Oliver Palmer

Blog posts

  1. South Gippsland Farmers' Markets Calendar

    Tired of being confused about which local farmers' market is on which weekend, I hacked together a simple web app

  2. Beaming Bog is a free Screaming Frog alternative

    My subscription to the SEO spider Screaming Frog expired so I used ChatGPT to make a stripped back free alternative

  3. Why you need to migrate to GA4 (immediately)

    Universal Analytics will stop ingesting data at the end of June 2023, but there are some good reasons why you should make the switch now

  4. 33% of Shopify sites are failing at basic SEO

    I hacked together up a Python script to crawl the internet and see how many Shopify stores are violating one of the basic rules of SEO

  5. Most of your A/B tests will fail (and that's OK)

    The vast majority of experiments don't do anything at all, so make sure you plan, budget and manage expectations accordingly

  6. The case against heatmaps

    Website heatmaps are a low effort, low signal waste of time and best avoided in favour of actual research

  7. The crisis of optimisation

    If academic research science is having a crisis of integrity, then what can we expect from the closed door world of corporate A/B testing?

  8. You probably don’t need A/B testing

    The best way to optimise your website is usually the simplest.

  9. Why I won't be switching my email to HEY

    I tried out Basecamp's reimagined take on email for 14 days and, as much as I wanted to love it, I need to keep searching for an alternative to Gmail.

  10. PIE prioritisation method

    Take a handful of guesstimates and then get the average. Surely there's a better way to prioritise your A/B testing program? I used to think so too.

  11. The best way I’ve found to manage A/B testing programs

    You could use a messy spreadsheet or buy a custom built tool, but a simple kanban board in (gasp!) Jira is the most deliciously simple and effective method that I’ve found.

  12. David Ogilvy's foreword to Scientific Advertising

    The full text of David Ogilvy's 1964 foreword to Scentific Advertising by his mentor Claude Hopkins. I bought an overpriced copy of the book so that you don't have to.

  13. Installing a Nest thermostat in Australia

    Nest still doesn't sell their thermostats for the Australian market, so it can be hard to work out what you need. Find out what you need to install one on your system.