Understanding Quality Score (and How to Improve It)

Quality Score is Google’s 1 to 10 diagnostic rating of how relevant your keyword, ad and landing page are to the person searching. Understanding Quality Score matters because it shapes your cost per click and your ad position, but the number itself is not what Google uses in the live auction. Read it as a health check, not a scoreboard, and it becomes one of the most useful columns in your account.

This post covers how the score is built, where to find it, and the specific changes that actually move it. It also covers something most articles skip: how to tell the difference between a low score you can fix and a low score you should ignore.

What Is Quality Score?

Quality Score is reported at the keyword level on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is poor and 10 is excellent. Google calculates it from your keyword’s historical performance on exact-match searches, then displays it as a rough estimate of quality relative to other advertisers bidding on the same term.

The score you see is an aggregate snapshot, updated regularly, and it can shift as you accumulate impression data. New keywords often show a placeholder value of null or a dash until they have collected enough impressions, which is usually a few hundred at minimum. That is normal and not a sign of anything wrong.

The important nuance: the visible 1 to 10 figure is a simplified summary. In the actual auction, Google calculates real-time ad quality using the searcher’s device, location, time of day, query wording and other context signals. Your reported Quality Score is the retrospective average of all that, rounded into a single digit.

What Are the Components of a Quality Score?

Three sub-scores feed the number, and each is reported as Above average, Average or Below average rather than as a figure:

• Expected click through rate: the likelihood that someone will click your ad when it shows for this keyword, normalised for ad position. This is usually the heaviest-weighted component.
• Ad relevance: how closely your ad copy matches the intent behind the keyword and the language people actually search with.
• Landing page experience: whether the page you send traffic to is relevant, original, easy to use on mobile, transparent about your business, and reasonably fast.

Google’s own documentation on Quality Score confirms these three inputs but has never published a weighting or a Quality Score formula. Anyone selling you an exact calculation is guessing. What you can rely on is the direction of travel: fix the below-average components and the composite number climbs.

How Quality Score Affects Cost and Position

Ad quality is one input into Ad Rank, alongside your bid, the competitiveness of the auction, the context of the search, and the expected impact of your extensions and ad formats. Google explains the mechanics in its guide to Ad Rank, and the practical consequence is straightforward: better quality lets you hold a given position at a lower bid.

In accounts I audit, the swing between a keyword scoring 4 and the same keyword scoring 8 is often 30% to 50% on cost per click for identical positions. High quality also unlocks eligibility for certain ad formats and extensions, and it lowers the first-page bid estimates Google shows you. Low quality does the reverse: you pay a premium to appear at all, or you stop appearing for competitive queries.

How to Measure Quality Score in Google Ads

The score lives in the Keywords table. Add the columns manually because they are hidden by default:

1. Open Campaigns > Audiences, keywords and content > Search keywords.
2. Click Columns, then Modify columns.
3. Under Quality Score, tick Quality Score, Exp. CTR, Ad relevance and Landing page exp.
4. Also tick the historical versions (Qual. Score (hist.) and the three historical component columns) so you can see how the score looked during past date ranges.
5. Save the column set so you can reapply it in one click later.

The historical columns are the part most people never switch on, and they are the ones that tell you whether a change worked. Current Quality Score always shows today’s value regardless of the date range selected, so without the historical view you cannot prove that last month’s landing page rebuild improved anything. There is no reliable third-party Google quality score checker, because the data only exists inside your own account.

The Gap Most Guides Miss: Diagnose Before You Optimise

Chasing the composite number is a trap. A keyword at 5 with all three components at Average has no obvious fix, while a keyword at 5 with Below average ad relevance has a very obvious one. The status columns are the diagnosis; the digit is just the temperature.

Sort your keywords by cost, descending, and look only at the top 20 spenders. Then match the pattern:

• Below average expected CTR, everything else fine: your ad is not compelling enough for this specific query, or the keyword is too broad for your offer. Rewrite headlines or tighten your match types.
• Below average ad relevance: the keyword sits in the wrong ad group. Move it to a group where the ad copy can mirror the search language.
• Below average landing page experience: the destination page is generic, slow, thin or mismatched. This is a website problem, not an ads problem.
• All three below average: the keyword probably does not belong in the account. Pause it and reinvest the budget.

