Google Ads Quality Score: The Complete Guide to Lowering Your CPC

Key takeaways

• Quality Score is a 1 to 10 diagnostic, not an auction input. Google reads three components underneath it, and you improve the score by improving them, never by chasing the number.
• The three components are expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience, each rated below average, average or above average, which tells you exactly what to fix.
• Expected CTR and landing page experience carry the most weight, so they are usually where your effort pays off fastest.
• A higher score lowers your cost per click for the same position, because quality feeds the Ad Rank that sets your price in the auction.
• Prioritise by spend, not by score. Fix the weak component on your highest-spend keywords first, and don’t delete low-score keywords that still convert.

Every click you pay for in Google Ads is priced partly on something you can’t bid your way out of: how relevant Google thinks your ad and landing page are. Ignore it, and you quietly pay more per click than a competitor sitting in the same position. That signal has a name, Quality Score, and once you understand what it measures you can bring your cost per click down without raising a cent on your bids.

What is Google Ads Quality Score?

Google Ads Quality Score is a 1 to 10 diagnostic rating, assigned at the keyword level in Search campaigns, that estimates how relevant and useful your ad and landing page are to someone searching for that keyword. A score of 1 is the lowest and 10 is the highest.

The word “diagnostic” matters. Google states plainly that Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction. It is a health indicator, not a lever you pull and not a number the auction reads. You improve the three things underneath it, and the score follows.

Think of it the way Google does, as a warning light on your dashboard. The light tells you something needs attention. You don’t fix the car by staring at the light, and you don’t fix your campaign by chasing the number. You fix the components behind it.

Visible Quality Score vs auction Quality Score

Here is the part most guides skip. There are really two Quality Scores in your account, and only one of them is visible to you.

The visible Quality Score is the 1 to 10 number in your keywords table. It is based on the historical performance of exact-match impressions for that keyword over roughly the prior 90 days, so it is backward-looking and updates as data comes in. This is the score you can see, track and work on.

The auction Quality Score is different. Google works out a real-time quality assessment every single time your keyword is eligible for an auction, using the live search context. You never see this number, and with millions of auctions it would be meaningless to display. What you can do is influence it, because improving your visible score improves the underlying signals the auction reads.

So when you optimise the visible score, you are not gaming a vanity metric. You are improving the same three components, expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience, that feed the real-time score deciding whether your ad shows and what you pay.

The three components of Quality Score

Quality Score is built from three components, and Google rates each one as below average, average or above average against other advertisers showing for the same keyword. Those labels are where the real diagnostic value sits: they tell you which lever to pull.

Expected click-through rate, and what a good CTR looks like

Expected CTR is Google’s prediction of how likely someone is to click your ad when it shows for that keyword, based on your past click-through rate. A high expected CTR tells Google that searchers find your ad worth clicking.

The obvious next question, and one most guides dodge, is what actually counts as a good click-through rate. There is no single number, because it depends heavily on the type of keyword. A brand term behaves nothing like an awareness term. In our experience running Singapore search accounts at Roots Digital, the healthy ranges break down roughly like this:

Keyword type	Typical CTR	Typical avg. CPC	Typical conversion rate
Brand	15% to 25%	Under $3	20% to 25%
Category / competitor	4.5% to 6.5%	$3 to $5	3% to 5%
Awareness	1.2% to 2%	$3 to $5	Under 1%

These are our own working benchmarks, drawn from historical campaign data rather than any published “industry average,” which we don’t rely on because there is no way to validate the figures behind them. Treat the bands as a sense-check: a category keyword sitting at 2% CTR is a signal to look at your ad relevance, not proof that the keyword is doomed.

Ad relevance, and how to fix a “below average” rating

Ad relevance measures how closely your ad copy matches the intent behind the keyword. When your ad speaks directly to the search, it reads as relevant. When it is generic, it doesn’t.

A “below average” ad relevance rating is one of the most fixable problems in the account, and the fix is structural. The lever is keyword-rich ad copy: pull the target keywords from that specific ad group into your headlines so the ad answers the query directly. In a responsive search ad, this usually means reserving several headlines to mirror the ad group’s keywords, with the remaining headlines carrying your unique selling points and value propositions.

