Quality Score gets treated as a vanity metric to be raised. It is more useful as a diagnostic. It's more useful as a diagnostic: a low score is Google telling you that the promise chain from search to ad to page is broken somewhere.
The three components of Quality Score
- Expected click-through rate — will people click this ad for this query?
- Ad relevance — does the ad match what they searched?
- Landing page experience — does the page deliver what the ad promised, quickly?
Each is rated below average, average or above average. Those ratings are more actionable than the 1–10 number.
Why it matters commercially
Higher quality means you pay less for the same position, or get a better position for the same bid. On a tight budget this is one of the few levers that increases volume without increasing spend.
Fixing each component
Low expected CTR
Usually the ad is generic. Put the specifics in: the city, the price, the timeline, the thing that distinguishes you. Ads that qualify as well as attract tend to earn better click-through from the people who matter.
Low ad relevance
Almost always structural — the ad group covers too many unrelated keywords, so no single ad can match them all. Split by theme so the ad can echo the query. Structure guidance here.
Low landing page experience
The most commonly ignored and the most commercially important, because it's also costing you conversions:
- The page doesn't mention the thing they searched for.
- It's slow on a mid-range phone on 4G.
- Paid traffic is going to a homepage rather than a page about the offer.
- The offer on the page isn't the offer in the ad.
A poor landing page rating is Google telling you the same thing your conversion rate is telling you. It's just less polite about it.
What not to do
- Don't chase 10/10. Some competitive commercial terms will never score high. The business question is whether the traffic converts.
- Don't delete low-score keywords that convert. A 5/10 keyword producing customers is worth more than a 9/10 keyword producing nothing.
- Don't stuff keywords into the page. Relevance is judged on meaning, not density.
A sane review
Once a month, look at your highest-spending keywords and their three component ratings. Fix anything rated below average on the landing page component first — that work improves conversion rate as well as score, which is two returns for one effort.
Then check your search terms report, because irrelevant queries drag relevance down as well as wasting spend.
We go through all of this on every account we take over — see how we run Google Ads.
Optimisation score is a different number with a similar pull on behaviour, and it feeds the partner programme — what the Google Partner badge actually requires explains why a high score is not automatically in your interest.
Questions people ask
What is Quality Score?
Google’s one-to-ten diagnostic of how relevant your keyword, ad and landing page are to a search, built from expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. It is a report on the promise chain rather than a number to optimise directly.
Does Quality Score affect what I pay?
Yes, indirectly. It feeds Ad Rank, so a higher score can win a better position at a lower cost per click. That is why a low score is expensive even when the campaign looks like it is working.
How do I improve a low Quality Score?
Fix whichever component is marked below average rather than all three. Below-average ad relevance usually means the ad group is too broad; below-average landing page experience usually means the page does not repeat the promise the ad made.
Should I chase a ten out of ten?
No. A nine that sells is better than a ten that does not, and some commercially valuable keywords will never score well because the competition is fierce. Use it to find broken promise chains, not as a target.
Want a second pair of eyes on the account? Send us the numbers.