The three things it measures
Each is rated below average, average or above average, and you can see all three in the Google Ads interface by adding the columns.
Expected click-through rate
How likely Google thinks people are to click your ad for this keyword, based on its history. This is the heaviest of the three, and the one most directly under your control through better copy.
Ad relevance
Whether the ad text actually matches the keyword. An ad group covering forty loosely-related keywords cannot possibly be relevant to all of them, which is why tight themes score better than broad ones.
Landing page experience
Whether the page behind the ad delivers what the ad promised, loads quickly and works on a phone. This is the component advertisers most often ignore, because it lives outside the ad account.
Why it changes what you pay
Ad Rank determines your position, and it is roughly your bid multiplied by your quality signals. Because the relationship is multiplicative rather than additive, quality is not a tiebreaker — it is a lever with the same force as money.
The practical consequence is that two advertisers can occupy the same position at very different costs. Raising relevance is the only change available that improves your position and lowers your cost simultaneously. Raising your bid can only do the first.
This is also why simply outspending competitors is a poor strategy on Google. A structurally better account beats a richer one, and it keeps beating it every day thereafter.
How to actually raise it
Split your ad groups
The most reliable single fix. A handful of closely related keywords sharing one specific ad will outscore a group covering everything. If you would have to write a vaguer ad to cover all the keywords in a group, the group is too broad.
Echo the keyword in the ad
Not as robotic insertion, but genuinely — if the keyword is 'emergency plumber', the ad should be about emergencies, not about plumbing generally.
Match the landing page to the promise
An ad for emergency plumbing that lands on a generic homepage fails, however good that homepage is. The page has to continue the sentence the ad started.
Add every ad asset
Sitelinks, callouts and structured snippets feed Ad Rank at no extra cost per click. Sitelinks alone are reported to lift click-through by 10–20% on non-brand terms. It is the cheapest improvement available and the one most small advertisers skip.
Prune what drags
A keyword with a persistently low score and no conversions is costing you on every other keyword's behalf. Pausing it is often the fastest account-level improvement.
What to ignore
Quality Score is reported at keyword level, but the auction uses a real-time calculation that is not exactly the number you see. Chasing a 10 on every keyword is not a good use of time.
Treat it as a diagnostic. A score of 3 or 4 tells you something in the chain is broken and points at which link. A score of 7 or 8 means the structure is sound and your effort is better spent elsewhere — usually on the offer or the landing page conversion rate rather than the ad account.
Questions
What is a good Quality Score?[+][-]
Seven or above is healthy. Below five signals a real mismatch somewhere between keyword, ad and landing page. A perfect 10 is rarely worth the effort required to reach it.
Does Quality Score affect Performance Max?[+][-]
Not in the same visible way. Quality Score is reported for Search keywords; automated campaign types use related relevance signals internally without exposing the number.
How long does it take to improve?[+][-]
Expected click-through rate updates as new impression data arrives, so meaningful movement usually takes a couple of weeks of real traffic rather than days.
Can a low Quality Score stop my ads showing?[+][-]
Yes. A sufficiently low score can put you below the threshold to enter the auction at all, at which point the ad simply does not appear regardless of budget.
Keep reading
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It plans, writes and launches the campaigns, then watches these numbers every day and adjusts them — inside your own ad account.
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