Quality score
What is quality score?
Quality score is the 1-to-10 rating Google gives each keyword in a search campaign. It is assembled from three diagnostics: expected clickthrough rate, how closely the ad matches the search, and the landing page experience. The rating itself does not enter the auction, but it shows where your ad is weaker than a competitor’s and why your clicks are costing more than theirs.
Example
The keyword “roof repair Ruse” sits in a group with forty others, all sharing one ad headed “Construction services”, and the click lands on the home page. All three diagnostics read “below average” and the rating is 4.
We split the group: the keyword gets its own ad whose headline repeats the search, and a roof repair page instead of the home page. Within a month the rating reads 8, the clickthrough rate moves from 2.1% to 5.4%, and the average click falls from €0.90 to €0.62. On a €600 budget that is the difference between 667 and 968 clicks for the same money. The figures are illustrative; the direction is what restructuring an account usually produces.
Why it matters for a business
The rating itself never enters the auction — quality is recalculated at every search. It is a diagnostic, and it tells you which of the three parts is failing. “Expected clickthrough rate” means the ad is not persuading; “ad relevance” means the group has collected unrelated keywords; “landing page experience” means the page does not answer the search, or is slow to arrive.
A low rating on a keyword your business depends on costs twice: you pay more per click and you show less often. Fixing it is not an algorithm trick — the same changes make the ad clearer to the person reading it.
How to improve it
- One theme per group: the keyword, the ad and the landing page all say the same thing.
- Headlines that repeat the search, and descriptions carrying a concrete offer rather than generalities.
- Negative keywords: impressions on unrelated searches drag the expected clickthrough rate down.
- A fast page that shows on a phone exactly what the ad promised.
- No chasing tens on keywords with a handful of impressions a month — the rating means nothing there.
Groups, ads and pages get rebuilt together inside Google Ads.