Quality Score is Google’s 1-10 rating of your keyword-level ad experience. It’s built from three components: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. But here’s the part most advertisers get wrong – Quality Score itself isn’t used in the ad auction. It’s a diagnostic tool, a snapshot of how Google views your ads compared to other advertisers. The real-time signals that determine your actual ad rank and CPC are calculated fresh for every single auction.
That distinction matters because it changes how you should think about optimisation. Chasing a perfect 10 across every keyword is a waste of time. But ignoring Quality Score entirely means you’re flying blind when something’s underperforming. The sweet spot is using it as a diagnostic tool to find problems, fix them, then shift your attention back to what actually drives revenue. That’s the approach we take with our Google Ads management – treating Quality Score as a signal, not a target.
What Is Quality Score?
Quality Score is a number from 1 to 10 assigned to each keyword in your Google Ads account. It reflects Google’s estimate of how relevant and useful your ads and landing pages are to someone searching for that keyword.
A few things worth understanding upfront. Quality Score is keyword-level, not account-level or campaign-level. It’s calculated based on exact-match impressions of your keyword, regardless of which match type you’re actually using. And it only updates when your keyword accumulates enough impression data – it won’t change overnight from a single tweak.
Google is explicit that Quality Score is diagnostic. It’s there to help you identify weak spots. The actual auction uses real-time calculations that factor in things Quality Score can’t capture – device, location, time of day, the specific search query, and other contextual signals.
The Three Components
Each keyword’s Quality Score is built from three sub-metrics. Google rates each one as “Above Average”, “Average”, or “Below Average” compared to other advertisers competing on the same keyword. Understanding what each one measures is the first step to knowing where to focus.
Expected Click-Through Rate (eCTR)
This is Google’s prediction of how likely your ad is to get clicked when shown for this keyword. It’s based on your historical CTR performance, adjusted for ad position and other factors that affect visibility.
A “Below Average” rating here means Google thinks your ads are getting fewer clicks than competitors’ ads for the same searches. That’s usually a sign your ad copy isn’t compelling enough, your headlines don’t match the search intent well, or you’re missing ad extensions that competitors are using.
Ad Relevance
Ad relevance measures how closely your ad matches the intent behind the keyword. If someone searches “emergency plumber London” and your ad talks about general home maintenance services, the relevance score will suffer.
This component is largely about keyword-to-ad alignment. Are the terms in your keyword reflected in your ad copy? Does the ad address what the searcher is actually looking for? It’s less about CTR performance and more about semantic matching between keyword and ad text.
Landing Page Experience
This one evaluates the page people land on after clicking your ad. Google considers relevance (does the page match what the ad promised?), load speed, mobile-friendliness, and how easy the page is to navigate.
Landing page experience is the slowest component to improve because it often requires development work rather than just ad copy changes. But it’s also the component that benefits your entire account, since better landing pages improve conversion rates alongside Quality Score.
How Quality Score Affects Your Costs
Here’s where Quality Score gets financially interesting. While the diagnostic score itself isn’t used in the auction, the underlying factors it measures absolutely are. And the relationship between quality and cost follows a clear pattern.
Industry studies suggest that keywords with a Quality Score of 7 or above tend to receive a CPC discount compared to what you’d pay at the benchmark score of 5. A Quality Score of 10 could mean paying roughly 50% less per click than an advertiser with a score of 5 bidding on the same keyword. At the other end, a Quality Score of 1 could mean paying up to 400% more.
The approximate relationship looks something like this:
| Quality Score | Estimated CPC Impact |
|---|---|
| 10 | ~50% discount |
| 8 | ~25% discount |
| 7 | ~15% discount |
| 6 | Roughly benchmark |
| 5 | Benchmark |
| 4 | ~25% penalty |
| 3 | ~67% penalty |
| 2 | ~150% penalty |
| 1 | ~400% penalty |
These figures are approximate and based on widely cited industry analyses – Google doesn’t publish an official CPC multiplier table. But the pattern is consistent: the penalty for low Quality Scores is much steeper than the discount for high ones. Moving from 3 to 5 saves you far more money per click than moving from 7 to 9.
How to Check Quality Score in Google Ads
Quality Score isn’t visible by default in the Google Ads interface. You need to add it as a column.
Navigate to Keywords in your Google Ads account
Click the Columns icon (the three-column graphic above your keyword table)
Select Modify columns
Expand the Quality Score section
Add these columns: Quality Score, Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, Landing Page Experience
Optionally add the historical versions of each (Quality Score (hist.), etc.) to track changes over time
Click Apply
You’ll now see the 1-10 score alongside the three component ratings for every keyword with enough impression data. Keywords without sufficient data will show a dash.
