What is Quality Score?
Google's one-to-ten rating of how relevant an ad, its keywords and its landing page are to the search. A higher score lowers what you pay per click for the same position.
Quality Score is Google’s rating, from one to ten, of how relevant your ad and landing page are to the people searching for a keyword. You can see it for each keyword in your Google Ads account.
Google builds it from three parts. Expected click-through rate, which is how likely people are to click your ad. Ad relevance, which is how closely the ad matches what was searched. And landing page experience, which is how useful and relevant the page is that the ad sends people to.
It matters because Google does not sell the top positions to whoever bids most. It weighs your bid against the quality of your ad. A business with a better Quality Score can appear above a competitor bidding more, and pay less per click to do it. That makes improving relevance the one legitimate way to buy the same traffic for less money.
The usual fixes are tighter groups of closely related keywords, ads that repeat the language of the search, and a landing page that picks up exactly where the ad left off rather than dropping people on the homepage.
Paid media measured on what it returns, not what it spends.
Google, Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok campaigns built on search terms, creative testing and conversion tracking, not impressions.