Marketing metrics explained

Google Ads quality score: the three parts, and what each one responds to

Google Ads quality score is Google's rating of how well a keyword's ad and landing page fit the person searching, reported per keyword on a scale from 1 to 10.

About the Google Ads connector

It is a diagnostic, and Google's help page says so in as many words: it is not used in the auction. Source: Google Ads Help, About Quality Score for Search campaigns. It tells you which part of a keyword's setup Google thinks is weak.

How it's counted

The score has three components, each rated on a three-step scale: below average, average or above average. Source: Google Ads Help, About Quality Score for Search campaigns.

Expected click-through rate is Google's estimate of how likely your ad is to be clicked when it shows for this keyword, judged against other advertisers on the same term. It responds to the ad copy's pull and to how well the keyword matches what people typing it want.

Ad relevance is how closely the ad's wording matches the keyword's intent. A keyword about running shoes served an ad about sports equipment scores low here. It responds to writing ads per keyword theme rather than one ad for everything.

Landing page experience is Google's view of the page the click lands on: whether it is about what the ad promised, whether it loads and works on a phone, and whether it is easy to use. It responds to the page, which sits outside the ads account and is easy to overlook.

The score shown is Google's. The exact way the three are combined is not published in a form you can reproduce.

What it tells you, and what it doesn't

It tells you where to look. A keyword with a low score and a below average landing page experience has a page problem; where ad relevance is the weak part, it is a copy problem. That is the whole use of it.

It does not tell you whether the keyword is profitable, or whether a high score is worth having on a term that never converts. A keyword can score 10 and lose money, and score 4 and be your best performer.

Where it goes wrong

A low score raises what you pay. Google ranks ads by a combination of the bid and the ad's quality, along with other factors, so an ad with a lower quality score needs a higher bid to win the same position, and the cost per click you actually pay rises with it. Two advertisers bidding the same amount on the same term can pay different prices if their quality differs. Google's help page names six factors in Ad Rank: the bid, the quality of the ad and landing page at auction time, the Ad Rank thresholds, how competitive the auction is, the context of the search (location, device, time, the search terms), and the expected impact of assets such as sitelinks. The quality it uses is measured fresh for each auction, not the 1 to 10 figure in your column, which is a summary of it. Source: Google Ads Help, About Ad Rank.

Chasing the score is the other failure. Rewriting ads to match keywords word for word, or pausing low-scoring keywords that convert, improves the number and can worsen the account. The score is a symptom reading, and a keyword that converts at a good cost per acquisition with a score of 5 is a keyword to keep.

The third failure is reading a score that hasn't settled. A keyword shows a dash instead of a score until there have been enough searches that exactly match it, and a score built on a handful of impressions moves around. Source: Google Ads Help, About Quality Score for Search campaigns. Treat it as meaningful only once the keyword has had real traffic.

How to read it in your account

Quality score and its three components are columns you add to the keyword table: Quality Score, Exp. CTR, Ad Relevance and Landing Page Exp., under the Quality Score group in the column picker. The four historical versions (each with "(hist.)" after the name) show the score at the end of the reporting period, and segmenting the table by day shows how it moved. Source: Google Ads Help, About Quality Score for Search campaigns.

Sort by impressions, then read the score. A low score on a keyword with ten impressions a month doesn't matter; a low score on your top spender does.

Related metrics

Click-through rate: the observed figure that expected CTR is a forecast of.

Cost per click: what a low score pushes up.

Impression share: how often your ad showed when it could have, which a low score also erodes.

Keeping it current

A scheduled Fresh Sheets report can keep Google Ads keyword data, with quality score and its three components selected as fields, current in its own tab. Fresh Sheets replaces that tab's contents on every refresh, so keep any notes or week-on-week comparison on a separate tab.