The reason a rating stays below average is almost always that the ad group is too broad. If one ad group holds keywords with different intents, no single ad can be relevant to all of them. Tightening the group so every keyword shares a theme lets the ad match all of them at once, which is the single highest-leverage move for ad relevance.

Landing page experience

Landing page experience rates how useful and relevant your page is to someone who clicks the ad. Google weighs relevance to the query, useful and original content, transparency about your business, and how easy the page is to navigate, especially on mobile.

Load speed feeds into this too. A page that is slow or hard to use on a phone drags the rating down regardless of how good the content is. The practical test is simple: when someone lands from your ad, can they find what the ad promised quickly, on the device they are actually using?

How is Quality Score calculated? The formula

Google has never published the exact arithmetic behind Quality Score. What we have is a well-supported reverse-engineering: an analysis of more than 15,000 accounts, published through Search Engine Land, that models the score as a points system.

Each component contributes points based on its rating, and the points sum to a score out of 10:

Component	Above average	Average	Below average
Expected CTR	3.5 points	1.75 points	0 points
Landing page experience	3.5 points	1.75 points	0 points
Ad relevance	2 points	1 point	0 points

The formula is then:

Quality Score = 1 + expected CTR points + ad relevance points + landing page experience points

A keyword rated average on all three scores 1 + 1.75 + 1 + 1.75 = 5.5, which Google rounds to 6. That is why “average” often shows as a 6, not a 5.

Two things follow from the point weights. Expected CTR and landing page experience each carry more weight than ad relevance, so improving either has roughly twice the impact of improving ad relevance. And this is a third-party estimate, not a Google figure, so treat it as a rough map of where your effort pays off, not gospel.

The levels of Quality Score

The keyword-level score is the only one Google shows you, but it is not the only place quality is assessed. Understanding the levels helps you diagnose a problem that keyword-level data alone won’t explain.

Keyword-level Quality Score

This is the visible 1 to 10 score in your keywords table. It is the one Google reports, and it is tied to the historical performance of that keyword, its ad and its landing page.

Ad group-level quality

Google does not show a Quality Score for the ad group, but the ad group’s structure shapes every keyword score inside it. A tightly themed ad group tends to lift the scores of all its keywords at once, because a single ad can be relevant to every keyword in the group.

Campaign-level quality

Campaigns are usually organised around a theme, such as brand versus non-brand. Looking at how your keyword scores cluster by campaign shows you whether a whole area of the account is struggling, which points to a structural fix rather than a per-keyword one.

Account-level quality

Account-level quality is widely accepted to exist, though Google doesn’t display or officially confirm a single number for it. It reflects the historical performance of everything in the account, which is one reason a well-run account tends to earn stronger scores on new keywords faster.

Landing page-level signals

Because landing page experience is scored per destination, several keywords pointing at the same weak page can all inherit a below-average rating. Fixing one page can therefore lift the scores of every keyword sending traffic to it.

Display Network quality

Quality on the Google Display Network is assessed differently from Search. It uses its own signals suited to placements and audiences rather than search queries, so a strong Search score tells you little about Display performance.

Quality Score vs Ad Rank: how they relate but differ

Quality Score and Ad Rank get confused constantly, so it is worth being precise. Quality Score is a diagnostic you read. Ad Rank is the calculation that actually decides your fate in each auction.

Ad Rank is a set of values Google works out every auction to decide whether your ad shows, and if so, in what position. It draws on your bid, the quality of your ad and landing page, the Ad Rank thresholds, how competitive the auction is, the search context, and the expected impact of your assets and formats.

You will often see Ad Rank taught as “bid times Quality Score.” That is a teaching simplification, and a useful one, but Google has never published that equation and quality here means the real-time assessment, not the visible score. The relationship it captures is real: raise quality and you can win a better position without raising your bid.

The practical takeaway is the one Google states directly. Even when a competitor bids more than you, you can still win a higher position at a lower price by being more relevant. Quality is the lever that lets a smaller budget outrank a bigger one.

