Using Quality Score to guide optimizations

Official guide to understanding and improving ad quality.

This ad quality best practices guide explains what Quality Score is and how you can use it to improve your ad performance in Google Ads.

1. What is Google Ads Quality Score

Quality Score is a helpful diagnostic tool, not a key performance indicator.

Why: Your Quality Score is like a warning light for a car’s engine that shows how healthy your ads and keywords are. It’s not meant to be a detailed metric that should be the focus of account management.

2. Diagnose keyword quality using Quality Score and other metrics

Focus your efforts on high-value areas where you can affect change.

Why: Being selective with your quality optimization efforts allows you to maximize impact - don’t waste time on things you can’t change or optimizations with limited upside.

3. Follow up on your Quality Score diagnosis

Pay attention to the “Big Three” component parts of ads quality: ad relevance, expected CTR and landing page experience.

Why: The real-time evaluations of these three components are used in the ad auction, while your Quality Score itself is not. Speaking generally, when those three components aren’t working well, you may want to take actions to improve them.

4. What matters (and what doesn’t) when it comes to ads quality

Understand what does and doesn’t matter when it comes to ads quality.

Why: Doing so will keep you focused on meaningful optimizations that will improve ads quality.

5. Connect ad quality to better performance

Make sure your most competitive ads can serve for each auction.

Why: Optimized ad rotations consider the specific context of an auction. Your ads, assets and bids can work together to drive more clicks.

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