Most Quality Score advice tells you to “be more relevant,” which is not advice — it is a restatement of the problem. Quality Score is a 1–10 diagnostic built from three specific components, and only some of them respond to the things advertisers spend their time on. Across the accounts we audit, the two changes that move it most reliably are tightening ad groups so ads genuinely match their keywords, and fixing landing pages that were never built for paid traffic. Bid changes, budget increases and adding more keywords do not move it at all.
Quick reference — what Quality Score is and isn’t:
- Three components: expected CTR, ad relevance, landing page experience — each rated Below Average / Average / Above Average
- It is a diagnostic, not a ranking factor — the 1–10 number itself is not used in the auction
- Expected CTR is the heaviest lever in most accounts
- It updates with traffic, not on a schedule — no impressions, no re-evaluation
- New keywords start at a seeded estimate based on account history, not at a true score
- Bids, budget and spend do not affect it — raising a bid never improves Quality Score
What is Quality Score actually measuring?
Quality Score is a keyword-level estimate, reported 1–10, of how relevant your ad and landing page are likely to be to someone searching that keyword. It is assembled from three components, each reported in your keyword table as Below Average, Average, or Above Average:
- Expected click-through rate — how likely your ad is to be clicked when shown for that keyword, relative to competitors, normalised for position.
- Ad relevance — how closely the ad’s text matches the intent behind the keyword.
- Landing page experience — how relevant, transparent, navigable and fast the destination page is.
Here is the part most guides get wrong: the 1–10 Quality Score is a reporting metric, not the thing used in the auction. Google calculates ad quality in real time for every individual auction, using signals about the specific query, the user, the device and the context. The 1–10 number is a simplified summary of that, surfaced so you can diagnose problems. Chasing the number as a goal in itself is a category error — you fix the components, and the number follows.
Google’s documentation on Quality Score is explicit about this, and it is worth reading if you have been treating the score as a lever rather than a readout.
Why does Quality Score matter if it isn’t used directly?
Because the underlying quality assessment it summarises is used, and it has real financial consequences through Ad Rank.
Ad Rank determines whether your ad shows, where it shows, and what you pay. It combines your bid, the real-time quality assessment, the Ad Rank thresholds, auction competitiveness, context, and the expected impact of your assets and extensions. Higher quality means you can achieve a given position at a lower cost per click — or a better position for the same bid.
The practical translation: two advertisers bidding identically on the same keyword do not pay the same amount or get the same position. The one with better ad relevance and a better landing page pays less for the better slot. Over a year, on a meaningful budget, that gap is the difference between an account that works and one that doesn’t.
This is also why Quality Score work compounds. Better ad quality lowers CPC, which buys more clicks for the same budget, which produces more conversion data, which makes Smart Bidding work better — a point we cover in Smart Bidding strategies.
Why does generic “be relevant” advice fail?
Because relevance is structural, not verbal. Advertisers reading that advice go and rewrite their ad copy, inserting the keyword a few more times, and are then surprised when nothing changes.
The reason nothing changes is that the ad was never the bottleneck. If an ad group contains forty loosely related keywords, no single ad can be genuinely relevant to all of them. You can write the best ad in the world for “emergency plumber” and it will still be a poor match for “hot water system replacement cost” sitting in the same ad group. The ad is doing its job; the container is wrong.
The second reason is that ad relevance is the least valuable of the three components to optimise in isolation. In the accounts we audit, expected CTR carries the most weight and landing page experience is the most commonly neglected. Advertisers optimise ad relevance because it is the easiest to change — you can rewrite a headline in thirty seconds — and then conclude Quality Score is broken.
Keyword stuffing specifically backfires. Repeating the keyword four times in a 30-character headline produces ads that read badly, get clicked less, and therefore damage expected CTR — the component that matters most. You trade a small gain in one component for a larger loss in another.
Which fixes actually move Quality Score?
In rough order of impact, based on what has worked across the accounts we manage:
1. Tighten ad group structure. This is the highest-leverage change available and the one most accounts need. Break sprawling ad groups into tight themes where every keyword shares a genuine intent, then write ads specifically for that theme. This improves ad relevance and expected CTR simultaneously, because the ad can finally speak directly to what the searcher wants.
The counterweight: do not shatter the account into single-keyword ad groups. That was a legitimate tactic a decade ago; with today’s matching and Smart Bidding it starves each ad group of the conversion data it needs. Aim for tight themes, not one keyword per group.