Why Quality Score matters: CPC, position and ROI

Quality Score matters because it sits in the part of the auction that sets your cost. Better quality signals push your Ad Rank up, which earns you a better position, and often at a lower cost per click than a less relevant competitor pays for the same spot.

The mechanism behind the cost saving is the auction itself. Google runs a modified second-price auction: you pay only what is minimally required to clear the Ad Rank thresholds and beat the Ad Rank of the advertiser directly below you, rounded up by a cent. Because quality feeds your Ad Rank, stronger quality lowers the price you need to pay to hold your position.

There is one nuance worth keeping. Moving up a position isn’t always cheaper per click: a higher slot can carry a higher cost even as quality improves the maths in your favour. The point is not to chase the top slot at any price. It is to make sure you are never paying a quality surcharge to sit where you already are.

At scale, this compounds. A small per-click saving on one keyword is trivial, but the same saving across thousands of clicks a month is the difference between a campaign that returns and one that leaks budget. That is the real reason to care about the three components underneath the score.

What counts as a good Quality Score?

There is no official “good” threshold, but practitioner consensus and the point weights give a clear working answer. Google rates the average keyword at around 5 to 6, so anything above that puts you ahead of most advertisers.

Good benchmarks, and branded vs non-branded

As a rule of thumb, treat 7 to 10 as strong, 5 to 6 as average with room to improve, and 1 to 4 as actively costing you money. The realistic target depends on the keyword type.

For non-branded keywords, a 7 is a genuinely good score and worth aiming for. For branded keywords, where your ad, keyword and landing page all revolve around your own name, you can and should expect 9 to 10, because the relevance is almost guaranteed. Chasing a 10 on every non-branded term, by contrast, hits diminishing returns fast, and the effort is usually better spent lifting a cluster of 3s and 4s.

What a low Quality Score is costing you

A low score is not just a bad grade. It means you are paying a surcharge to hold the same position a more relevant competitor holds for less, because your weaker quality signals drag down your Ad Rank.

Push a score low enough and the cost stops being the issue, because your ad may not clear the Ad Rank threshold and simply won’t show at all. This is also why bidding on a competitor’s brand name tends to run expensive: you cannot put their brand in your ad or on your landing page, so ad relevance and landing page experience stay low by design, and you pay for the gap. Sometimes that trade is still worth it, but you should make it knowing the quality tax you are accepting.

How to check your Quality Score in Google Ads

Google reports Quality Score at the keyword level, but the columns are hidden by default. You add them once and they stay.

Add the Quality Score columns

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account and click Keywords in the page menu to open the search keywords page.
2. Click the Columns icon above the statistics table, then choose Modify columns.
3. Select Quality Score.
4. Tick the attributes you want to track: current Quality Score, expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience. Add the historical versions too if you want to see how the score has moved over time.
5. Click Apply.

Your keyword table now shows the 1 to 10 score alongside the three component ratings, so you can see at a glance which keywords are weak and, more usefully, which component is dragging each one down. For a quick check on a single keyword, hover over the speech-bubble icon next to its status.

Why you can’t see ad group, campaign or account scores

Google only surfaces the keyword-level number. There is no button that shows an ad group, campaign or account Quality Score. If you want a view at those levels, you work it out yourself, usually by weighting each keyword’s score by its impressions so that high-traffic keywords count for more. That weighting is also how you decide where to start, which is the first step of actually improving the score.

How to improve your Quality Score

You improve a Quality Score by fixing the three components underneath it, working from the highest-leverage change down. Because expected CTR and landing page experience carry the most weight, the moves that lift those matter most, but they all start with account structure, because structure is what makes an ad relevant in the first place.

Tighten your account and ad group organisation

The single biggest lever on Quality Score is how tightly your ad groups are themed. When every keyword in an ad group shares one intent, a single ad can speak to all of them, and both ad relevance and expected CTR rise together.

The practical rule is to keep each ad group narrow. A good SEM account structure groups keywords so specifically that you can write one ad that genuinely matches every keyword in the group. When a group sprawls across different intents, that becomes impossible and the scores slide.