Worth noting: the Quality Score column shows the most recent score, not a time-weighted average. If you want to track how scores change after optimisation work, you’ll need to either record them manually or use the historical columns with a date filter.
Diagnosing a Low Quality Score
When a keyword’s Quality Score drops below 5, don’t just start tweaking things at random. Work through the components in order of how quickly they can be fixed and how directly they affect performance.
Step 1: Check expected CTR first. If it’s “Below Average”, your ad copy is the most likely problem. This is also the fastest fix – you can write new ads and see impact within days.
Step 2: If eCTR is “Average” or above, check ad relevance. A “Below Average” ad relevance score means there’s a disconnect between your keywords and your ad copy. The keyword might be too broad for the ad group, or your ad text doesn’t include the terms people are actually searching for.
Step 3: Check landing page experience. If the first two components look fine but your Quality Score is still low, the landing page is the weak link. This takes longer to fix but often has the biggest downstream impact on conversions too.
Step 4: If all three show “Average” and your score is still below 5, the issue is likely competition-driven. You’re not underperforming in any single area, but competitors are strong across all three. In this case, you’ll need to outperform on at least one component to push the score up.
This diagnostic order works because it follows a fastest-fix-first logic. Ad copy changes take hours. Ad group restructuring takes a day. Landing page improvements can take weeks.
Improving Expected Click-Through Rate
Expected CTR is fundamentally about how compelling your ads are relative to competitors’ ads for the same search terms. A few approaches that consistently move this metric.
Write headlines that match search intent directly. If someone searches “best CRM for small business”, a headline like “Top CRM for Small Teams” will outperform “Cloud Software Solutions” every time. Mirror the language your searchers use.
Test multiple ad variations. Run at least 3 responsive search ad variations per ad group. Give Google enough headline and description options to assemble high-performing combinations. Pin your strongest headlines to position 1 if you have a clear winner, but leave the rest flexible.
Use all relevant ad extensions. Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and call extensions increase your ad’s visual footprint on the results page. More real estate generally means higher CTR – and Google factors extension performance into the expected CTR calculation.
Include numbers and specifics. “4.8-Star Rated” outperforms “Highly Rated”. “Free Delivery Over £50” outperforms “Great Delivery Options”. Specificity builds credibility and draws clicks.
Review your search terms report. You might be showing for searches that don’t match your ad well. Adding negative keywords to filter out irrelevant queries improves your CTR by reducing impressions that were never going to result in clicks.
Improving Ad Relevance
Ad relevance problems almost always trace back to ad group structure. When a single ad group contains keywords with different intent, your ads can’t speak to all of them well.
Tighten your ad group themes. Each ad group should contain keywords that could all be answered by the same ad. “Running shoes men” and “running shoes women” need separate ad groups because the ad copy should differ. “Running shoes” and “trail running shoes” might also benefit from separation.
The SKAG debate. Single Keyword Ad Groups used to be the gold standard for ad relevance. You’d create one ad group per keyword with tailored ad copy. It worked, but it created enormous accounts that were painful to manage. Modern best practice leans toward tightly themed ad groups with 5-15 closely related keywords rather than one keyword per group. You get most of the relevance benefit without the management overhead.
Use keyword insertion carefully. Dynamic keyword insertion ({KeyWord:default}) can boost ad relevance by pulling the actual search term into your headline. But it can also produce awkward or grammatically broken ads if your keywords aren’t well curated. Only use it in ad groups where every keyword reads naturally in a headline.
Match your ad copy to keyword intent. Informational keywords (“how does X work”) need educational ad copy. Commercial keywords (“best X service”) need comparison or value-proposition copy. Transactional keywords (“buy X”) need direct, action-oriented copy. Mismatched intent tanks ad relevance.
Improving Landing Page Experience
Landing page experience is the component most advertisers neglect because it requires effort beyond the Google Ads interface. But it’s also where the biggest quality gaps tend to exist between advertisers.
Speed matters more than you think. Google has been explicit that page load time affects landing page experience scores. Run your landing pages through PageSpeed Insights and address anything flagged as an issue. Aim for a Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds. Heavy images, unoptimised scripts, and slow server response times are the usual culprits.
Mobile experience is non-negotiable. More than half of Google Ads clicks happen on mobile devices. If your landing page has tiny text, horizontal scrolling, or buttons that are hard to tap, your landing page experience score will reflect it. Test every landing page on an actual phone, not just a browser resize.
