Quality Score is a rating on a scale of 1-10 that Google Ads gives each of your keywords. It is made up of three components: expected click-through rate (CTR), ad relevance (how well the ad matches the search) and landing page experience. It’s how Google rewards relevant ads and penalises random ones.
Why does Quality Score affect what you pay?
Because an ad’s position in the auction comes from your bid multiplied by quality. An advertiser with a Quality Score of 8 can pay less per click than a competitor with a score of 4 and still rank higher. In practice the differences can be large: raising your score from 4 to 7 at the same bids can noticeably lower the CPC across the whole campaign. It’s the cheapest optimisation lever there is, because it doesn’t take a single extra penny of budget.
How do you improve Quality Score?
In our Google Ads campaigns, we take three steps. First, tighter ad groups in which the keyword actually appears in the ad text (the keyword ‘website quote’ triggers an ad specifically about website quotes). Second, a landing page that answers the search query, loads fast and reads well on a phone. Third, regularly clearing out keywords that generate impressions without clicks, because they drag down expected CTR. You can check your score in Google Ads by adding the ‘Quality Score’ column at keyword level.