So when should you split an ad group into two? Ask three questions of the keywords sitting together:

• Do they mean different things to the searcher? “Cheap running shoes” and “trail running shoes” are different intents.
• Would they need a different ad to be answered well?
• Would they send the visitor to a different landing page?

If the answer to any of these is yes, split them into separate ad groups. Each new group then gets its own tightly matched ad and destination, which is exactly what the quality signals reward.

Improve expected CTR through ad testing

Expected CTR improves when your ads earn clicks, and the reliable way to find clickable ads is to test them. Run a few ads in each ad group and let the data show you which resonates.

Judge the test on the right metric. A high click-through rate is not the goal in itself: an ad can pull clicks and still fail to drive revenue. Look at conversions and revenue per impression, keep the ad that performs, and pause the ones that don’t. Over time this steadily lifts the expected CTR of the keywords in that group.

Write intent-matched ad copy

The fastest way to raise ad relevance is to mirror the keyword in the ad. When your target keyword appears in the headline, both the searcher and Google see an immediate match.

In practice, take the keywords for that ad group and work them into several of your responsive search ad headlines, then use the remaining headlines for your value propositions, offers and calls to action. This is where good ad copywriting techniques matter: the copy has to read naturally and persuade, not just stuff in a keyword. The aim is an ad that is obviously about what the person searched for.

Improve your landing page experience

Landing page experience rewards pages that deliver what the ad promised. The page should match the ad’s message, answer the query quickly, and make the next step obvious. If your ad sells a specific service, the visitor should land on that service, not a generic homepage.

This is conversion work as much as quality work, and the two reinforce each other. Sharpening a page’s relevance and clarity through conversion rate optimisation tends to lift both the Quality Score signal and the actual conversion rate at the same time.

Fix page speed and Core Web Vitals

Speed is part of the experience Google measures, and it is often the quiet drag on an otherwise good page. A slow or clumsy mobile page pulls the rating down no matter how relevant the content is.

Run the page through a speed test, look at the mobile experience specifically, and clear the obvious bottlenecks. Our guide on how to measure page speed walks through the checks. Even moving a page from slow to acceptable can shift a landing page experience rating from below average to average.

Use match types and negative keywords deliberately

Your match types decide which searches trigger your ads, and that directly shapes relevance. Broad match reaches more queries but risks showing for searches your ad doesn’t really fit, which drags expected CTR and ad relevance down.

Negative keywords are the counterweight. By excluding terms that don’t fit your offer, you stop your ads showing for irrelevant searches, so the clicks you do get come from people your ad actually matches. Cleaner traffic means stronger quality signals over time.

Diagnose where to start, don’t fix everything

You will not improve every keyword at once, and you shouldn’t try. Weight each keyword’s Quality Score by its impressions and the spend in its ad group, so a low score on a high-traffic, high-spend keyword rises to the top of the list.

That is where the money is. Fixing a below-average component on the keyword burning the most budget moves your results far more than nudging a score on a keyword nobody searches for. Diagnose first, prioritise by spend, then work down the list.

How often is Quality Score updated?

Quality Score updates continuously as new data comes in, not on a fixed schedule. Because it is based on historical impressions for exact searches of your keyword, a high-traffic keyword refreshes quickly while a low-traffic one moves slowly.

Two consequences are worth knowing. First, changing a keyword’s match type won’t change its Quality Score, because the score is tied to exact-match search history, not the match type you have set. Second, if you see a dash (“—”) in the Quality Score column, it means there haven’t been enough exact-match searches to calculate a score yet, not that your score is zero.

Common Quality Score myths and mistakes

Most Quality Score mistakes come from believing the score does something it doesn’t. Clearing up a few myths saves you from wasting effort on things that don’t move it.

Myth: good SEO or organic ranking lifts your Quality Score

It doesn’t. Your organic rankings, backlinks and technical SEO have no bearing on Quality Score, which is measured entirely from the paid ad experience. A site could rank nowhere organically, or even be absent from organic results, and still earn a 10.

