Google Ads Quality Score: What It Is and How to Fix It

Google Ads Quality Score is a keyword-level diagnostic that tells you how well your ads, keywords, and landing pages align with what a searcher actually wants. The number itself is less important than what sits underneath it: three component statuses, each labeled “Above average,” “Average,” or “Below average,” that point directly to what needs fixing. Open your Google Ads account right now, enable the Quality Score column under Keywords, scan those component statuses, and fix whichever one shows “Below average” first. That single action will do more for your cost-per-click and ad position than any bid adjustment.

Quick audit checklist:

Open your Google Ads account and navigate to Keywords.
Enable the Quality Score column and the three component columns (Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, Landing Page Experience).
Filter for keywords with a Quality Score of 1–5 and note which component is flagged “Below average.”

Pro Tip: Don’t try to fix everything at once. Rank your keywords by spend, then address the “Below average” component on your highest-spend keywords first. That’s where the CPC savings show up fastest.

Key Takeaways

Google Ads Quality Score is a 1–10 diagnostic built from three components — fix the “Below average” component on your highest-spend keywords first, and the CPC and position gains follow.

Point	Details
Quality Score is diagnostic	The 1–10 number summarizes expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience — use components, not the number, to prioritize fixes.
It’s not a live auction input	Real-time auction quality uses additional signals; improving components improves auction performance indirectly.
Fix highest-spend keywords first	Combine spend volume with component status to sequence fixes for the largest CPC and position impact.
Landing page is the most common weak point	Dedicated landing pages per ad group, matched to the ad promise and fast on mobile, fix the most common “Below average” status.
Growthreachmarketing for managed campaigns	Growthreachmarketing audits, restructures, and manages Google Ads for Irish salons and clinics to lower cost-per-lead and grow bookings.

What the three Quality Score components actually measure
How the 1–10 score is calculated and what it actually affects
How to find Quality Score and component statuses in your account
Priority-driven actions to raise each component
Hands-on audit checklist for Irish salons, clinics, and local service businesses
Quality Score is a diagnostic, not a report card
Growthreachmarketing manages Google Ads for Irish salons and clinics
Sources

What the three Quality Score components actually measure

Quality Score is built from three components: expected click-through rate (CTR), ad relevance, and landing page experience. Each carries its own status label, and each status label tells you something specific about where the problem lives.

Expected CTR

Expected CTR measures how likely your ad is to get clicked when it appears for a given keyword, compared to other ads in the same position. Google estimates this based on historical performance for that keyword across all advertisers, adjusted for factors like ad format and position.

A “Below average” status here usually means your ad copy isn’t compelling enough relative to what searchers expect to see. The fixes are concrete:

Test a stronger headline that includes the keyword and a specific benefit (“Book a Botox Consultation in Dublin Today” beats “Aesthetic Treatments Available”).
Add sitelink extensions, callout extensions, and call extensions. These increase the visual footprint of your ad and lift CTR without touching the core copy.
Tighten match types and add negative keywords to stop your ad showing for searches where a click was never likely.

Ad relevance

Ad relevance measures how closely your ad copy matches the intent behind the keyword. A mismatch here is almost always a structural problem: too many loosely related keywords crammed into one ad group, each triggering an ad that was written for a slightly different search.

The clearest sign of an ad relevance problem is an ad group where the keyword is “laser hair removal Dublin” but the ad headline reads “Beauty Treatments for Every Occasion.” The searcher wanted something specific; the ad gave them something generic. Component statuses indicate exactly where to update ad text, keyword selection, or landing page content — and “Below average” on ad relevance almost always means the ad group needs to be split into tighter, single-theme groups.

Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) can help, but use it carefully. If your keyword list is too broad, DKI will surface awkward or misleading headlines that hurt relevance rather than help it. For more on writing copy that actually matches intent, the ad copy fundamentals guide covers the mechanics in detail.

Landing page experience

Landing page experience covers relevance, transparency, page speed, and mobile usability. Google evaluates whether the page a searcher lands on delivers what the ad promised, loads quickly on mobile, and doesn’t feel deceptive or confusing.

Quick checks that flag a problem:

The ad promises “Free Skin Consultation” but the landing page is the homepage with no mention of the offer.
The page takes more than three seconds to load on a mobile connection.
There’s no clear call-to-action above the fold.
Contact details, business name, and address (NAP) are missing or buried.

Pro Tip: Quality Score uses a 90-day lookback window of exact-match impression data. For niche services with low search volume, you may see a dash (“—”) instead of a score — that means insufficient data, not a bad score. Focus on pattern analysis across similar keywords and ad groups rather than chasing a single keyword’s number.