2. Fix the landing page. Landing page experience is a full third of the assessment and the component advertisers most often ignore entirely. Send traffic to a page that matches the query rather than the homepage, get mobile load under 2.5 seconds, and make the offer and the business identity obvious immediately. We cover the specifics in landing page optimisation for Google Ads.
3. Improve real CTR through better ads and assets. Expected CTR is modelled partly on how your ads have actually performed. Test genuinely different angles rather than cosmetic variations — a different offer, a different objection addressed, a different proof point. Add and maintain your assets (sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets): they increase the ad’s footprint and click likelihood, and expected asset impact feeds Ad Rank directly.
4. Remove the keywords dragging the account down. Search terms that were never going to convert generate impressions without clicks, which suppresses expected CTR. Disciplined negative keyword work is a Quality Score intervention as much as a budget one — see negative keyword lists by industry.
5. Pause chronically poor keywords rather than nursing them. A keyword sitting at 3/10 with Below Average across all three components, in an account where similar keywords score 7, is usually telling you the intent doesn’t fit your business. Cutting it is a legitimate fix.
What does not affect Quality Score?
Explicitly, so you stop spending time on it:
- Your bid. Raising it does not improve quality. It affects Ad Rank separately.
- Your budget or total spend. Google does not reward bigger spenders with better Quality Scores.
- Account age or how long a campaign has run, in itself.
- Pausing and re-enabling keywords. History is retained; this does not reset anything.
- Adding more keywords. Volume of keywords is not a quality signal.
- Ad rotation settings, directly.
There is a persistent myth that pausing a low-Quality-Score keyword and adding it again fresh gives you a clean slate. It does not. The historical performance data associated with that keyword in your account persists.
When should you ignore Quality Score?
More often than the amount of attention it receives would suggest.
On very low-volume keywords. A keyword with 40 impressions has a Quality Score built on almost no data. Reading meaning into it is noise-chasing.
When it conflicts with profitability. A keyword with a Quality Score of 5 that produces leads at a cost you’re happy with is a good keyword. One at 9/10 that produces nothing is not. Quality Score is a means to cheaper clicks, not a business objective. If you find yourself considering pausing a profitable keyword because its score is mediocre, the metric has captured you.
On Performance Max and Demand Gen. Keyword-level Quality Score does not apply to these campaign types in the way it does to Search. Optimising them means feeding better assets, audience signals and conversion data — see Performance Max in Australia.
Immediately after major changes. Quality Score updates as traffic accumulates. Restructuring an account and then checking scores the next morning tells you nothing; give it a few weeks of meaningful volume.
The healthiest way to hold it: treat Quality Score as a diagnostic that points at where an account is weak, then judge your fixes on cost per conversion — not on whether the number went up.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good Quality Score? 7 or above is generally healthy for commercial keywords; 8–10 is strong. But context matters more than the number — a 6 on a competitive high-intent keyword that converts profitably beats a 9 on a broad informational term that doesn’t. Look at the three components to find the specific weakness rather than fixating on the total.
How long does it take for Quality Score to improve after I make changes? It updates as the keyword accumulates impressions and clicks, not on a fixed schedule. For a keyword with steady traffic, expect to see movement within a couple of weeks. For low-volume keywords it can take considerably longer, because there simply isn’t enough new data to re-evaluate.
Does Quality Score affect Performance Max? Not in the keyword-level form you see in Search campaigns. Ad quality still matters to PMax outcomes, but you influence it through asset quality, audience signals and conversion data rather than a keyword Quality Score column.
Will pausing low Quality Score keywords raise my account average? It will change the average you see, but there is no meaningful “account-level Quality Score” that Google uses as a lever. Remove keywords because they don’t earn their place, not to flatter a reported average.
Can I improve Quality Score without touching my landing page? Partly — restructuring ad groups and improving ads will move expected CTR and ad relevance. But if landing page experience is rated Below Average, you have capped your ceiling on a third of the assessment. It is usually the largest single opportunity in accounts that have never addressed it.
Does a higher Quality Score guarantee a lower CPC? It improves your position in the auction relative to your bid, which typically lowers what you pay for a given position. It is not a guarantee — competition, auction context and Ad Rank thresholds all still apply.
Quality Score rewards accounts that are structurally coherent: tight ad groups, ads written for those groups, and pages built for the traffic being sent to them. There is no trick, and the advice that promises one is why so many advertisers have concluded the metric is meaningless.
If your account has scores you can’t explain, a structured audit is the fastest way to find out which of the three components is actually holding you back — or get in touch and we’ll look at it with you.