What Quality Score is and why it affects your costs
Quality Score is a 1–10 rating Google assigns to each keyword in your account. It feeds into your Ad Rank, which determines where your ad sits and what you pay per click.
Higher scores mean better position at lower cost. When yours is low, you pay closer to your maximum bid, even when competition for that keyword is light.
Google’s documentation: “Higher quality ads typically cost less per click than lower quality ads. If your ads are low quality, you may find that your actual CPC is close to your maximum CPC even when there is low competition.”
Quality Score has three components: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Two of them live inside Google Ads. The third is on your website.
What Google checks on your landing page
Google crawls the page your ad sends people to. It checks whether the page matches what the ad promised, how fast it loads on mobile, and whether the next step is obvious.
The most common issue: every ad in the account sends traffic to the homepage. The homepage isn’t built around the keyword that triggered the click. It has six different places to go and takes four seconds to load on a phone. Google reads that as a poor experience.
Message match
If your ad targets “emergency electrician Perth,” the page it sends to should open with the thing the person searched for. Your company name in the H1 doesn’t count. Neither does a generic tagline about how long you’ve been in business.
When your ad and your landing page say the same thing, the reader knows they’re in the right place. If they say different things, the reader hesitates, and Google scores it accordingly.
Ideally, you want one dedicated page per campaign, built around the keywords it’s serving. One headline, one offer, one action.
How to check your score right now
This takes about one minute.
- Open Google Ads and go to Campaigns, then Keywords.
- Click the columns icon in the top right of the keyword table.
- Under “Modify columns for keywords,” open the Quality Score section.
- Add: Quality Score, Landing Page Exp., Ad Relevance, and Exp. CTR.
- Click Apply.
Your table now shows the landing page experience status for every keyword: Above average, Average, or Below average. Any keyword with meaningful spend sitting at Average or Below average is worth investigating.
Want a Google Ads specialist to check your account?
All our potential clients are audited by a Google Ads specialist in Perth who presents your recommended strategy.
The three fixes that move the score
Match the page to the keyword. Your H1 should reflect the search terms your campaign is targeting. If it doesn’t, that’s the first fix.
One clear action. A page with multiple competing CTAs reads as confusing to both the user and Google. Pick one: a call button, a contact form, or a booking link.
Speed on mobile. Google-commissioned research by Deloitte found that a 0.1-second improvement in mobile load time produced a 21.6% increase in lead generation form completions. The study tracked 37 brands and 30 million user sessions. Run your page through PageSpeed Insights. If the mobile score is under 50, it’s worth fixing.
If you want us to walk through what your account is showing, get in touch with the Distl team.
