Google Ads Quality Score: What It Actually Affects
Quality Score gets discussed constantly and understood poorly. It shows up as a 1-to-10 number in your keyword report and most advertisers treat it like a report card. High score means the campaign is healthy. Low score means something is broken. That framing misses what Quality Score actually does and why chasing it can lead you to make the wrong optimisation decisions.
Here is what Quality Score is, what it genuinely changes in how your ads compete in the auction, and where the common advice goes wrong.
The 3 Components
Quality Score is a diagnostic estimate made up of three signals, each rated as Above Average, Average, or Below Average.
Expected click-through rate is Google's prediction of how often your ad will be clicked when it shows for a given keyword. This prediction is based on historical performance data for that keyword and how your ad has performed relative to other ads on the same searches. It is forward-looking, not a simple average of your current CTR.
Ad relevance measures how closely your ad copy matches the intent behind the keyword. If your keyword is "book Greek restaurant Adelaide" and your ad talks about Greek catering with no mention of dining reservations, the relevance score will be low. The copy needs to reflect the specific search query.
Landing page experience is Google's assessment of how useful and relevant your landing page is for users arriving from that keyword. Google evaluates this using signals including page content relevance to the ad and keyword, mobile-friendliness, page load speed, and how often users navigate away immediately after landing (a bounce signal).
These three components feed into an overall Quality Score from 1 to 10. A score of 7 or above is generally considered competitive. Below 5 on a keyword you are spending on is worth investigating.
What Quality Score Actually Changes in the Auction
Quality Score is not used directly in the ad auction. This is where the common explanation breaks down.
The real-time auction uses a metric called Ad Rank. Ad Rank determines your ad position and whether your ad shows at all. The formula involves your bid, your expected impact of ad extensions and formats, and something called the Quality Score components, specifically expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience, evaluated in real time for each auction, not just from the stored Quality Score number.
What this means practically: Quality Score is a diagnostic tool that reflects how the quality components are performing over recent history. The actual auction uses real-time quality signals that are closely related but not identical to the stored score.
What Quality Score changes directly and measurably is your cost per click. Higher Quality Score on a keyword means you pay less for the same ad position. Google's pricing formula rewards quality. Two advertisers bidding the same amount will pay different CPCs if their quality signals differ. The higher-quality advertiser pays less.
It also affects whether your ad shows at all. Below a minimum quality threshold, no amount of bidding gets your ad into the auction. Google does not publish this threshold but Below Average ratings on all three components consistently results in ads that rarely serve.
What Does NOT Move the Needle
Most advice about improving Quality Score focuses on things that have minimal direct impact.
Account-level history is sometimes cited as a Quality Score factor. It is not a direct input. Old, well-performing accounts do not carry Quality Score advantages into new campaigns just by virtue of being old.
Ad group organisation is frequently overemphasised. Having 10 ad groups instead of 5 does not improve Quality Score if the ads and keywords within each group are not tightly aligned. Reorganising structure for the sake of reorganisation does nothing.
Keyword match types do not directly affect Quality Score. The score is calculated per keyword. Whether that keyword is exact, phrase, or broad match does not change the score directly. What changes is which searches trigger your keyword, and those searches may have different expected CTRs.
Bid amount has no direct effect on Quality Score. You can bid $50 on a keyword with a Quality Score of 3 and it will still show a 3. The score and the bid are separate inputs to Ad Rank.
Adding keywords does not improve existing keyword scores. Each keyword has its own Quality Score calculated independently. Adding more keywords to an ad group does not transfer scores.
The One Thing with the Biggest Impact
Landing page experience moves Quality Score more than anything else in most underperforming accounts.
Expected CTR is difficult to improve quickly because it depends on historical click data that accumulates slowly. Ad relevance is easier to adjust, but it is bounded by how well your copy can match the query without becoming repetitive. Landing page experience, however, can be dramatically improved in a short time and the effect on Quality Score is significant.
Three landing page factors have the highest impact. Page load speed on mobile is the most commonly neglected. A restaurant booking page that takes 5 seconds to load on a 4G connection is failing users before they even see the content. Google sees those quick exits and the landing page experience score reflects it. Use PageSpeed Insights, compress images, remove unnecessary scripts, and get the mobile load time under 3 seconds.
Relevance between the keyword, the ad, and the landing page content is the second. If someone searches "book a table Greek restaurant Unley" and lands on a homepage with no mention of reservations in the visible above-the-fold content, the relevance signal is weak. Match the headline of the landing page to the intent of the keyword group.
Clear and accessible user experience on mobile is the third. Tiny text, links placed too close together, forms that are difficult to complete on a phone. These behavioural signals feed into what Google can observe about user frustration on the page.
Fix the landing page and the Quality Score improvement follows. The impact shows up faster than most advertisers expect, sometimes within two to three weeks of the page changes going live.
How to Use Quality Score Diagnostically
Pull the keyword report, add the Quality Score columns for each component, and sort by spend descending. Focus on the keywords that are spending the most. A keyword with a Quality Score of 4 that accounts for 30% of your spend is costing you real money in excess CPCs compared to what it would cost at a score of 7.
Do not obsess over keywords with low spend and low Quality Score. They are not hurting you materially. Prioritise the high-spend, low-quality-score keywords where the cost savings from improvement are meaningful.
Quality Score above 7 on your main keywords generally means you have resolved the major issues. Chasing a 10 on every keyword is not worth the time investment. The marginal CPC improvement between a 7 and a 10 is smaller than the improvement between a 4 and a 7.
Use it as a signal, not a goal. If Quality Score is declining on keywords that used to perform well, that tells you something changed: the ad copy drifted from relevance, the landing page slowed down, or the historical CTR is dropping because competitors improved their ads. Those are actionable diagnostics.
Quality Score does not tell you if your campaign is profitable. It tells you if your ads are competitive and relevant. That is a narrower but still valuable question. Combine Quality Score with your actual conversion data and you have a complete picture. For help building campaigns that score well and actually convert, see our Google Ads services.