Google Ads Quality Score: What It Is and How to Improve It
Quality Score is Google’s 1 to 10 rating of how relevant your keyword, ad, and landing page are to a searcher. A higher score earns a better ad position at a lower cost per click. The three components, expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience, each have specific levers. This guide breaks down what moves them and what does not.
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- Ad quality affects where your ad appears and what you pay. Quality Score is Google’s diagnostic for it, not an input in the auction.
- The three components score independently, identify which is Below Average and work on that one specifically.
- Google doesn’t publish weights for the three components. Treat every “Below average” status as a priority, whichever component it is.
- Landing page experience accounts for relevance, speed, and transparency, message match is the lever most accounts ignore.
Why Quality Score matters economically
Quality Score isn’t a vanity metric, but it isn’t a lever you can pull either. Google describes it as a diagnostic tool and says it is not an input in the ad auction. What matters is what it points at: the quality of your ad and landing page, which Google does use when your ad competes. Google says higher ad quality generally leads to better performance, including better ad positions and lower cost. When one of the three components is rated below average, you may be paying more, or showing lower, than you need to.
Google doesn’t publish an exact saving for a given score, so treat any figure that says an 8 pays a set percentage less than a 4 as a rough guide, not a rule. The useful habit is to find the components rated below average and fix those, then judge the result by cost per conversion, not by the 1 to 10 number.
What Quality Score is
Quality Score is a per-keyword diagnostic that Google calculates by comparing your keyword, ad, and landing page combination against what it observes across all advertisers bidding on that keyword. It is a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest, and it is updated based on recent performance signals rather than set once at campaign creation.
Importantly, Quality Score is a reporting metric, not the live signal used in each auction. The live signal is auction-time quality, which Google calculates per query using more granular real-time data. Quality Score is the smoothed, averaged view of that underlying quality that you can see in the interface. Moving Quality Score in the reports requires sustained performance improvement, not a single good day.
The three components
Google breaks Quality Score into three sub-scores, each rated as Above Average, Average, or Below Average.
| Component | What It Measures |
|---|---|
| Expected CTR | How likely your ad is to be clicked when shown for this keyword, compared to other advertisers |
| Ad relevance | How closely your ad copy matches the intent of the keyword |
| Landing page experience | How useful and relevant your landing page is for people who clicked the ad for this keyword |
Each status compares you with other advertisers whose ads showed for the same searches over the last 90 days. Source: Google Ads Help, About Quality Score.
Each component scores independently. A keyword can have Above Average expected CTR but Below Average landing page experience, giving an overall middling score. The component scores tell you which lever to pull first.
How it affects Ad Rank and CPC
Ad Rank decides whether your ad can show and where it appears. Google says it is based on six factors: your bid, the quality of your ads and landing page, Ad Rank thresholds, how competitive the auction is, the context of the search, and the expected impact of your ad assets and other formats. It is calculated at auction time, so it can change from one search to the next. You may have seen “bid multiplied by Quality Score” as a simple formula. Google doesn’t describe the auction that way, and it says Quality Score is not an input.
What you pay depends on the auction too. Google says higher quality ads can often lead to lower cost per click, and that you will never be charged more than your maximum CPC for a click unless you use automated bidding. Bidding more is the short-term lever anyone can pull. Improving the quality behind the score is slower, but it can lower what you pay to hold a position. Sources: Google Ads Help, About Ad Rank and About ad quality.
Improving each component
- 01
Expected CTR: write for the intent, not the brand
Expected CTR compares your ad to the norm for that keyword. Ads that name the specific thing the searcher typed convert curiosity into clicks. Use the keyword or close synonym in the headline. Add extensions that expand the ad’s footprint: sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and call extensions all improve expected CTR by giving more real estate for the searcher to find relevance. Remove ads with consistently below-average CTR and replace them with tighter variants.
