PPC ads are extremely important for any online and offline business. For this reason, PPC specialists need to work on creating campaigns that do not only stand out from the crowd but also convert.
By learning how to code, you can optimize your campaigns and landing pages to do just that. So here, we’ll talk about how knowing different programming languages can make you a better PPC specialist. Read on!
Who is a PPC Specialist?
PPC specialists are experts in pay-per-click ads. Some people may believe that placing these ads is as simple as clicking a few buttons and displaying ads that redirect your audience to your website.
This couldn’t be further from reality.
PPC specialists have to keep an eye on each aspect of these ads from landing page design to keyword research and even looking out for trends to ensure that they are placing the right ads at the right time.
Let’s take a brief look at the different responsibilities of a PPC specialist and check how you can grow in this field.
Keyword Research
Keyword research involves looking for relevant terms or phrases that users search to display your ads. For example, if you’re looking for new shoes, you’ll probably be a little more specific than typing just “shoes” in the search bar. There’s a higher chance that you’ll type something like “best shoes under $20” or “buy formal shoes for women online.”
Landing Page Improvement
The design of your landing page has a great impact on whether or not a prospect will share their details with you and finally make a purchase. Of course, a PPC specialist is not a designer, but they are likely to help the web development team create well-converting pages, based on their vision and experience.
Trend Watching
Watching out for trends is imperative to ensure that consumers will respond to your pay-per-click ads. In doing so, you’ll know what people are interested in, helping you mitigate the risk of spending money on ads that don’t resonate with your audience and its current needs.
Improving Campaign Performance
This is perhaps one of the most important responsibilities of a PPC specialist. Monitoring PPC campaigns involves a thorough analysis of both the campaigns’ performance in terms of views and conversion rates, checking budget distribution, and optimizing both based on the company’s marketing objectives.
Why You Should Learn Coding to Become a Better PPC Specialist
Since the responsibilities of a PPC specialist can vary, it’s important to have a certain degree of technical acumen and coding knowledge so that you can optimize your campaigns and get the right results.
HTML and CSS
HTML and CSS are the most common and easily understandable languages that are used for creating websites. HTML is generally used to add structure to a website whereas CSS is needed to make these websites more visually attractive. Even basic knowledge of HTML and CSS is enough to help you build a simple web page.
HTML and CSS skills can also help you troubleshoot issues with your landing pages and even add code blocks to improve the overall implementation and design of your ads. The latest version of HTML called HTML5 is actually commonly used to create display ads which tend to attract large numbers of audiences from various websites.
You can also leverage your knowledge of HTML5 to create highly interactive ads and tweak them to increase your clickthrough rates and conversions.
Another benefit is that HTML5 can be used to create expanded text ads. These are special types of ads that get redirected to your Gmail ads. The good part about expanded text ads is that you can add multiple interactive elements such as images, videos, and forms that users can submit to make a purchase.
With the right amount of knowledge of HTML, you can increase the chances of winning customers by making your ads elaborate and visually attractive.
Regular Expressions
Regular expressions or RegEx are formulas that can be used to find specific terms or records from large volumes of data. They can ensure that your data is valid according to the rules of the field in which it exists. For instance, if you want to validate an email address, you need to make sure it contains an ‘@’ symbol. Using regular expressions, you won’t manually have to sift through all email addresses and can easily filter the right ones out.
Regular expressions can be useful for PPC specialists in several ways. If you’re looking for some specific data, say details of users that searched keywords containing the word ‘best,’ you can easily set the regular expression up on Google Analytics and find only relevant information. This approach also speeds up the entire process considerably, allowing you to reach insights faster.
The best part about regular expressions is how versatile they are. You can create a regular expression for any type of pattern and you’ll get the right results in no time.
A great resource, where you can read how to create RegEx, is CodeGym. The website is mostly focused on Java courses and exercises for entertaining practicing. Even if you are not planning to go for Java, you can definitely benefit from other valuable materials and choose to learn to code on CodeGym.
JavaScript
Javascript is a popular programming language that was created to make websites more interactive. It can be used to add functionality to your web pages and improve the overall layout.
Google Tag Manager, also allows you to track various aspects of your ad campaigns by creating custom variables. These variables, created in JavaScript, can be used for multiple reasons including collecting the IP address of the user and finding out the exact second at which a certain action or ‘event’ was performed. Examples of events that you might be interested in tracking are form submissions, downloads, emails, and video plays done through a landing page for a certain PPC ad.
SQL
SQL (Structured Query Language) is used to extract insights and very specific information from databases. This information can then be used for reporting and making better decisions for your business.
As a PPC specialist, you’ll inevitably be dealing with large volumes of user data. Now, you might need to understand trends by identifying which behaviors different demographics commonly display when interacting with your ads. With the right knowledge of SQL, you can use queries, including complex ones, joins and other functions to make more sense of your data and get the information that you need in a few seconds.
SQL can also help you make your Google shopping campaigns more efficient. If you ever want to subdivide the products in your campaign and create custom labels, you can use SQL to find out some common elements in popular products and filter out these products to improve your sales figures.
Conclusion
So, there you have it – our list of the top coding skills you should develop as a PPC specialist. Whether you learn JavaScript, HTML, RegEx, or all of them, once you know how to code, you’re bound to get better at what you do! Trust us when we say that once you get started with coding, you might enjoy it too much to stop.