Weight your effort by spend, not by how ugly the score looks. A keyword scoring 3 that spends £4 a month is noise. A keyword scoring 6 that spends £900 a month is where the money is.

How Do You Improve Quality Score?

Lift expected click through rate

Expected CTR responds to relevance and to how your offer reads against the competing ads on the page. Put the searcher’s exact phrasing in headline one, add a specific differentiator (price, timeframe, guarantee, location) in headline two, and use all available assets so your ad occupies more space. Our breakdown of what makes a high-converting search ad covers the structure in detail.

Tighten ad relevance

Relevance is mostly an account structure question. Group keywords by shared intent rather than by topic, keep ad groups small enough that one set of ads can genuinely speak to every keyword inside, and mine your search terms report weekly for queries that deserve their own group. Solid keyword research built for paid search prevents most relevance problems before they start.

Improve landing page experience

This is where the biggest and slowest gains sit, because it is a site build task rather than a settings change. Google looks for original, useful content, clear navigation, mobile usability, honest information about your business, and reasonable load speed:

• Match the page headline to the ad headline so the click feels continuous.
• Get the primary action above the fold and repeat it further down.
• Target a largest contentful paint under 2.5 seconds; see how to speed up WordPress for better Core Web Vitals.
• Publish real trust signals: address, phone number, pricing guidance, reviews, policies.
• Send each ad group to the most specific page you have, not to the homepage.

Many of the same fixes help organic performance, which is why a lot of the items in our list of quick WordPress SEO improvements double as landing page experience work. If you are new to making these edits yourself, our beginner’s tour of the WordPress dashboard shows you where everything lives.

A Realistic Improvement Timeline

Quality Score updates lag your changes because it is built on accumulated impression data. Expect roughly this pace:

1. Week 1: add the columns, audit your top 20 spenders, pause the hopeless keywords, add negatives.
2. Weeks 2 to 4: restructure ad groups and rewrite ad copy for below-average relevance keywords.
3. Weeks 4 to 8: rebuild or create dedicated landing pages for your highest-spend groups.
4. Weeks 8 to 12: compare historical Quality Score columns period on period and reallocate budget toward the groups that improved.

One caution: treat Quality Score as a leading indicator, not a goal. An account averaging 6 with a 4% conversion rate beats an account averaging 9 that converts at 1%. Optimise for profit, and use quality as the lever that makes that profit cheaper to buy.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Quality Score?

Quality Score is a 1 to 10 diagnostic in Google Ads that estimates how relevant your keyword, ad and landing page are compared with other advertisers targeting the same term. It is reported per keyword, updates as impressions accumulate, and is built from three components rather than from a single metric.

How do you improve Quality Score?

Fix whichever of the three components reads Below average, starting with your highest-spend keywords. In practice that means rewriting ad copy to echo the search query, splitting oversized ad groups so one ad can serve every keyword in it, and sending clicks to a fast, specific landing page instead of your homepage.

How do you measure Quality Score?

Add the Quality Score columns to your Search keywords table via Columns then Modify columns, and include the four historical versions. Current scores ignore your selected date range, so the historical columns are the only way to measure whether a change made a difference.

What are the components of a Quality Score?

There are three: expected click through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Each is shown as Above average, Average or Below average, and Google has never published the exact weighting, though expected CTR generally carries the most influence.

Is there a Quality Score formula or percentage?

No published formula exists, and Quality Score is not expressed as a percentage. Estimates that convert the 1 to 10 figure into a cost discount are third-party approximations, useful for illustration but not something to plan a budget around.

Want a Second Opinion on Your Account?

If your Quality Scores are stuck in the 4 to 6 range and you are not sure whether the problem is structure, copy or the website itself, an audit will tell you quickly. Get in touch with SEO Quirk and we will look at your top-spending keywords and show you which fix pays back first, or read more about working with a local agency.