Google Ads Quality Score Explained: How It Works and How to Improve It

Google Ads Quality Score gives you a 1-to-10 rating at the keyword level, showing how relevant your ads and landing pages are to the people searching for them. Three things build that number: expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. It doesn't set your rank on its own. Each auction works out Ad Rank from your bid combined with real-time quality signals, though ads with higher quality can still land better positions for less per click. What follows breaks the score down, explains how it ties to Ad Rank and cost, and walks through each component with steps for fixing a low score.

This guide comes from the RATH Infotech team, led by founders Sumeet Mehta and Manish Doshi. We've served Dubai and the rest of the UAE since 2014, running Google Ads accounts at scale with Google-certified specialists on staff. The levers below aren't folklore lifted from some blog. They're how we manage relevance every single day.

What Google Ads Quality Score actually is (and isn't)

Quality Score is a keyword-level number, scored 1 to 10 in Google Ads (the platform used to be called Google AdWords), that estimates how relevant your ads and landing pages are to a searcher versus other advertisers. Google calls it a diagnostic tool: a check on your relevance, not something the auction uses directly to rank you. So that 1-10 you see is really just a summary of past relevance signals. It's there to show you what needs fixing.

That difference matters, because people constantly conflate three separate things. The Quality Score you can see isn't the same as the real-time quality signals Google runs inside each auction, and neither one is Ad Strength, which is its own feedback on how well your responsive ad is put together. Most competing explainers blur all three together. We cover Ad Rank in its own section below, and we bust the Ad Strength myth further down.

The three components: expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience

Quality Score comes from three components, and each shows up with a plain status: Above average, Average or Below average. Those labels, not the 1–10 number, are what you actually act on. A "Below average" flag tells you exactly which lever to pull.

Expected clickthrough rate tells you how likely someone is to click your ad when it shows for a given keyword, based on past performance, regardless of position. Ad relevance is a different measure: how closely the ad matches what the keyword is actually asking for. Then there's landing page experience, which judges the page itself once the click happens, its relevance, usefulness, transparency, and how easy it is to navigate. Put the three together and you can see exactly where a keyword is bleeding quality.

How to check your Quality Score (60-second walkthrough)

To find your Quality Score, open the keywords table in Google Ads and add the relevant columns. There's more than just the overall Quality Score column available, though. You can also pull in Expected CTR, Ad relevance, and Landing page experience, along with their historical versions. That way you're watching how each piece is trending, not just glancing at today's snapshot.

One thing trips people up: a keyword marked with a dash instead of a number doesn't mean it has a bad score. That dash simply shows Google hasn't seen enough recent traffic on the keyword to calculate a reliable score. It's missing data, not poor quality. Give the keyword some impressions and clicks, then check back. Treat the component statuses as your working columns; they map directly to the fixes covered in the playbook below.

Ad Rank explained: what the auction really uses

Ad Rank is the number Google works out for your ad in every single auction, and it decides whether your ad shows at all, and where. Google recalculates it live each time someone searches. That's why your position can shift between searches even when you haven't touched your account. This is the figure that actually governs eligibility and placement. The visible Quality Score doesn't.

Google lays out several factors behind Ad Rank: your bid, the auction-time quality of your ad and landing page, the Ad Rank thresholds an ad has to clear before it can show, how competitive that particular auction is, the context of the search itself (the query, location, device, time and other signals), and the expected impact of your assets and ad formats. Here's the key point: the auction reads real-time quality signals. The 1–10 Quality Score, by contrast, is just an aggregated estimate of those same relevance fundamentals. Sharpen the fundamentals, relevance, expected CTR, landing pages, and the diagnostic score and your live Ad Rank move together.

How quality changes what you pay per click

Does Quality Score itself affect your cost per click? Not directly. It's the quality signals underneath it that do the work. Ad Rank blends your bid with quality measured at auction time, so a higher-quality ad can land a better position at a lower actual cost per click than a competitor who bids more but is less relevant. In practice, improving your three components is usually the cheapest "bid increase" you can get. You're buying position and efficiency with relevance, not money.

Reading older guides, watch out for one thing: the old formula floating around on blogs, actual CPC equals the Ad Rank of the advertiser below you divided by your Quality Score, plus one cent, is outdated. Don't treat it as current fact. We describe auction pricing here only the way Google documents it today: qualitatively, better quality can mean a better position at a lower cost. Want to know what clicks actually cost in AED, and how to plan a budget? Our guide to Google Ads cost in the UAE covers that. The same relevance mechanics come up when you're weighing paid against organic results, a comparison we cover in SEO versus Google Ads.

