Quality Score

Quality Score is a diagnostic number from 1 to 10 that Google Ads shows for each keyword. Google's help page calls it a tool that estimates how your ads and landing pages compare with other advertisers' for the same searches, and says plainly that it is not a measure of performance. Behind the number sit three components, each rated Above average, Average, or Below average: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. To see them, open the Keywords table, click the columns icon, and add Quality Score, Landing Page Exp., Exp. CTR, and Ad Relevance. The (hist.) versions show past values, and segmenting by day shows change over time. The historical columns, marked (hist.), let you see how a score looked at the time, which helps you tell a real change from a one-day shift.

The most important sentence on Google's page is that Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction. The live auction uses Ad Rank, which Google recalculates for every search from six factors: your bid, ad and landing page quality, Ad Rank thresholds, auction competitiveness, search context, and the expected impact of ad assets and formats. Google's Ad Rank page says your quality is summarized in Quality Score, and that Ad Rank uses auction-time measurements of expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience. So the number is a summary of the same ingredients, shown to you after the fact. It is a report card, not the dial. Check the data volume before reading anything into a score, since keywords with very few impressions can show a rating that says little.

Quality Score connects to cost and eligibility rather than to a single setting. Google says higher quality often means lower cost per click, and quality affects whether your ads can show at all and whether assets such as sitelinks can appear. It is based on historical impressions for exact searches, so changing match types does not change the score, and a dash means there are not enough exact-match searches to calculate one. Components are rated against other advertisers whose ads showed on the same searches over the last 90 days, so a Below average rating can come from a competitor getting better as much as from your account getting worse. Account structure affects all three components, so groups with a tight theme tend to give clearer ratings than a mix of unrelated keywords.

Most mistakes come from treating the number as a goal. Google says it is not a key performance indicator and should not be optimized or aggregated with other data. People chase a 10 by bidding only on brand terms or stuffing keywords into ads, which can raise the number while sales fall. A keyword with a score of 4 that drives profitable leads is better than a 9 that drives nothing. Another mistake is averaging scores across the account to get a single health figure. The ratings are per keyword and depend on search volume, so low-volume terms are noisy. Resist the urge to delete low-score keywords that convert. Judge keywords by profit first, and use the score only to decide where to look.

The best use is as a finder. Filter your keywords by spend, then sort by Quality Score and look only at the expensive ones with a Below average component. Whichever component is below average tells you where to work: split the ad group and rewrite ads for ad relevance, test new copy for expected CTR, fix the page for landing page experience. Re-check after a few weeks, since the ratings rely on accumulated data. Do not touch keywords that have a low score but strong profit; they are doing their job. Keep a note of each change you make with the date, so you can connect a later rating shift to its cause.