Understanding the Google Ads Quality Score

• What is Quality Score?
• The 3 components of Quality Score:
• 1: Ad relevance
• 2: Expected CTR
• 3: Landing page experience

What is Quality Score?

Every Google advertiser needs a deep understanding of what Quality Score means, because it directly influences the performance of their sponsored links.

This metric is how Google assesses several characteristics of your ads and the keywords you selected.

Combined with your chosen bid and other factors, such as the context of the search, this score forms your Ad Rank, which sets your ad's position among the other search results. On top of that, the higher your Quality Score, the lower your cost per click, as we explain in our article on the Google Ads auction.

The 3 components of Quality Score:

Google evaluates the quality of the elements in your ad, the expected clickthrough rate for the selected keywords, and the user's experience on the landing page. Each of these factors carries a certain weight in the final score.

It is up to the analyst to identify where there is the most room for improvement and make the necessary adjustments. These components are rated “below average”, “average”, or “above average”.

Together, they define the Quality Score, which is given on a scale of 1 to 10. In Google Ads, these scores appear as optional columns in the keyword report, including historical versions of each component.

1: Ad relevance

With this factor, Google rates how closely your keyword matches the message in the ads that refer to it.

To earn good scores here, you need to be specific when writing your ad copy.

Your campaign structure should also be organized around themes, keeping very different keywords out of the same ad group.

There are still other powerful techniques to raise this factor, as we explain in our article on ad relevance.

2: Expected CTR

This component depends more heavily on the keywords you added. Expected CTR gives us the probability of receiving clicks when we enter the auction, without considering other elements that can affect ad visibility, such as ad assets (the former extensions).

To calculate this metric, Google evaluates whether the search term will match your keyword, along with device type and other factors.

Since this is a metric relative to other keywords in Google Ads, use it to compare the performance of your own keywords against one another.

That way, you can identify irrelevant terms that cannot bring good results.

Like Quality Score and its other components, this metric is constantly updated. So it is a good idea to redo this kind of analysis periodically.

3: Landing page experience

Google expects its advertisers to offer users the best possible experience, so that people keep coming back to the search engine.

That is why we should pay close attention to this component. We covered it in more detail in the article linked above, but a quick summary of how it works and what you can do is worth including.

After clicking the ad, users should land on a page highly related to what they were searching for.

That page should also be fast, work well on mobile, and offer content that is useful to the reader. If you notice this score is not good for one of your ads, check whether your site has a more relevant page for that group of keywords.

If it does not, consider making changes to the page itself, for example reducing its load time or adding copy that covers the same topic as your chosen keywords.

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