About Matthew Hopkins
I Grew Up With This Industry
I was born in 1976, which turned out to be a fortunate accident of timing. My father was made redundant from the steelworks and retrained as an IT lecturer, so there was a PC in our house before most people had heard of one. I wrote my first program on an Acorn Electron at around 8 years old.
By my final year at university in 1998, the web was still a novelty. I remember a project that year quoting AltaVista's monthly search volume, a number that felt enormous at the time and looks quaint now. Google launched that same year. I watched paid search go from nothing to the dominant form of advertising on the planet, because I was there for most of it.
Almost 25 Years in Paid Search
Technology In, Common Sense Out
Early in my career I worked with a consultant in his seventies who told me something that's stuck with me since: technology comes in, common sense goes out. Tools change constantly. What doesn't change is the need to keep sight of return on investment, measure the right things, and keep your data clean.
Technology itself is neither good nor bad, it's a tool. Used carelessly it wastes money. Used well it saves enough labour to become genuinely profitable. I use AI in my own work, but as a tool, not a replacement for judgement. It's made reporting and code faster. It hasn't replaced the almost 25 years of experience I bring to deciding what the data actually means.
I started my career in May 2002 as an E-commerce Adviser, helping small businesses in the public sector use websites, SEO, paid search, copywriting and analytics to reach their goals. AdWords (now Google Ads) had launched only two years earlier and was still finding its feet. I was advising on it while it was young, which meant learning the platform as it grew rather than inheriting it fully formed.
I moved into the private sector in 2008 and have spent the years since managing paid search in-house and through agencies, including some of the biggest in the UK, such as Golley Slater. I've managed budgets from £140k a month up to £2 million a month across sectors including finance, retail and comparison services. In one campaign for a financial services client, I raised the conversion rate from 2.5% to 4% through a mix of Google Ads techniques and conversion rate optimisation, which gave the client the confidence to raise the monthly budget from £140k to £200k. I've also managed a £250k monthly budget for a national retail group, rebuilding their measurement infrastructure to give them clear cost-per-lead visibility for the first time.
At university I developed a genuine interest in databases and what it takes to draw the right conclusions from data, and that's stayed central to how I work ever since.
Why Work With Me
Nearly 25 years in paid search, from AltaVista to AI Overviews. Experience across public sector, agency and in-house, at both small business and multi-million-pound scale. A genuine, long-standing interest in data and what it actually tells you, not just what it appears to say.
I have a real passion for helping businesses work smarter, not just spend more. I work from home, which keeps my overheads low, and I pass that saving on to you rather than a big agency mark-up.