Component	What Google measures	Status meaning	Top action
Expected CTR	Likelihood of a click vs. competitors at same position	Below average: ad copy or match types are weak	Rewrite headlines; add extensions; refine negatives
Ad relevance	How closely ad copy matches keyword intent	Below average: ad group is too broad or copy is generic	Split ad groups; align headline to keyword
Landing page experience	Relevance, speed, mobile UX, transparency	Below average: page doesn’t match ad promise or loads slowly	Build dedicated landing pages; improve mobile speed

How the 1–10 score is calculated and what it actually affects

The 1–10 number you see in your account is a diagnostic summary, not a live auction signal. Google’s own whitepaper is explicit on this point: the visible score reflects recent historical performance for exact-match queries and is not the same calculation Google uses at auction time. When your ad enters an auction, Google recomputes ad quality in real time using additional dynamic signals — device, location, time of day, and the exact query — that the 1–10 number doesn’t capture.

This distinction matters because it changes how you should use the score. Chasing a “10” is a distraction. What you’re actually trying to do is improve the underlying signals that feed both the diagnostic score and the real-time auction quality calculation.

When component statuses improve, here’s what tends to follow:

Lower average CPC. Better ad quality means Google needs to charge you less to maintain a given position.
Higher ad position. Ad Rank is determined by bid multiplied by ad quality, so better quality can lift position without raising bids.
Broader extension eligibility. Ads with stronger quality signals are more likely to show sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and call extensions — all of which improve CTR further.
More impression share. Higher-quality ads compete more effectively, so they appear more often for the same budget.

The relationship between Quality Score and ad impressions is worth understanding: a low-quality ad doesn’t just cost more per click, it also loses auctions it could have won, shrinking your reach before you’ve even looked at the bill.

How to find Quality Score and component statuses in your account

Google Ads provides step-by-step instructions for enabling Quality Score columns in the interface. Here’s the practical walkthrough:

Sign in to Google Ads and click Keywords in the left navigation.
Click the Columns icon (the grid icon at the top right of the table).
Select Modify columns and open the Quality Score category.
Add Quality Score, Exp. CTR, Ad relevance, and Landing page exp. to your active columns.
Click Apply and wait for the table to reload.
Sort by Quality Score ascending to surface the weakest keywords first.

What the dash (“—”) means: A dash in the Quality Score column means Google doesn’t have enough exact-match impression data for that keyword in the past 90 days. This is common for niche or low-volume services. It doesn’t mean the keyword is broken; it means you need more data before the diagnostic is meaningful.

Batch-fixing low-score keywords:

Filter the keyword table by Quality Score ≤ 4.
Export to a spreadsheet and add columns for monthly spend and conversion volume.
Prioritize keywords where spend is high and the component status is “Below average” — those are your highest-ROI fixes.
Group keywords with the same “Below average” component together so you can apply the same fix across multiple keywords at once.

Match type also affects what you see. Broad-match keywords may show a Quality Score if an exact-match version of that keyword has accumulated impressions in the same ad group. If you’re running mostly broad match and seeing lots of dashes, adding exact-match or phrase-match variants of your core keywords will generate the data needed for the diagnostic to populate.

Priority-driven actions to raise each component

The fastest gains come from fixing the right component on the right keywords, not from making small improvements everywhere at once. Use Quality Score alongside CTR, conversion rate, and site engagement to decide where to focus.

Improving expected CTR

Write headlines that speak to the specific search, not the general category. “Botox Clinic Dublin — Book This Week” will outperform “Aesthetic Treatments Available” for a searcher who typed “botox dublin.” Run A/B tests using Google Ads experiments rather than guessing. Add every relevant extension: sitelinks, callouts, call extensions, and location extensions all increase ad size and signal relevance.

Negative keywords are underused as a CTR lever. Every irrelevant click that doesn’t convert drags your historical CTR down and, over 90 days, pulls your expected CTR status with it.

Improving ad relevance

The fix is almost always structural. Split large, mixed ad groups into single-theme groups where every keyword shares the same core intent. Then rewrite the ad for that specific theme. For a salon running ads for “hair extensions Dublin” and “balayage Dublin” in the same ad group with one ad — split them. Each service gets its own ad group, its own headlines, and its own landing page. For a deeper look at how ad relevance works at the keyword level, that guide covers the mechanics.

Improving landing page experience

Create a dedicated landing page for each ad group theme. The page headline should mirror the ad headline. The offer should be visible above the fold. The CTA — whether that’s a booking form, a phone number, or a WhatsApp link — should be impossible to miss on mobile. Page speed matters: aim for a Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds on mobile. Google’s PageSpeed Insights gives you a free baseline. Conversion rate optimization principles apply directly here: a page that loads fast and matches the ad promise converts better and scores better.

