe so I could roll out my own A/B tests without needing IT. I've also met Sean Ellis and other prominent Growth Hackers, and worked for Noah Kagan at SumoMe.

I have 10 years experience with $50m spent on PPC. At Ladder I've grown 200+ clients including Monzo Bank, Time Out and Booking.com. I optimized $10m a year on Google for Carphone Warehouse at Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe) and grew PPC from 1% of total revenue to 6% at ShopStyle. I was an early Facebook advertiser at Travelzoo (Groupon competitor) acquiring 1m subscribers, scaled acquisition at SumoMe (founded by Noah Kagan) by 30x, and even ran Facebook ads for Facebook (Workplace).

Having worked with over 200 startups in the past five years through Ladder, a growth marketing agency I founded, I've seen enough technology stacks and the issues with them to be able to help give some guidance in the majority of scenarios. Specifically I'm best at tag management and set up of tracking / analytics, and I've done enough CRM to know the commonalities of how they all work.

I started advertising on Adroll at SumoMe, and have experimented with it multiple times across the 200 clients we've worked with at Ladder, an agency I co-founded. I actually now have Criteo as a client, a direct competitor, and therefore have done a lot of competitive research into its strengths and weaknesses.

My first job was at Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe) where I optimized $10m a year on Google for Carphone Warehouse and others. I then joined Travelzoo where amongst other media and landing page optimization, I managed their $4m a year PPC budget. After that I grew PPC from 1% of total revenue to 6% at ShopStyle, then founded my own agency, Ladder, where I've worked with over 200 clients on PPC, including Monzo Bank, Time Out and Booking.com.

Ahrefs is my SEO tool of choice - I have run many manual checks over the years and their data is the most consistent. I also prefer the UI and it isn't bloated like other tools when it comes to features. I use it primarily for keyword research, but it is also very useful for linkbuilding strategies (which actually was what it was originally known for, before they upped their game on keywords).

I have been running campaigns on Bing for a decade, and worked directly with them as one of the UK's largest advertisers for a while. I was an active spender during the shift to Yahoo account management and most of the 200 clients I've worked with at Ladder, the agency I co-founded, have experimented with Bing.

This is one of my favorite rarely tested channels. You can get really premium inventory particularly if you're targeting designers, developers or marketers. It is a little difficult to buy on vs the self-serve Google and Facebook platforms, but in particular the email sponsorship has worked well for me. When Crypto was a thing I spent a lot of money on BuySellAds as they had the Crypto package, in some cases achieving <0.5 cents cost per click and 5% CTR (unheard of in display ads!).

I was an early Facebook advertiser at Travelzoo (Groupon competitor) acquiring 1m subscribers, scaled acquisition at SumoMe (founded by Noah Kagan) by 30x, and even ran Facebook ads for Facebook (Workplace). As the co-founder of Ladder, a growth marketing agency, I have scaled campaigns up to $500k a month, and have worked with clients like Monzo Bank, Time Out and Booking.com.

I was an early adopter of Google Optimize and even wrote a blog post that got retweeted by them (how I moved my agency from Optimizely to Google Optimize). I have set up complex experiments including working with developers, even for fortune 500 companies like Nestle.

I'm a power user of Google Data Studio having transitioned our entire agency (50 employees) across to it from an internal system we built in-house. I have set up many custom reports and dashboards for clients, including connecting to BigQuery, or custom population of spreadsheets as sources for things like cohort analysis. I have built GDS reports for companies like Monzo Bank, Time Out and Booking.com.

I'm a Google Tag Manager power user, having used it on something like 200 clients through Ladder, the agency I co-founded. I even set up Google Tag Manager for a major fast food brand late one night when another agency couldn't find anyone who knew it! I know how to code basic JavaScript for custom setups, and am competent in working with developers for any advanced needs. I also have experience with other tag management solutions such as Segment, and before that Qubit and others.

I have used Hotjar for a long time, and competed against them somewhat when I worked for SumoMe. I have worked with over 200 startups at Ladder, a growth agency I founded, and for most of them we installed and used Hotjar actively for insights in CRO.

I have worked with HubSpot as my own CRM in the growth marketing agency I founded, Ladder. We are getting something like 300 leads a month through inbound marketing and I'm familiar with the various workflows needed to integrate HubSpot with other services, including attributing marketing for the full funnel. I have also worked on HubSpot for clients, including a wedding company with over 50 venues.

I have used Intercom for both clients and my own company, having launched several SaaS tools and scaled them to over 1,000 users. I have built several end to end tracking installations with Intercom, and I'm familiar with how to connect it to other services, as well as set up complex behavioral email loops.

My experience with JavaScript is mainly in setting up tracking events on websites, custom coding for front-end A/B tests (implemented via Optimizely, VWO or Google Optimize) and setting up automations in Google Ads Scripts.

I have run LinkedIn campaigns for years, including for some big names like Booking.com, which are one of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in Europe. I've worked directly with LinkedIn account reps and have experience with a variety of ad formats.

I have worked with Mailchimp for years, both for my own newsletters and behavioral emails, and on behalf of clients at Ladder, the growth marketing agency I founded. This is the email platform I have the most experience with, though I have also worked with several others.

I have a lot of Mixpanel experience, having worked directly with them as a partner agency in the implementation of several complex mobile app clients. One of the clients I built the setup for was a new French bank, post-GDPR, so I had to navigate through the many ways they store data and help their legal team interpret the risk vs benefit of several major analytics decisions.

I have basic SQL experience - enough to pull the data I need - then I usually export into another platform to analyze with Python or in a spreadsheet.

I'm a semi-competent Python developer with a focus on Data Science, and have built simple Django apps and workflow automations. I mostly use Python for advanced analysis though I also have entry level experience in machine learning applied to marketing.

We tried out Quora ads early on and saw good success, in particular for clients like Booking.com on the B2B side. It is still a relatively early platform so has rarely been a big source of traffic for the 200 or so clients I've worked with at Ladder, but it does well enough to be worth testing.

I have used Segment many times for multiple clients in spaces like financial services (including launching a new bank in France) and also for my own in-house products. I mostly use it in scenarios where the client is on mobile, has offline events, or has advanced analytics needs, for example dumping raw data into Google BigQuery and/or Mode Analytics for advanced analysis via SQL and Python.

I have used Twitter pretty regularly as an ads platform since starting my agency, Ladder. In some cases we have gotten it to be a better source of traffic with more volume than Facebook, though that is admittedly rare and depends on the type of client.

I founded a growth marketing agency, Ladder, who became a partner agency of Unbounce, and have sent people from my team to their conference. We have used Unbounce for Fortune 500 clients all the way down to early stage startups, and have built several custom pages with unique setups.