Google Ads Quality Score Explained: 3 Parts to Improve

Quick answer

Quality Score is Google’s 1 to 10 rating of how relevant your keyword, ad and landing page are compared with other advertisers. It combines expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. It is a diagnostic, not a direct auction input, but fixing those three things usually lowers what you pay per click.

This guide explains what each part means in plain English, how to find your scores, and the fixes that work for small accounts, in the order we would tackle them.

What Quality Score actually is

Google describes Quality Score as “a diagnostic tool meant to give you a sense of how well your ad quality compares to other advertisers”. Its help page on Quality Score says the score runs from 1 to 10 and is shown for each keyword, not for the account as a whole.

Think of it as a report card. A 3 tells you that, for that keyword, people searching are not finding your ad or your page as useful as your competitors’. A 7 or above tells you that you are roughly in line or better. The score itself does not change your bill. The things it measures do.

One point causes a lot of confusion. Google says plainly that Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction. What goes into the auction is Ad Rank, which uses Google’s live, search-by-search judgement of ad and landing page quality. Quality Score is a summary of that judgement averaged over past searches, which is why it is useful for spotting problems even though it is not the dial itself.

The three parts, in plain English

Each part is rated Above average, Average or Below average, based on how your ad compares with other advertisers whose ads showed for the same searches over the last 90 days.

You can see each part by adding the Quality Score columns to your keywords table. Google’s guide to Quality Score for Search campaigns lists the column names, including “Landing Page Exp.”, and shows how to view the historic versions by day.

Why it still matters for your costs

Google’s page on Ad Rank lists what decides whether your ad shows and where: your bid, the quality of your ads and landing page, minimum thresholds, competition, the context of the search and the expected impact of assets such as call buttons and sitelinks. It also says that even if competitors bid more, you can still win a higher position at a lower price with highly relevant keywords and ads.

For a small business on a few hundred pounds a month, that is the whole game. You cannot outbid national firms. You can be more relevant than them for the specific jobs you do in the specific places you cover.

How to find your Quality Scores

1. In Google Ads, open Campaigns, then Keywords.
2. Click the columns icon and choose Modify columns.
3. Open the Quality Score section and add Quality Score, Exp. CTR, Ad relevance and Landing Page Exp.
4. Sort by cost, highest first. Your expensive keywords with low scores are where the money leaks.
5. Write down the weakest part for each of your top ten keywords. That tells you which fix to make first.

If a keyword shows a dash instead of a number, it has not had enough searches yet. Do not chase scores on keywords with a handful of impressions.

Fixing expected click-through rate

This is about making your ad the obvious one to click for that search.

• Put the job and the place in the headline. “Emergency Plumber in Leeds” beats “Professional Plumbing Services”.
• Give a reason to choose you. A fixed price, a same-day slot, a guarantee you actually offer, years trading.
• Use assets. Call buttons, sitelinks, callouts and your location make the ad bigger and more useful on a phone.
• Remove searches you do not want. Add negative keywords such as “jobs”, “course”, “DIY” and “free” so the ad stops showing to people who will never click.

Fixing ad relevance

Low ad relevance nearly always means an ad group trying to cover too much. If “boiler repair”, “bathroom fitting” and “blocked drain” all share one ad, that ad cannot match any of them well.

• Split keywords into tight groups, one service per ad group.
• Write ads that repeat the language of the keyword, naturally.
• Keep the number of keywords in each group small enough that one ad genuinely fits them all.

Fixing landing page experience

This is the part most small accounts neglect and the one with the biggest knock-on effect, because it also decides whether a click turns into a phone call.

• Send each ad group to the matching page. Boiler repair ads go to the boiler repair page, not the home page.
• Repeat the promise from the ad. If the ad says “fixed-price boiler service”, the page headline should say it too.
• Make it fast on a phone. Our guide to website speed for small businesses explains the checks, and speed optimisation is £99 if the site is the bottleneck.
• Make the next step obvious. A tap-to-call button and a short form near the top, both working. If enquiries vanish, check why contact forms stop working.

Where your current site has no page that fits a campaign, a dedicated page is often the fastest fix. Our landing page design is £199.

A worked example: one ad group split three ways

Take an electrician in Nottingham running a single ad group called “Electrician” with twenty keywords in it: fuse box replacement, EV charger installation, rewiring, socket installation, electrical safety certificates and more. One ad reads “Local Electrician, Fully Qualified, Call Today”, and every click lands on the home page. Most keywords show scores of 3 or 4, with ad relevance and landing page experience both below average.

The fix is structural rather than clever. The twenty keywords become three tight groups: consumer unit replacement, EV charger installation and landlord electrical certificates. Each group gets its own ad naming the job and the city, with a line on what the customer gets, and each ad points to a page about that one job with a call button at the top. Nothing about the budget changes.

What changes is that each searcher now sees an ad about the thing they typed and lands on a page about it. That is exactly what the three parts of Quality Score measure, so the scores tend to follow, and more importantly so do the phone calls. The same budget simply works harder.

Which fix to make first

The time column is a rule of thumb from running small accounts, not a Google figure. Scores update as new searches come in, so low-volume keywords move slowly.

Mistakes that waste money chasing the score

• Pausing every keyword under 5. A low-scoring keyword that brings profitable calls is still a good keyword.
• Stuffing the keyword into every line. Relevance is about matching intent, not repetition.
• Ignoring tracking. Quality Score tells you about clicks. Only conversion tracking tells you about calls and forms.
• Judging after a few days. Scores need volume. Make one change, then give it time.

When to get help

If your scores are mostly 3s and 4s and your cost per click keeps climbing, the account structure is usually the problem rather than your budget. Our Google Ads management is from £199 a month, with your ad spend paid directly to Google and no markup on it. We rebuild the structure, rewrite the ads, line each group up with the right page and set up tracking. Every price is on our pricing page.

Whether you hire help or not, treat Quality Score as a free monthly health check. It points straight at the part of your ads that is costing you most.