Quality Score is the number from 1 to 10 that appears next to every keyword in the Google Ads interface. It summarizes how well your ad, your keyword, and your landing page match what the user searched for.
The score isn’t a goal in itself. A campaign’s real success is determined by business outcomes like conversions, cost, and lead quality. Quality Score is a diagnostic indicator that tells you which area is weak before you get to those outcomes.
Google Ads’ Quality Score documentation explains the score through three diagnostic components: Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, and Landing Page Experience. WordStream’s Quality Score guide shows that reading these three components separately produces more actionable insight than looking at a single number. CXL’s landing page optimization process also points out that the third component is usually the most neglected.
What Is Quality Score?
Quality Score appears next to the status column on the “Keywords” tab. Google calculates a separate score for each keyword — two keywords in the same ad group can carry different scores.
A score forms once a keyword has received enough impressions to enter at least one auction. A newly added keyword, or one that gets very little search volume, shows a ”—” mark; that doesn’t mean the keyword is low quality, it means not enough data has been collected yet.
Why the score is built from three separate labels
Before showing the final 1-10 score, Google labels each of the three sub-components separately as “Below average,” “Average,” or “Above average.” These three labels are evaluated together to produce the final score.
What Is Expected CTR?
Expected CTR is Google’s prediction of how likely ads targeting this keyword are to be clicked under similar conditions. The evaluation is comparative, measured against the historical performance of other advertisers targeting the same keyword.
This component is not the same thing as your actual observed CTR. An ad’s real click-through rate can be high thanks to branded search, yet Expected CTR can still stay low, because the comparison is made against every advertiser targeting that keyword. CTR itself is a separate metric, covered in What Is CTR?.
An example of low Expected CTR
Consider an ad group targeting “cheap flight tickets.” If the ad copy only carries a generic headline like “Buy Flight Tickets,” the user sees no price or promotional offer, so the predicted click likelihood comes out low. Adding a concrete price range or promotional detail to the headline can strengthen this signal.
What Is Ad Relevance?
Ad Relevance expresses how closely the ad copy’s message matches the search intent behind the keyword. If a user is searching for a specific service, the ad’s headline and description should stay close to that intent.
This signal usually surfaces a problem in ad group structure. If distinct intents like “SEO consulting” and “web design pricing” are lumped into the same ad group, a single piece of ad copy can’t be specific enough for both searches. In that case, relevance comes out low.
The practical fix
Splitting the ad group by intent usually improves this signal directly. Once each group focuses on a single search intent, the ad headline can be written specifically for that intent. The relationship between ad group and campaign levels is covered further in What Is Google Ads Campaign Structure?.
What Is Landing Page Experience?
Landing Page Experience refers to the experience of the page a user reaches after clicking the ad. Google evaluates this signal across four areas: page speed, mobile-friendliness, transparency, and how well the content matches search intent.
Transparency is a particularly overlooked area here. If it’s unclear which company is providing the service, or contact information or pricing logic is missing, the user can feel a lack of trust even if the page loads quickly.
The gap between the promise and the page
If the ad promises “same-day quote” but the page has no quote form or clear next step, the problem isn’t just textual relevance. The step the user expected is missing, and that affects both the Landing Page Experience score and the actual conversion rate. The conversion-rate side of this is covered in more detail in What Is Conversion Rate?.
How Does Quality Score Affect CPC?
Because Quality Score is a component of Ad Rank in the auction, it can indirectly affect the actual cost-per-click you pay. But the claim “a higher quality score automatically means a lower CPC” isn’t true in every case — the effect depends on competitors’ bids and your own Ad Rank threshold.
The logic is easier to see with a simplified example. The table below compares two advertisers in the same auction using a rough Ad Rank = Bid × Quality Score multiplication; the real algorithm uses far more signals, but the direction of the effect is the same.
| Advertiser | Bid | Quality Score | Simplified Ad Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 10 TL | 4 | 40 |
| B | 6 TL | 8 | 48 |
B reaches a higher Ad Rank than A despite bidding lower, because the gap in quality score offsets the gap in bid. In practice, this means a low-quality ad has to bid higher just to stay competitive. For the other components of CPC, see What Are CPM, CPC, and CPA?.
The Relationship Between Quality Score and Impression Share
Because quality signals can affect ad rank, they have an indirect relationship with Impression Share. If an ad isn’t relevant enough, or the page experience is weak, the opportunity to show up in some auctions may not arise at all.
This loss shows up in reports as “Lost IS (Rank),” and it’s a distinct cause from loss due to insufficient budget (Lost IS Budget). For a broader read on the visibility side, see What Is Impression Share?.
How Do You Diagnose a Low Quality Score?
When you hit a low score, the first step is checking the panel to see which of the three components is labeled weak. Any change you make without that information is just guesswork.
| Weak component | First thing to check | Shortcut to avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Expected CTR | Search intent, headline clarity, and price/promotion messaging | Using an irrelevant promise just to grab attention |
| Ad Relevance | Topical alignment between the keyword and the ad group | Putting every keyword into a single ad group |
| Landing Page Experience | Message continuity, speed, mobile usability, and transparency | Simply repeating the keyword more often on the page |
If all three components come back weak at once, the problem is usually not one keyword — it’s that the whole ad group was built too broadly. In that case, restructuring the group by intent tends to be a more lasting fix than tweaking individual keywords.
A Common Mistake
The most common mistake with Quality Score is treating the score itself as the goal. Raising the score is useful, but if real conversions and lead quality are neglected, the campaign may not deliver any business result.
The second mistake runs in the opposite direction: forcing relevance up by opening a separate ad group for every single keyword. A structure that fragmented increases management overhead and can make it harder for each group to gather enough data. The right balance between improving relevance and needlessly fragmenting the account should be set based on keyword count and available data volume.
Summary
Quality Score condenses three independent signals — Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, and Landing Page Experience — into a single number. When you encounter a low score, first check the panel to see which component is weak, then apply a fix specific to that component.
The score shouldn’t be looked at to make a decision on its own, but to understand which area needs improvement. For the broader framework, see The Google Ads Metrics Guide.