What Is Quality Score in Google Ads?

What is Quality Score in Google Ads? Google scores each keyword from 1 to 10, and it builds that Google Ads Quality Score from three parts. Expected clickthrough rate is how likely your ad is to be clicked when it shows. Ad relevance is how closely your ad matches the intent behind the search. Landing page experience is how relevant and useful your page is to the people who click it.

Each part gets one of three grades: Above average, Average or Below average. That grade is more useful than the number, because it tells you which of the three to fix.

The score sits at the keyword level, and that is the useful bit. You read it against the keyword that is actually spending your money.

Open the Keywords page in Google Ads. Use the columns menu to add Quality Score and its three parts: expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience.

A dash instead of a number is not a bad score. Google shows a dash when there were not enough exact searches for that keyword to rate it. Google also says the score is built from past exact searches, so switching a match type does not reset it.

Not a public one. Google names the three parts and grades each one, but it does not publish weights or a formula that turns them into the 1 to 10 number. Any page that shows you an exact formula is guessing.

What Google does publish is how Ad Rank works, and that matters more. Ad Rank decides if your ad can show and where. Google lists the inputs: your bid, your ad and landing page quality, Ad Rank thresholds, how competitive the auction is, the context of the search, and the expected impact of your assets. So Quality Score is not in the auction, but the quality it reports on is. Google's own line is that even if a rival bids more, you can still win a higher spot at a lower price with highly relevant keywords and ads.

Google does not name a target number, and we will not invent one. The honest rule is relative. A keyword with Below average on any part has a clear fix waiting. A keyword with Above average on all three has nothing left to gain from this metric.

Read the score next to cost. A 4 on a keyword that spends a few dollars a month does not matter. A 4 on your top-spending keyword is the first job of the week.

Google is blunt about this one. Its own help page says Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction. Google calls it a diagnostic tool instead. So chasing a 10 out of 10 is not a strategy. Use the score to find which keywords are dragging. Then go and fix the ad or the page behind them.

There is a second catch if you sell products. Shopping campaigns have no keywords at all, so there is no Quality Score to read in them. Google matches your products off your feed instead. If most of your budget sits in Shopping or Performance Max, your product data is doing the job that Quality Score reports on in Search.

Google Ads Quality Score optimization is work, not a trick. Fix whichever part says Below average.

Expected CTR below average: write headlines that repeat the words people type, and add the assets that make the ad bigger, like sitelinks and prices. Ad relevance below average: split the ad group so each ad answers one tight group of searches. Landing page experience below average: send the click to the page that shows the thing they searched for, in stock and priced, and make it load fast on a phone.

None of that is clever. It is just work that nobody does weekly.

Scaley helps with the waste half of that loop. Scaley Media Buyer reads the account when you ask and points at the keywords dragging the score down. Scaley Suite mines bad search terms and hands you the exclusion with the evidence attached, and nothing moves until you say yes. We build Scaley, so weigh that. On a small Search account, reading the score yourself for one honest hour a week beats any tool.