What counts as a "good" Quality Score?

There's no official "good" Quality Score target. Google doesn't publish one, and anyone promising a guaranteed 10/10 is peddling folklore. What we can say honestly is that scores behave differently depending on keyword type. Brand terms naturally score higher than generic or competitor terms, since your ads and pages are inherently more relevant to your own brand. Compare like-for-like instead of holding a competitor keyword to a brand keyword's standard.

A better rule is to judge keywords by profit, not by the number. A keyword sitting at 5 with three "Average" statuses that converts profitably is healthier than a vanity 8 on a term that never turns into business. Fix any "Below average" component first. Treat the 1–10 as a diagnostic, and let profit per conversion be the goal. We deliberately avoid quoting invented "industry average" score benchmarks, because no honest, universal figure exists.

How to improve Quality Score, component by component

Why is your Quality Score low? Nearly always it comes down to one component sitting Below average, so fixing it means figuring out which one and pulling that specific lever, not chasing the overall number. Go through the components in order, then check again once the keyword has picked up fresh data.

For expected CTR, tighten the match between keyword and ad. Rewrite headlines so they promise exactly what the searcher asked for, cut loose match types that drag in off-target queries, and add negative keywords so the ad only shows where it's actually relevant. Ad relevance calls for a different fix: break mixed ad groups into single-theme groups and echo the keyword's own language in the copy, so the ad reads like a direct answer to the search. Landing page experience closes the loop. The page has to carry through on the ad's promise: strong message match, useful original content, clear signals of transparency and trust, and fast, mobile-friendly performance.

On the landing-page lever specifically, our landing page conversion checklist and website speed optimization guide cover the details. Need the page built from scratch? That's what our landing page design service is for. One caution: don't pause a low-score keyword just because the score is low, not when it's converting profitably. Restructure it instead. Running all this in-house isn't for everyone. If you'd rather not, get a free growth audit and we'll show you exactly which components are costing you.

Five Quality Score myths that waste budget

Quality Score gets wrapped in myths, and those myths quietly eat your budget. Clear them up and you'll spend your time differently.

A 10/10 score everywhere isn't the goal, and treating it as one misses the point. The score is a diagnostic tool, so the real job is chasing profit and clearing up Below-average statuses, not landing a perfect number on every keyword. Another common mix-up: Ad Strength and Quality Score aren't the same thing. They're built for different jobs. Ad Strength grades how well a responsive ad is put together, while Quality Score digs into keyword-level relevance. Then there's the dash. A ", " score doesn't mean something's wrong; it just means there isn't enough recent data yet. Some assume Quality Score doesn't matter anymore now that AI bidding and Performance Max run the show, but that's wrong too. Relevance signals still drive Ad Rank in Search auctions, so the work still pays off in position and cheaper clicks. Last, people assume the keyword-level score works the same way across every campaign type. It doesn't. It's a Search-keyword diagnostic specifically, and other campaign types, like Display, Shopping and Performance Max, give their own feedback instead of this exact score.

How we apply this in UAE accounts

The UAE throws in a complication most global explainers skip over: search happens in both English and Arabic. Real relevance means treating the two languages separately, with their own ad groups and their own landing pages. Serve an English ad against an Arabic query and you won't get strong ad relevance or a good landing page experience. It's a harder discipline to maintain here. That's precisely why it pays off.

Quality discipline explains how our paid-media practice kept average CPC at ₹31.45 (≈ AED 1.37), with a best cost per conversion of ₹31.95 (≈ AED 1.39), across an anonymised real-estate Google Ads portfolio. These numbers come from one portfolio's performance-marketing results, shown alongside the conversion note below. They aren't a Quality Score promise for any account.

₹ converted at AED 1 = ₹23; that was the rate around campaign time, and it has moved since. These are performance-marketing results from a real-estate portfolio, not a Quality Score guarantee for any account. For senior attention on the mechanics described above, RATH Infotech offers Google Ads management across Dubai and the rest of the UAE, and the founders personally handle accounts of AED 25,000+/month. Full numbers sit in our real-estate Google Ads case study. Our wider performance marketing and lead generation work is worth a look too, and the same discipline applies to real-estate lead generation.

Ready to move forward? Get a free growth audit and we'll dig into what's dragging down your Quality Score, or take a look at our campaign results first if you'd rather see proof before you commit. You can reach us through the forms on this site, or just email sales@rath.ae.

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Reviewed by the RATH Infotech team, led by founders Sumeet Mehta and Manish Doshi.