Why Your Google Ads Quality Score Is Hurting Your ROI

How to Improve Your Google Ads Quality Score

When Google Ads campaigns underperform, the first instinct is usually to increase the budget. More spend, more visibility, more results. It’s a logical assumption, but it often misses the real problem: a poor Quality Score.

Quality Score reflects how relevant your ads are to the people searching, and it directly affects how much you pay per click and where your ads appear. For marketing managers working with tight budgets, it’s one of the most effective ways to get more from the spend you already have.

What Is Google Ads Quality Score?

Quality Score is a diagnostic rating from 1 to 10, given to each keyword in your account. It’s based on three components, each rated Above Average, Average or Below Average:

• Expected click-through rate: how likely your ad is to be clicked when it shows for that keyword.
• Ad relevance: how closely your ad matches the intent behind the search.
• Landing page experience: how useful and relevant your landing page is to the person who clicks.

As a rough guide, a score of 7 or above is healthy. Brand keywords often reach 9 or 10, while generic and highly competitive keywords are harder to push up. Microsoft Ads uses a similar Quality Score system, so the same principles apply there too.

How to Find Your Quality Score

1. Open a campaign and go to the Keywords view.
2. If you can’t see the Quality Score column, click Columns, then Modify columns.
3. Search for “Quality Score”, tick it along with its three components, and click Apply.

Scores can vary by keyword, match type and landing page, so it’s worth reviewing them at ad group level rather than looking at an account average.

How Quality Score Affects What You Pay

Your ad’s position is decided by Ad Rank, which combines your bid, your Quality Score and the expected impact of your ad assets. That means an advertiser with a Quality Score of 8 can appear above a competitor with a score of 4, even if the competitor is bidding more.

The flip side is that a low Quality Score means paying more for the same position, or not showing at all. Across an account, that can quietly drain a significant share of your budget, which is why we recommend reviewing Quality Score at least once a quarter.

The Three Components in Practice

Expected CTR

Google looks at how your ads have performed in the past, adjusted for their position, and predicts how likely they are to be clicked. Specific headlines that match what someone searched for consistently outperform generic ones, so test your ad copy regularly.

Ad Relevance

The most common cause of poor ad relevance is putting too many loosely related keywords into one ad group. If ten different keyword themes share the same ads, the headlines can’t match all of them. A search for “sterile gloves”, for example, should trigger an ad that mentions sterile gloves in the headline, not a general one about cleanroom clothing.

Landing Page Experience

Google wants people to land on a page that gives them what the ad promised. It looks at four things:

• Relevance: the page should match the ad’s message and include the main keywords from your headline.
• Ease of use: clear sections, short paragraphs, bullet points and obvious calls to action.
• Reliability: fast loading and consistent display on mobile and desktop.
• Trust: reviews, testimonials and other proof that you’re a credible business.

Slow pages and poor mobile layouts are common culprits, so it’s worth checking your Core Web Vitals as part of any Quality Score review.

6 Ways to Improve Your Quality Score

1. Tighten your ad group structure. Give each ad group a single core theme, such as one product or service, so your ads can match the searches closely.
2. Mirror keyword intent in your ad copy. Use your keywords in both headlines and descriptions, and use Responsive Search Ads to test different combinations.
3. Build your keywords around how customers search. Customer research and longer, more specific keywords often bring lower volumes but much better-qualified traffic.
4. Send people to the right landing page. Point each ad group at the page about that product or service, not your homepage, and make sure it loads quickly on mobile.
5. Review your negative keywords. Check your search terms report regularly and exclude searches that are never going to convert.
6. Use ad assets. Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets and call assets (previously known as ad extensions) give people more reasons to click and take up more space on the results page.

A Note on Performance Max

Quality Score isn’t shown in Performance Max campaigns, so you have less visibility and control. The same principles still apply: relevance, intent matching and landing page quality all affect how PMax performs. Running Search campaigns alongside PMax gives you the diagnostic data that PMax doesn’t.

Getting More From the Budget You Already Have

Improving Quality Score is one of the most cost-effective ways to improve your Google Ads results, because it means spending smarter rather than spending more. Regularly reviewing your ad groups, keywords, ad copy and landing pages keeps your account working as hard as it can.

If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your account, our free Google Ads audit will show you where your Quality Score is costing you, and what to fix first.