First five fixes for any account:

Enable Quality Score and component columns.
Filter for keywords with Quality Score ≤ 4 and identify the most common “Below average” component.
Split any ad group with more than five loosely related keywords.
Write at least three headline variants per ad group and run an experiment.
Check every landing page on a mobile device and fix anything that breaks the booking flow.

Pro Tip: Fixing CTR and relevance first is tempting because the gains show up quickly in Quality Score. But the real payoff comes when you then improve the landing page conversion rate — that’s where lower CPC and better position translate into actual booked appointments, not just cheaper clicks.

Hands-on audit checklist for Irish salons, clinics, and local service businesses

Irish salons and aesthetic clinics running Google Ads face a specific challenge: search volumes for individual services are often low enough that Quality Score columns display dashes for many keywords. That makes pattern analysis across the account more useful than obsessing over any single keyword’s score.

Account structure checks:

Each service (e.g., “lip filler Dublin,” “semi-permanent makeup Cork”) has its own ad group. Pass/Fail.
Ad headlines include the service name and location. Pass/Fail.
Negative keywords exclude irrelevant searches (e.g., “DIY,” “training,” “course”). Pass/Fail.
Conversion tracking is active and recording phone calls, form submissions, and booking completions. Pass/Fail.

Landing page checks:

Each ad group links to a dedicated landing page, not the homepage. Pass/Fail.
The page includes the clinic name, address, and phone number (NAP). Pass/Fail.
A booking CTA is visible on mobile without scrolling. Pass/Fail.
Page loads in under three seconds on a 4G connection. Pass/Fail.
Reviews or trust signals (Google star rating, before/after results) appear on the page. Pass/Fail.

Prioritization framework: Score each keyword group by multiplying estimated monthly search volume by conversion potential, then weight by how easy the fix is. A keyword with moderate volume, a “Below average” landing page status, and a simple fix (add a dedicated page) ranks higher than a high-volume keyword where the fix requires a full site rebuild.

For local businesses, call extensions and location extensions are non-negotiable. A searcher looking for “aesthetic clinic near me” in Dublin who sees your ad with a phone number and address is far more likely to call than one who has to navigate to a page to find your contact details. Reputation signals — Google reviews, star ratings, and trust markers on landing pages — also feed landing page experience indirectly by reducing bounce rates and improving engagement metrics.

For clinics thinking beyond paid search, an SEO strategy for aesthetic clinics builds the organic authority that makes your paid ads more credible and your landing pages more trusted.

Pro Tip: Use Google Ads experiments to test landing page changes before rolling them out account-wide. A staged test on your top-spend ad group gives you real data on whether the change improves Quality Score components and conversion rate before you commit.

Quality Score is a diagnostic, not a report card

Most marketers treat Quality Score like a grade they need to improve. That framing leads to the wrong behavior: obsessing over the 1–10 number, making superficial copy tweaks to nudge a keyword from 6 to 7, and ignoring the conversion data that actually tells you whether the account is working.

The more useful frame is triage. Quality Score tells you where the friction is. A “Below average” landing page status on your highest-spend keyword isn’t a bad grade — it’s a specific instruction. Fix the page. Then check whether conversion rate improved alongside the component status.

What agencies running Google Ads for salons and clinics find consistently is that the accounts with the worst Quality Scores usually have the same two problems: ad groups that are too broad, and landing pages that are the homepage. Both are fixable in a week. The accounts with the best Quality Scores but disappointing results usually have the opposite problem: they’ve polished the diagnostic metrics without building a page that actually converts a visitor into a booked appointment.

Google’s own guidance reinforces this: Quality Score is directional. Pair it with conversion rate and business KPIs. A score of 8 on a keyword that never converts is a problem the Quality Score column won’t show you.

Growthreachmarketing manages Google Ads for Irish salons and clinics

Running Google Ads well for a salon or aesthetic clinic means more than fixing Quality Score columns. It means building an account structure where every ad group has a purpose, every landing page earns its click, and every euro of budget is working toward a booked appointment.

Growthreachmarketing handles the full process for Irish salons and clinics: account audit, ad group restructuring, ad copy testing, landing page optimization, and conversion tracking setup. The result is lower cost-per-lead and more booked appointments, without you spending hours in the Google Ads interface. If you’re running ads for a clinic or salon and your Quality Score components are flagging “Below average,” that’s the starting point. See how the Google Ads clinic guide applies these principles to aesthetic practices, or get in touch to book a free account review.

Sources

The following Google documentation and whitepapers form the foundation of this guide. Each is worth bookmarking for ongoing reference.