- 02
Ad relevance: tighten the keyword-to-ad relationship
Ad relevance scores how closely the ad copy reflects the keyword’s intent. Broad ad groups where one generic ad serves twenty different keywords produce average or below-average ad relevance across most of them. Tighter theme grouping, where the ad headline directly uses or reflects the keyword, is the structural fix. This does not require single keyword ad groups (which create management overhead) but it does require that each ad is written for a specific intent cluster rather than a general category.
- 03
Landing page experience: relevance, speed, and transparency
Google assesses landing page experience based on three things: how relevant the page content is to the keyword and ad (message match), how fast the page loads, and how transparently the page presents its content without intrusive interstitials or unclear navigation. Dedicated landing pages that continue the ad’s specific promise outperform generic homepages or service hubs on all three. The LPO framework covers the full page-level approach; the above-the-fold guide covers the critical first section Google reads first.
Common misconceptions
- Quality Score cannot be gamed by pausing keywords. Pausing a low-score keyword removes the damage from active auctions but does not improve the score of other keywords. It also does not reset when you re-enable it.
- A high Quality Score does not guarantee conversions. Quality Score measures relevance and expected clicks, not conversion intent. A highly relevant ad to a poorly converting landing page can have a Quality Score of 9 and a cost per conversion that makes the campaign unprofitable.
- Brand keywords scoring 9 to 10 is expected and irrelevant. Brand keywords nearly always score highly because the relevance match is perfect. The commercially meaningful Quality Score work is on non-brand keywords where competition is real and score differences change economics.
- Quality Score is not used for Shopping or PMax. It applies specifically to Search campaigns with keywords. Shopping and Performance Max use product data quality and landing page signals in different ways, covered in the feed optimisation guide and PMax controls guide respectively.
Quality Score work is a core part of our paid media service: it ties creative, account structure, and landing page work to three ratings you can check keyword by keyword, instead of three separate workstreams. Professional services and SaaS accounts, where CPCs on head terms run high, are where a lower cost per click is worth the most: see our SaaS and professional services pages for the full context.
Frequently Asked Questions
Quality Score is a diagnostic metric Google assigns to each keyword in your account on a scale of 1 to 10. It reflects Google’s estimate of how relevant your ad and landing page are to someone searching that keyword, relative to other advertisers. A score of 7 or above is generally considered healthy; below 5 indicates a relevance problem that is likely increasing your costs.
Not directly. Google says Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction. What it reports on, the quality of your ad and landing page, does affect Ad Rank and cost per click: Google says higher quality ads typically cost less per click than lower quality ones. Use the score to find which of the three components is weak, then fix that.
Google doesn’t set a target score. Many advertisers treat 7 or above as a rough sign that a keyword, ad and landing page are aligned, but Google says to use the score to diagnose low quality ads rather than to chase the number. A more useful check is the status of each component: Above average, Average or Below average.
Quality Score looks at expected CTR relative to other advertisers for the same keyword, not your historical absolute CTR. If you are showing a high CTR on a broad keyword with low competition, you may be getting clicks but Google’s benchmark for that keyword may be even higher. Landing page experience is also scored independently, so a high CTR with a slow or irrelevant landing page still produces a low overall score.
It’s based on three components: expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Each is rated Above average, Average or Below average against other advertisers whose ads showed for the same searches over the last 90 days, and Google combines them into a 1 to 10 score for each keyword. Google doesn’t publish the formula.
No. Google says Quality Score is not a key performance indicator and should not be optimised or aggregated with the rest of your data. Use it to spot ads with a weaker user experience, then judge success by conversions and cost per conversion.
A dash means there aren’t enough searches that exactly match the keyword to work out a score. Google notes that Quality Score is based on historical impressions for exact searches, so low-volume keywords often have none.
Open the Keywords view, choose Columns, then Modify columns, and add Quality Score along with expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience. Quality Score is reported per keyword, not per account.
No. Ad Strength is a guide to how complete and varied a responsive search ad is. Quality Score is a keyword-level diagnostic based on expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience.
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