Google Ads Quality Score: What Actually Affects It (and What Doesn't)

Quality Score gets blamed for a lot of underperforming campaigns that actually have a different problem entirely, and just as often gets chased with fixes that don’t move it at all. Here’s what the score actually measures, what genuinely moves it, and when it’s the wrong thing to be optimizing in the first place.

What Quality Score Actually Is

A 1-10 diagnostic score Google assigns per keyword, built from three components:

• Expected click-through rate — how likely the ad is to be clicked when shown for that keyword, compared to other advertisers bidding on similar terms
• Ad relevance — how closely the ad’s actual text matches the intent behind the keyword, not just whether the keyword appears in it
• Landing page experience — Google’s assessment of whether the page someone lands on is relevant, easy to navigate, and loads reasonably fast, based on aggregated data, not a manual page-by-page review

Each component is rated Below Average, Average, or Above Average individually, and the three combine into the single 1-10 number shown in the account.

What Quality Score Directly Affects

• Ad Rank, which determines both whether an ad shows at all and its position — Ad Rank is a function of bid amount multiplied by Quality Score (roughly), not bid amount alone, so a higher Quality Score can outrank a higher bid with a lower score
• Actual cost per click — a higher Quality Score generally means paying less for the same position, since Google’s actual-CPC formula factors the score in directly

This is the real reason Quality Score matters practically, not as an abstract grade — it’s a direct lever on cost, not just a vanity metric sitting in a column.

The Real Ways to Improve It

• Tighter ad group structure — grouping closely related keywords together (not dozens of loosely related terms in one ad group) lets ad copy match search intent more precisely, which moves the relevance component directly
• Ad copy that mirrors actual search intent, not just keyword stuffing — an ad that speaks directly to what someone searching that exact term is looking for outperforms one that just contains the keyword somewhere in the text
• A landing page that actually matches the ad’s promise — if the ad mentions a specific product or offer, the landing page needs to lead with that same thing immediately, not require someone to navigate to find it
• Page load speed, which is part of the landing page experience component and one of the more mechanical, fixable pieces on this list — a slow-loading page drags this score down regardless of how good the content on it is

The Myths Worth Retiring

• “Pausing and reactivating keywords resets Quality Score for the better.” It doesn’t reliably work this way, and can lose the keyword’s accumulated performance history in the process, which is a real cost for an uncertain benefit
• “A higher budget improves Quality Score.” Budget and bid amount don’t factor into the score’s calculation at all — it’s judged on relevance and experience signals independent of how much is being spent
• “Quality Score is the same across every campaign and network.” It’s calculated per keyword, and can genuinely differ between Search and Display for the same keyword, since the relevance and experience signals differ by context
• “A 10/10 score is always achievable and always the goal.” Some competitive, broad commercial keywords are structurally hard to score highly on regardless of optimization quality, since the expected-CTR component is relative to other advertisers in the same competitive auction

When Quality Score Isn’t Actually the Problem

A campaign with a solid 7-8 average Quality Score that still isn’t converting well usually has a different issue entirely — audience mismatch, an offer that doesn’t match what the keyword’s searcher actually wants, or a checkout/conversion flow problem downstream of the landing page itself. Our Google Ads search terms report guide covers finding the actual mismatch between what someone searched and what they got, which is often the real issue hiding behind a perfectly acceptable Quality Score. Chasing a marginally higher score on an already-decent keyword usually returns less than fixing what happens after the click.

Where This Fits With Broader Campaign Structure

Quality Score is a keyword-level signal, which means it matters most for Search campaigns with real keyword control — our Performance Max vs. Search campaigns comparison covers why PMax’s lack of keyword-level visibility makes this specific lever unavailable there, which is one more reason a new account benefits from starting with Search rather than PMax: there’s simply more to directly optimize, Quality Score included.

A Separate Lever: Bidding Strategy

Quality Score affects cost per click and Ad Rank, but it’s a separate lever entirely from which bidding strategy an account runs — a high-Quality-Score account can still be poorly served by the wrong Smart Bidding target. Our tCPA vs. tROAS guide covers that separate decision, worth getting right independently of whatever’s happening with Quality Score itself.

The Practical Takeaway

Quality Score is a real, direct cost lever worth improving through ad group structure, ad copy relevance, and landing page quality — but it’s a diagnostic tool pointing at specific fixable things, not a mysterious grade to chase with superstition. A low score on a specific keyword usually has one of the three components clearly Below Average in the account’s own reporting; fixing that specific component beats guessing at a general “quality” fix that isn’t tied to what’s actually being measured.

Quality Score also helps explain a report that’s easy to misread on its own — Auction Insights shows a low impression share against competitors, but not why it’s low; checking Quality Score first separates a budget problem from an ad-relevance problem before assuming either one.