Paid media
Quality Score
Quality Score is a diagnostic rating from one to ten estimating how relevant a keyword, ad and landing page are to a search, built from expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience.
What is quality score?
Quality Score is a diagnostic rating from one to ten estimating how relevant a keyword, ad and landing page are to a search, built from expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. It is a diagnostic rather than the live auction input.
Why anybody cares
It affects ad rank and the price paid per click, so the same position can cost materially less with better relevance.
How it is measured
Read at keyword level alongside its three components to see which one is weak, then improved by tightening the match between query, ad copy and landing page.
What people get wrong
It is a reported diagnostic, not the number used in the auction. Chasing the digit rather than the underlying relevance misses the point.
If somebody uses this term to mean something else, it is worth asking which meaning.
Where this comes up in the work
It is part of Marketplace Marketing, and more specifically of Regional marketplace marketing. Across the rest of the work it shows up in:
- Local SEO, which cannot be done properly without it
- Ecommerce SEO, where getting it wrong shows up in giving variant pages a canonical that makes sense
- Digital PR and Link Building: it is the reason targeting the trade sources that matter rather than general publications is scoped the way it is
- Google Ads Management, where it is the difference between making sure the platform is optimising toward something the business actually earns working and appearing to
What to check
Two questions that establish whether this is actually in order on a given site:
- Whether anyone has checked it since the last platform or plugin update
- Whether the alert that should catch it reaches a person who can act
Common questions
How urgent is quality score?
Before anything that depends on it, which is the test rather than a general ranking. It affects ad rank and the price paid per click, so the same position can cost materially less with better relevance.
How would we know quality score is a problem?
It affects ad rank and the price paid per click, so the same position can cost materially less with better relevance. The evidence is specific to the site, which is why the check comes before the recommendation.
What is quality score often confused with?
It is a reported diagnostic, not the number used in the auction. Chasing the digit rather than the underlying relevance misses the point.
Does quality score affect rankings directly?
It affects ad rank and the price paid per click, so the same position can cost materially less with better relevance. The honest framing is that it removes a constraint rather than adding a boost.
How is quality score audited?
Read at keyword level alongside its three components to see which one is weak, then improved by tightening the match between query, ad copy and landing page. The check is cheap; the fix is where the work sits. Both DPDP Act and Duplicate content assume this page, so they are the natural next two.
Who owns quality score in a business?
Whoever is accountable for deciding whether server-side tagging earns its running cost. Problems with this tend to persist because nobody is. Lifecycle and Email for Real estate and property covers the setup, Local SEO for Real estate and property the maintenance nobody budgets for.
Find the constraint before funding the plan
We would rather tell you the work is not worth the money than take it and report on activity.