What Is Google Ads Quality Score and How Do You Improve It?
Quality Score quietly controls how much you pay per click and where your ad shows up. Here's what actually feeds into it and how to raise it.
Quick answer
Quality Score is Google's 1–10 rating of how relevant and useful your keyword, ad and landing page are to a searcher, and it's built from three factors: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. A higher Quality Score generally lowers your cost per click and improves ad position for the same bid, so improving it is one of the most direct ways to make a Search account more efficient without increasing budget.
The three components of Quality Score
Expected click-through rate estimates how likely your ad is to be clicked when shown for a given keyword, based on historical performance of similar ads. Ad relevance measures how closely your ad's message matches the intent behind the keyword it's triggered by. Landing page experience evaluates whether the page a click lands on is relevant, fast, and easy to use for that specific search. Google scores each of these individually (as "below average," "average," or "above average") and combines them into the overall 1–10 score.
Why it affects what you actually pay
Google's ad auction weighs your bid against your Quality Score to calculate Ad Rank. Two advertisers can bid the same amount, but the one with a higher Quality Score typically pays less per click and can rank higher, because Google factors relevance into the auction rather than treating it as a pure bidding war. This is why two accounts targeting identical keywords can have very different cost-per-click outcomes.
Five ways to improve Quality Score
- Tighten ad groups around single themes. An ad group with 30 loosely related keywords will always underperform one built around 3–5 tightly related keywords, because the ad copy can speak directly to a narrower intent.
- Mirror keyword language in ad copy. If someone searches "affordable CRM for startups," an ad headline that says exactly that performs better than generic copy about "the best business software."
- Speed up and simplify the landing page. Page load time, mobile responsiveness and a clear match between ad promise and page content are all part of landing page experience — a slow, cluttered page drags Quality Score down even with great ad copy.
- Use negative keywords aggressively. Filtering out irrelevant search terms protects your click-through rate from being diluted by clicks (or non-clicks) on searches your ad shouldn't have shown for in the first place.
- Test ad copy continuously. Running multiple headline and description variations and letting Google's optimization identify the strongest combinations improves expected CTR over time, which directly feeds Quality Score.
Does Quality Score matter for Performance Max?
Quality Score, in its classic Search form, is specific to keyword-based Search campaigns. Performance Max doesn't report a Quality Score directly, but the same underlying principles — relevance between creative, landing page and audience intent — still influence how efficiently a PMax campaign spends its budget.
Quick questions
Quality Score is visible at the keyword level inside Google Ads by adding the "Quality Score" columns in the keywords view, which also break down the three individual status components.
Yes — it's recalculated continuously based on recent performance, so changes to ad copy, landing pages or search-term relevance can shift it within days rather than requiring months.
No. A Quality Score of 6-7 is often perfectly workable; the practical goal is steady improvement over time and avoiding the below-average range, not chasing a perfect score.