Myth: your conversion rate feeds your Quality Score

It doesn’t. Conversions can be almost anything you choose to track, from a sale to a video view, so the data isn’t consistent enough across accounts for Google to use in the score. A high conversion rate is the goal of your campaign, but it is not an input to Quality Score.

Myth: Google Analytics data affects your Quality Score

It doesn’t. Not every advertiser runs Google Analytics, and Google needs signals that exist consistently across all accounts. The score draws on data from your Google Ads account and the landing page you send traffic to, not your analytics.

Myth: your account’s age gives you a Quality Score boost

There is no legacy boost or penalty baked into Quality Score from how old your account is. An established account often earns good scores faster because its keywords have performance history, but age itself is not a bonus you are owed.

Mistake: chasing a 10 at the expense of revenue

The most common mistake is treating the number as the target. Once a component is above average, pushing it further adds nothing to the score, and a keyword can convert profitably at a 6. Deleting low-score keywords that actually make money, just to lift an average, is the same error in reverse. Optimise for revenue, and let the score be the diagnostic it was built to be.

Quality Score beyond Search: Shopping, Display and Microsoft Ads

The Quality Score you have read about so far is a Search Network mechanism. Move outside Search and quality still matters, but it is measured differently. Knowing the difference stops you applying Search tactics where they don’t fit.

Google Shopping has no keyword Quality Score

Shopping campaigns don’t use a keyword-level Quality Score at all, because you don’t bid on keywords in Shopping. Google matches your products to searches using your product feed, so “quality” here means the strength of your feed: accurate titles, clear images, correct attributes and competitive pricing.

If you run Google Shopping ads, the equivalent of improving Quality Score is improving your feed and product data, not writing keyword-rich headlines. The lever moves, even though the goal, showing relevant products to the right searcher, stays the same.

The Display Network uses its own signals

On the Google Display Network, ads show against placements and audiences rather than search queries, so the quality assessment leans on different signals suited to that context. A strong Search Quality Score tells you little about how your Display campaigns are judged, so treat the two as separate systems.

Microsoft Ads assigns its own Quality Score

If you also advertise on Microsoft Ads, formerly Bing Ads, you will find a familiar system. Microsoft assigns a Quality Score to your keywords on the same 1 to 10 scale, built from comparable ideas of expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page relevance.

The components rhyme with Google’s, so the same discipline carries over: tight ad groups, keyword-matched copy and relevant landing pages. The scores are calculated independently, though, so a good Google score doesn’t hand you a good Microsoft one. You still have to earn it on each platform.

Quality Score self-diagnosis checklist

Before you touch a bid, run your account through a quick self-audit. Each question maps to a component, so a “no” tells you exactly where to look.

Are your ad groups single-themed?

Open your worst-scoring keywords and check the ad group they sit in. If the group mixes different intents, that is almost certainly why ad relevance is low. Split it so every keyword shares one theme.

Do your ads mirror the keyword?

Read each ad against the keywords it serves. If the target keyword doesn’t appear in a headline, you are leaving ad relevance and expected CTR on the table. Rewrite the headlines to match.

Is your landing page relevant and fast?

Click your own ad and land where a customer would. Does the page deliver what the ad promised, quickly, on a phone? If it is slow, generic or off-topic, your landing page experience is dragging the score down.

Are you using negatives and match types deliberately?

Check your search terms report for queries that don’t fit your offer. If irrelevant searches are triggering your ads, add negative keywords and tighten your match types so your traffic stays relevant.

Are you prioritising by spend, not by score?

Sort your keywords by spend, then look at their scores. Fixing a below-average component on your highest-spend keywords returns far more than perfecting a keyword nobody clicks.

Frequently Asked Questions

Bringing it together

Quality Score rewards the same thing your customers do: an ad that matches what they searched for, backed by a page that delivers it. Work on the three components underneath the number, tight ad groups, keyword-matched copy and a fast, relevant landing page, and the score follows while your cost per click falls.

Start with the keywords spending the most money, fix the component that is actually weak, and leave the rest alone. If you would rather have a specialist find where your account is leaking budget, our team offers a free site audit to point you at the highest-impact fixes.