What is the Keyword Quality score?

Keyword Quality score (QS) is an important factor in whether your ads get shown or not. It's even more important in an Ad Grant than in a paid Google Ads account, since it's a compliance requirement.

Your keywords can be automatically given a Quality score, between 1 and 10.

Low quality scores tend to suppress Impressions and they also raise the average Cost Per Click (CPC) that you pay. Conversely, high scores make it more likely that your ads get shown and at a cheaper cost. It's important to maintain high scores.

QS can change from week to month, and you can take various actions to improve them. A lot of low quality keywords could indicate a problem with your ad groups, or a website landing page that's not fit for purpose.

Not all keywords will get a score and that's ok: un-scored keywords (you'll just see a dash instead of a score in the column) do no harm to your results. The more impressions a keyword gets, the more likely it is to get assigned a quality score.

QS has three component parts that determine its score:

1. Landing page experience: how relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad
2. Ad relevance: how closely your ad matches the user's search
3. Expected Click Through Rate (CTR): how likely it is that your ad will be clicked when shown

There is already an article in this course about improving CTR, so let's look at how you can improve QS by improving the landing page and ad relevance.

Add the quality score columns to your keyword reports

Navigate to Campaigns > Audiences, Keywords and content > Search Keywords. You can do this at account level to see all keywords, or view only the keywords within a specific campaign or ad group.

There are three essential columns you need to add to your report. By default these are missing. Click on the Columns icon, then select Modify columns.

In the left column check the boxes to add the columns for Quality score, Landing page experience, and Ad relevance. In the right column, you can move those columns to your preferred position next to other columns.

For now, ignore the options that have (hist.) after them. Those provide historical data that don't need right now.

How to figure out what caused high or low quality scores

Once you've saved those new columns, you should see a report much like this. The new columns can help us pinpoint why Google scored keywords high or low.

This screenshot shows the keywords from an informational campaign about young people and nutrition. All ads in this campaign point to the same landing page.

You can click the top of the Quality score column to sort the keywords by highest QS first. Alternatively, click the top of the Impressions column to sort by the most-shown ads.

First, look at the Quality score column. In this campaign there are no really low scoring keywords, the lowest is 5/10. A couple are a respectable 7/10. None need to be removed.

What's different about the two highest keywords? They both have the word "teach" in them, but nothing else sets them apart.

The Ad relevance column confirms what the problem isn't: it's not the ad text. The wording of the ad matches the keywords. Only one keyword scores below average, probably because the words "healthy foods for teens" don't appear in the ad text. As the Ad Grant manager, the ad relevance score should be within your ability to control.

Now look at the Landing page experience column. It tells a compelling story: the landing page is below average for almost every keyword, which is bringing the average QS down. The landing page looks ok to me, it's well written and attractive; but a quick test reveals that it's very slow loading, giving a poor experience to the visitor. To improve landing page experience you need to either have the access and ability to fix website issues, or a web developer to do it for you.

How to improve quality scores

If the landing page experience is the problem:

1. Try to view the landing page with a fresh eye. If you wrote it, ask others for feedback.
2. Improve the landing page. Ensure it is persuasive, well written, and fast loading, with compelling calls to action for visitors to take, relevant to what they searched for.
3. Check the conversion rate. If people aren't ever converting from this landing page, that might indicate a problem with it.
4. Try to use consistent language, with the text of your ad closely matching the text on the landing page.
5. Test the page loading speed and mobile friendliness and get your web developer to fix any issues.
6. Point the ads, or just the individual problematic keywords, to a more relevant landing page.

If ad relevance is the problem:

1. Ensure that the keywords closely match the ad text. It's important to have carefully themed ad groups, with the wording of the ad similar to the keywords.
2. If keywords are relevant to your mission and you know they ought to score better, consider splitting them into a new ad group with more suitable ad text.
3. If the keywords are off-mission, edit and improve, or remove them.

Filter the report to find the most problematic keywords

Filtering is a very useful technique. Whilst in the Search keywords report, you can filter to identify the worst-scoring keywords across the account. Make sure you're at account level, then click the Add filter button.

Start typing the word quality and you should be offered the option to filter by Quality Score. Choose the less than symbol< and type the number 5, as shown below. Now you're seeing every low quality keyword on your account. Sort by column to put them in order of high to low, or maybe to group them by ad group.

Beyond compliance, personally I don't want many quality scores of 3 or 4 in my campaigns. I remove, reword or reorganize them, or try to improve the landing page. It can take time for scores to improve, so make a note and check them again a month or two later.

If a keyword scores 3 or 4 but has a high Conversion rate and/or high Click Through Rate (CTR) plus plenty of impressions, then I would let it remain on the account.

Quality scores and Ad Grant Compliance

Ad Grant accounts must maintain keyword quality scores of 3 and above, and pause keywords that score only 1 or 2. Non-scored keywords can be ignored, they are not an issue for compliance.

The old method for staying in compliance was to set up an automated rule that paused low quality keywords daily; however these days low quality keywords are automatically paused by Google Ads so you don't need to actively check for them. You can see if this has happened by viewing the Campaigns > Change history report.

Google support pages:

Ad Grant mission-based campaigns policy:
support.google.com/grants/answer/4410314

About Quality score:
support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6167118

5 ways to use Quality Score to improve your performance:
support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6167130