Quality Score is a keyword-level rating Google assigns in Google Ads, from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest). It reflects how well a keyword, your ad, and your landing page combine to serve a searcher's intent. A higher Quality Score generally earns better ad positions at a lower effective cost per click.
Important: this is the Google Ads Quality Score for keywords. It is a different measure from Vendably's product quality score (which lives in DataHub) and the DataHub feed health score. Those assess your product data; this metric assesses how Google rates your keyword-ad-landing page combination in the ads auction.
The three components
Quality Score does not have a single arithmetic formula. Google calculates it from three rated components:
- Expected click-through rate: how likely your ad is to be clicked when shown for this keyword, compared with other ads targeting the same keyword.
- Ad relevance: how closely your ad copy matches the intent behind the keyword.
- Landing page experience: how relevant, useful, and easy to navigate your landing page is for someone who clicked the ad.
Google rates each component as "Above average", "Average", or "Below average". The composite Quality Score from 1 to 10 reflects those three ratings together. You can view the component ratings in Google Ads alongside the overall score.
Worked example
You bid on the keyword "stainless steel water bottle 500ml". Google rates your expected CTR as "Above average" because your historical CTR for similar terms is strong, your ad relevance as "Average" because your ad copy mentions the category but not the specific size, and your landing page experience as "Below average" because the page loads slowly on mobile.
Your Quality Score is 5. Improving the landing page speed and adding "500ml" to the ad headline could lift you to 7 or above, reducing your effective CPC and improving your ad rank.
What good looks like
- 7 to 10: above average. Your keyword, ad, and landing page are well aligned. Google rewards this with better positions and lower effective CPCs.
- 4 to 6: average. Acceptable, but there is usually a clear component holding the score back. Check which of the three components is rated "Below average".
- 1 to 3: poor. Investigate immediately. A low Quality Score means you are paying more than competitors for a worse position, and your ads may show infrequently or not at all.
Aim for 7 or above on your priority keywords. Any keyword scoring 3 or below is worth pausing or fixing before spending further budget on it.
How Vendably surfaces Quality Score
Vendably reads each Google Ads keyword's Quality Score from the Google Ads API and stores it against the keyword record. The ad account audit flags keywords with low Quality Scores as part of its account health findings, so you can see which keywords are dragging down performance without manually checking each one in Google Ads. See the ad account audit article for more on what the audit checks.
Quality Score is a Google Ads metric. Microsoft Advertising does not provide an equivalent quality score, so this metric is not available for Microsoft campaigns.