Content relevance between ad and page. The page needs to deliver what the ad promised. If your ad mentions “free consultation” and the landing page makes no mention of it, that’s a relevance disconnect. The headline on your landing page should closely match the headline in your ad. The offer on the page should match the offer in the ad copy.
Make the page genuinely useful. Google evaluates whether the page provides original, substantive content relevant to the search query. Thin pages with just a form and a stock photo score poorly. Pages with clear information, transparent pricing or process descriptions, and obvious next steps score well.
Navigation and trust signals. Easy-to-find contact information, clear privacy policies, and straightforward navigation all contribute. Pages that feel like they’re hiding something – whether through aggressive pop-ups, buried terms, or no visible business information – get penalised.
Common Quality Score Myths
A few misconceptions that still circulate widely.
“Quality Score is used in the auction.” Not directly. Google uses real-time calculations at auction time that consider the same factors Quality Score measures, plus contextual signals like device, location, and time of day. The Quality Score number you see in your account is a simplified, static diagnostic. Think of it as a report card, not a live input.
“Pausing a keyword resets its Quality Score.” It doesn’t. When you pause and re-enable a keyword, it retains its historical Quality Score data. You can’t game the system by pausing poor performers and restarting them.
“My account has an overall Quality Score.” There’s no account-level Quality Score. The metric exists at the keyword level only. Some advertisers calculate a weighted average across their keywords (weighted by impressions or spend), which can be useful for tracking trends, but it’s not a metric Google assigns or uses.
“Quality Score updates instantly.” It doesn’t. Quality Score updates require a meaningful volume of exact-match impressions. Changes to ad copy or landing pages might take days or weeks to reflect in the score, depending on your keyword’s search volume.
“A low Quality Score means Google won’t show my ads.” Low Quality Score increases your costs and may reduce your impression share if your bids aren’t high enough to compensate. But Google will still enter your ads into auctions if your bid meets the threshold. You’ll just pay more per click.
Quality Score for Modern Campaign Types
If you’re running Performance Max, Smart Shopping, or other automated campaign types, the traditional Quality Score metric doesn’t apply in the way you might expect.
Performance Max doesn’t report Quality Score. PMAX campaigns use “Ad Strength” instead – a separate metric that evaluates the creative assets you’ve provided (headlines, descriptions, images, videos). Ad Strength rates your asset mix from “Poor” to “Excellent” based on quantity, variety, and relevance.
Ad Strength and Quality Score aren’t the same thing. Ad Strength is about whether you’ve given Google enough diverse creative material to work with. Quality Score is about how well your keywords, ads, and landing pages align. They’re measuring different problems.
What to focus on instead for PMAX. Since you can’t see keyword-level Quality Scores in PMAX, focus on providing strong creative assets, clear audience signals, and high-quality landing pages. The underlying auction mechanics still reward relevance and good user experience, even if the diagnostic tool isn’t available.
Display and video campaigns also don’t use traditional Quality Score. Display campaigns have their own quality evaluation based on ad creative performance and landing page experience, but it’s not exposed as a 1-10 score.
Search campaigns remain the Quality Score heartland. If you’re running standard Search campaigns, Quality Score is still your most useful diagnostic tool. For everything else, focus on the metrics that those campaign types actually report.
When to Stop Worrying About Quality Score
There’s a point of diminishing returns with Quality Score optimisation, and most advertisers hit it sooner than they think.
A Quality Score of 7 is genuinely good enough for most keywords. The CPC discount curve flattens significantly above 7, meaning the effort required to push from 7 to 8 or 9 rarely delivers proportional savings. That time is almost always better spent on conversion rate optimisation, bid strategy refinement, or expanding into new keyword territory.
Quality Score also becomes less meaningful as your campaigns mature and you shift toward automated bidding strategies. Target CPA and target ROAS bidding already account for conversion likelihood in their bid calculations. If your automated bidding is hitting your targets, a Quality Score of 6 on a keyword that converts profitably isn’t a problem worth solving.
The real danger is Quality Score below 5. That’s where the cost penalties start compounding and where the diagnostic workflow above earns its keep. Below 5, you’re likely paying a meaningful premium on every click, and there’s almost certainly a fixable problem in one of the three components.
So the practical approach: fix anything below 5, monitor anything between 5 and 7, and leave anything at 7 or above alone unless you’ve genuinely run out of higher-impact optimisation work. Your conversion data will always tell you more about campaign health than Quality Score ever will.
