Google Ads Quality Score is a 1-to-10 rating that reflects how well your ads, keywords, and landing pages serve the people searching for what you offer. A higher score means you pay less per click and earn better ad positions, so improving it directly affects your advertising budget. The score is built from three components: expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Each one is rated “Above average,” “Average,” or “Below average” compared to other advertisers whose ads showed for the same searches over the last 90 days.
How Quality Score Affects Your Costs
Google uses a metric called Ad Rank to decide whether your ad shows, where it appears on the page, and how much you pay per click. The basic formula is Ad Rank equals your bid multiplied by your quality. That means an advertiser with a high Quality Score can outrank a competitor who bids more but has lower quality. It also means you can maintain the same position while spending less if you raise your score.
The practical impact is significant. If two advertisers bid the same amount for the same keyword, the one with the higher Quality Score pays less per click and appears higher on the page. Conversely, a low score forces you to bid aggressively just to show up, eating into your return on ad spend. Improving even one component from “Below average” to “Average” can noticeably reduce your cost per click across an entire campaign.
Raise Your Expected Clickthrough Rate
Expected clickthrough rate measures how likely someone is to click your ad when it appears. Google predicts this based on the historical performance of your keyword and ad combination, compared to everyone else bidding on the same search. A “Below average” rating here means your ads are getting fewer clicks than competitors for the same queries.
The most direct fix is writing ad copy that speaks to what the searcher wants. If someone searches “waterproof hiking boots,” an ad that says “Shop Waterproof Hiking Boots” with a clear benefit like “Free Returns, 4.8-Star Rated” will earn more clicks than a generic “Shop Outdoor Footwear” headline. Use your keyword naturally in the headline, and pair it with a specific value proposition in the description lines: a price point, a guarantee, a review count, or a shipping promise.
Ad assets (formerly called extensions) also help. Sitelinks, callout assets, and structured snippets make your ad physically larger on the page and give searchers more reasons to click. Google factors device type, user location, and time of day into the real auction, so your actual clickthrough rate in live auctions is shaped by more than just copy. But the copy is the variable you control most directly.
Improve Ad Relevance With Tighter Ad Groups
Ad relevance measures how closely your ad matches the intent behind a search. Google evaluates this by looking at the meaning of the search term, all the keywords in an ad group, and the landing pages within that ad group. If your ad group contains loosely related keywords, your ad copy can only match some of them well, dragging down relevance for the rest.
The fix is structuring ad groups thematically. Instead of one ad group with “running shoes,” “trail running shoes,” and “road running shoes,” split those into separate ad groups. Each one gets its own ad copy that mirrors the specific search intent. The headline for “trail running shoes” should mention trail running, not just running in general. This lets Google’s system see a tight connection between the keyword, the ad text, and the landing page.
Google’s AI-based ad group prioritization will try to match searches to the most relevant ad group in your account, but it works best when you give it clear thematic groupings to choose from. If your keywords overlap across ad groups with vague boundaries, the system has to guess, and it may not pick the ad group with the most relevant copy.
When using responsive search ads, make sure at least a few of your headline options include the core keyword for that ad group. Google assembles different combinations of your headlines and descriptions, so the more headline variations that align with the keyword theme, the more often the served ad will feel relevant to the searcher.
Fix Your Landing Page Experience
Landing page experience is the third component, and it is the one most advertisers neglect. Google evaluates whether your landing page is relevant to the ad, useful to the visitor, and easy to navigate. A “Below average” rating here usually points to one or more of three problems: the page content does not match the ad’s promise, the page loads slowly, or the page is difficult to use on a phone.
Content Relevance
If your ad promises “waterproof hiking boots,” the landing page should show waterproof hiking boots immediately, not your entire footwear catalog. Sending ad traffic to a homepage or a broad category page forces users to hunt for what they clicked on, which signals poor relevance. Create dedicated landing pages, or at minimum use deep links to the most specific product or service page that matches each ad group’s theme.
The page should also be transparent about what you are offering. Clear pricing, honest product descriptions, and visible contact information all contribute to what Google considers a trustworthy landing page. If users frequently bounce back to the search results after clicking, that behavior signals the page did not deliver what the ad promised.
Page Speed
Google’s own documentation calls landing page speed “one of the best and easiest ways to get better results from your mobile ads.” A page that takes four or five seconds to load loses a significant share of visitors before they even see your content. Compress images, minimize JavaScript that blocks rendering, and use a content delivery network if your audience is geographically spread out. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will give you a specific list of issues to fix for any URL.
Mobile Friendliness
Google tracks whether your landing page passes its Mobile-Friendly test every time someone clicks your ad. If it does not, your “Mobile-friendly click rate” drops below 100%, which hurts your landing page score. With mobile traffic accounting for the majority of searches in most industries, a page that is hard to read, has tiny tap targets, or requires horizontal scrolling is actively pulling your Quality Score down. Test your landing pages on actual phones, not just in a desktop browser’s responsive mode. Forms should be short, buttons should be easy to tap, and the core content should be visible without scrolling past a wall of navigation.
Where to Check Your Score
In your Google Ads account, navigate to the Keywords tab and add the Quality Score columns if they are not already visible. You can add columns for the overall Quality Score (the 1-to-10 number) and for each of the three components: expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Each component will show its “Above average,” “Average,” or “Below average” status, which tells you exactly where to focus your effort.
Google is clear that Quality Score is a diagnostic tool, not a live auction input. The number you see in your account is a snapshot based on the last 90 days of auction data, and the actual auction uses real-time signals including device, location, and time of day. That means your reported Quality Score of 7 might perform differently in a mobile auction at 8 a.m. than in a desktop auction at midnight. Still, the diagnostic value is real: if a component shows “Below average,” that component is consistently underperforming relative to your competition, and fixing it will improve your auction outcomes.
Prioritize by Impact
Start with whichever component is rated “Below average.” Moving a component from “Below average” to “Average” produces a bigger improvement in auction performance than moving from “Average” to “Above average.” If multiple components are below average, ad relevance is often the fastest to fix because it only requires restructuring ad groups and rewriting copy. Landing page experience takes more effort but tends to have lasting effects across every keyword pointing to that page. Expected CTR improvements come last because they depend partly on accumulated click data, which takes time to build after you change your ads.
Review your Quality Scores at the keyword level every few weeks. After restructuring an ad group or improving a landing page, give it at least two to three weeks for Google to collect enough new auction data to update the score. Avoid making multiple changes at once if you want to understand which change moved the needle.