Quality Score (Google Ads metrics)

Quality Score is a diagnostic tool meant to give you a sense of how well your ad quality compares to other advertisers.

This score is measured on a scale from 1-10 and is available at the keyword level. A higher Quality Score means that your ad and landing page are more relevant and useful to someone searching for your keyword, compared to other advertisers.

You can use the Quality Score diagnostic tool to identify where it might be beneficial to improve your ads, landing pages, or keyword selection. Having better quality components typically makes it easier and cheaper for your ads to enter an auction. Our measures of ad quality also help determine whether your ad is qualified to appear at all.

Good to know about Quality Score

1. Quality Score is not a key performance indicator and should not be optimized or aggregated with the rest of your data.
2. Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction. It’s a diagnostic tool to identify how ads that show for certain keywords affect the user experience.

How it’s calculated

Quality Score is calculated based on the combined performance of 3 components:

• Expected clickthrough rate (CTR): The likelihood that your ad will be clicked when shown.
• Ad relevance: How closely your ad matches the intent behind a user’s search.
• Landing page experience: How relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad.

Each component is evaluated with a status of “Above average,” “Average,” or “Below average.” This evaluation is based on a comparison with other advertisers whose ads showed for the exact same keyword, over the last 90 days.

If one of these components has a status of “Average” or “Below average,” this may indicate an opportunity to make improvements. Learn more about the 5 ways to use Quality Score to improve your performance

Keep in mind

• Quality Score is based on historical impressions for exact searches of your keyword, therefore changing keyword match types will not impact Quality Score.
• If you notice a “—” in the Quality Score column, it means there aren’t enough searches that exactly match your keywords to determine a keyword’s Quality Score.
• There are factors related to your ad quality that might not be captured by Quality Score. These factors include, but are not limited to:
  1. Devices used in search
  2. Location of user
  3. Time of day
  4. Ad extensions
• Information obtained from any of Google’s various crawlers may be used to assess ad quality, which can be reflected through Quality Score.
• Create time- or location-specific ad text: test seasonal creative around holidays or special events, or test location-optimized creative. Adding seasonal messaging during the holiday season might improve the ad rank.

How to check your Quality Score

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. In the left menu, select Keywords.
3. In the upper right corner of the table, click the columns icon.
4. Under “Modify columns for keywords”, open the Quality Score section. To view the current Quality Score and its component statuses, choose any of the following to add to your statistics table:
   1. Quality Score
   2. Landing Page Exp.
   3. Exp. CTR
   4. Ad Relevance
5. To view past Quality Score stats for the reporting period you’re looking at, choose any of the following metrics:
   1. Quality Score (hist.)
   2. Landing Page Exper. (hist.)
   3. Ad Relevance (hist.)
   4. Exp. CTR. (hist.)
6. Apply

How often does quality score update?

Quality scores on Google Ads update every time a user makes a search which triggers your ad. This means that it constantly updates to take into account changes to your site and ad copy, as well as your ad’s performance. In practice, given the use of historic data, quality scores will take a bit of time to reflect the changes made. But the good news is that, with a bit of work, you can improve your quality scores.

But why does quality score matter?

These changes are all well and good, but what’s in it for you as an advertiser? To put it bluntly, the better your quality score, the cheaper your clicks. Remember that the higher your quality score, the better Google sees you as responding to your users’ needs, and therefore the less they will charge you for each click. Cheaper clicks equal better margins and a lower cost per conversion.