Keywords & Targeting
Quality Score
Quality Score is Google's 1 to 10 diagnostic rating of a keyword based on expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience, indicating how well the ad and page match the searcher's intent.
In practice
Quality Score is a reported diagnostic, not the exact number used in the auction, but the components behind it are what the auction uses. Higher quality lowers the cost you pay for a given position, so a keyword at 8 can outrank a competitor at 5 while paying less per click.
The three components are visible in the keyword report. Expected CTR reflects how often your ad gets clicked relative to its position; ad relevance measures how closely the ad text matches the keyword; landing page experience judges the page for relevance, transparency, speed, and mobile usability. Each is rated below average, average, or above average, which tells you where to work.
The practical fixes are structural: tightly themed ad groups so ad copy can mirror the keyword, responsive search ads with the keyword in a headline, and landing pages that repeat the promise of the ad. Chasing a 10 on every keyword is not the goal; removing below-average components on the keywords that spend the most money is.
Why it matters
It is the mechanism by which relevance turns into lower cost per click, and it diagnoses where the mismatch is.
RELATED TERMS
Landing Page Experience
Landing page experience is the Quality Score component that rates how relevant, useful, transparent, fast, and mobile-friendly the page a searcher lands on is for the keyword and ad that brought them.
CTR (Click-Through Rate)
Click-through rate is clicks divided by impressions, expressed as a percentage, showing how often people who saw an ad chose to click it.
Exact Match
Exact match is a Google Ads keyword match type, written in brackets, that shows ads for searches with the same meaning or intent as the keyword, including close variants.
Written by Ilya Bulychev, Founder, Live PPC Ads. Part of the PPC Glossary.
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