It is not exactly intuitive to run a successful Adwords campaign without ending up with disappointing results, especially for a first time user. It takes a lot of patience and testing to end up setting up a campaign that gives you a good return on your investment. Besides the knowledge needed to configure a winning campaign, you also need to understand the factors that go into how Adwords work.

When you are able to look behind the curtain at the way things work then you can get a better understanding. With this understanding, you’ll have a much better chance of getting things right from the beginning. In this article, we will go over several key factors for you to understand how to run Adword campaigns that convert.

Understanding the quality score

Google issues every ad campaign a quality score that helps them determine how to deal with the ad. To have a successful campaign you have to have a good Quality Score. If your score is low then it has little chance of winning the auction when you bid for keywords. Knowing that your score is low will give you the opportunity to fix the ad so it can improve.

For instance, you could be dealing with a low click-through rate early in the campaign and this will negatively impact your QS. If you understand that your low CTR is contributing to a low Quality Score then you can make some changes to the ad to raise the QS and the CTR. You may even find that you are dealing with click fraud started by a competitor and that is hurting your QS. In this case, you can hire a company like Lunio to combat fraud.

In addition to your CTR, you’ll also have to focus on relevance to get a good score. This means that you can’t bid on a keyword that is only somewhat related to the ad. This isn’t in your best interest anyway as it will certainly result in low conversions, but Google also wants to make sure that people get the ads that they are expecting when they do a keyword search.

How to improve your score

The very first step is to improve your landing page to increase your score. It is very likely that unless you are experiencing click fraud, your landing page is the cause of a low CTR that has also impacted your Quality Score. Most of the time it is not optimized in a way that will inspire people to take the next step.

When people are clicking off of the landing page and going back to the SERPs then this is a clear signal to Google that the visitor didn’t get what they needed and your score will be lower. If you make sure that the visitor doesn’t click back then your score will rise.

Make sure the landing page is easy to navigate and gives all the information that a visitor needs to want to take the next step.