Quality Score is the most misread number in a Google Ads account. It looks like a performance metric, it sits in a column you can sort by, and it runs from one to ten, so everybody treats it as a target. At The Growth Bully, a Malta performance marketing agency, we inherit accounts every month where somebody has spent weeks trying to move that number and has made the advertising worse in the process.
It is a diagnostic readout. It tells you what the system currently believes about your keyword, your ad and your page, measured against the other advertisers bidding on the same search. Reading it is useful. Chasing it is not.
What is Quality Score actually measuring?
It is a relative estimate, not an absolute grade. Three components sit behind the single number: expected click through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Each is scored as below average, average or above average against other advertisers competing for the same keyword, which means your score can fall while nothing on your side has changed.
That relativity is the part most explanations skip, and it has a practical consequence. A seven in a quiet niche and a seven in a crowded one are not the same quality of setup. If a competitor arrives with a sharper offer and a faster page, your components can drop while your own account is exactly as you left it last month.
Does raising Quality Score lower your cost per click?
Not directly, and this is where the chasing starts. Quality Score is a reporting summary of signals that the auction already uses when it calculates ad rank. Improving the underlying relevance does usually reduce what you pay. Improving the displayed number without changing anything real is not possible, because the number is downstream of the signals.
The distinction matters because it decides what you work on. If you treat the score as the goal, you optimise for the appearance of relevance: keyword stuffed headlines, keywords repeated in the page title, ad groups split until each holds one term. If you treat it as a readout, you work on the thing it is reading, which is whether your advert and your page genuinely answer the search.
Which of the three components is usually the real problem?
Landing page experience, in most accounts we open, and it is almost never the technical problem people assume. The page loads perfectly well. What fails is message match: somebody searched for one specific service, clicked an advert promising that service, and landed on a general homepage that mentions it in a list of eleven other things.
Speed gets the blame because it is measurable and there are tools that produce a red number for it. Relevance has no tool, so it goes unexamined. If a searcher cannot see the thing they searched for in the first screen of your page, in roughly the words they used, no amount of page weight optimisation will fix the component. We go into the page side of this in why landing pages fail to convert.
Is a low Quality Score on a low volume keyword worth fixing?
Usually not. A keyword with three impressions a month and a Quality Score of four is costing you almost nothing and telling you almost nothing, because the estimate itself is built on too little data to be stable. The work it would take to move it is identical to the work on a keyword carrying real volume.
Sort by cost before you sort by score. Fixing the three components on the keywords that take the top share of spend changes the account. Fixing them on the long tail changes a column. Here is the order worth working in:
- Keywords above roughly a tenth of account spend with a below average component. These are the only ones where the maths is obvious.
- Keywords with above average click through rate but below average landing page experience. The demand is proven and the page is losing it, which is the cheapest fix available.
- Keywords with below average ad relevance across a whole ad group. That is a grouping problem, not a copy problem, and one restructure fixes many keywords at once.
- Everything else, which is a quarterly tidy at most, and often a pause decision instead of a fix.
How do you improve landing page experience without rebuilding the site?
Match the page to the search rather than the service. The fastest version is a headline that repeats the searcher intent in their phrasing, the proof of that specific claim immediately beneath it, and a single action. Everything else on the page can stay. Most of the lift comes from the first screen agreeing with the advert.
Two further things carry weight and cost little. Keep the page useful on a phone, since the majority of Maltese search traffic arrives that way and a form that needs pinching to read is an experience problem regardless of load time. And make the next step obvious rather than abundant: a page offering four different conversion routes is a page that has not decided what the visitor came for.
What makes expected click through rate fall?
Usually a mismatch between what the keyword asks and what the headline offers, and sometimes nothing you did at all. The component is an estimate of how your advert will perform relative to competitors on that search, so a rival writing a better headline can lower yours. It is also historical, which means it recovers slowly.
What reliably helps is making the headline answer the query rather than describe your company, and allowing the loose matching in the account to be policed properly, because an advert measured against searches it was never written for will always look weak. That is a search terms problem more than a copy problem, and we cover the mechanics in where your budget actually goes and what match types really control.
Why does chasing the number produce worse ads?
Because the shortcuts that look like relevance to a human reading a checklist are not the ones the auction rewards. Keyword stuffed headlines, single keyword ad groups built past the point of usefulness, and page titles written for the crawler rather than the buyer all tend to raise a component slightly and lower the conversion rate meaningfully.
The trade is a bad one. You cannot spend a Quality Score. The account is judged on cost per qualified enquiry, and copy written to satisfy a relevance estimate reads like copy written by somebody who has never met the customer, because that is effectively what it is.
What should you look at instead?
Cost per qualified enquiry, by keyword, with a conversion signal you trust. That single view answers the question Quality Score only gestures at, which is whether the money is buying the right conversations. Quality Score then becomes what it was always meant to be: a hint about where to look when that number moves the wrong way.
The prerequisite is measurement that survives consent prompts and browser changes, because a relevance diagnostic is no use on top of a broken conversion signal. We set that out in conversion tracking that survives, and the enquiry quality side in why leads do not convert. If you would rather have the diagnosis done properly once, our Google Ads work starts by finding which keywords are paying for the wrong searches, or tell us what your enquiries are costing now and we will tell you where the waste is.