Google Ads Quality Score sits on every keyword in an account, yet most advertisers treat it as a vanity number in a column nobody clicks on. That’s a mistake. Quality Score directly affects the price paid per click and where an ad lands in the auction, so a low score on a high-volume keyword can quietly inflate a Dubai advertiser’s monthly spend for months without anyone spotting why.
What Google Ads quality score measures
Quality Score is not one thing. Google builds it from three separate components, each scored against how other advertisers targeting the same keyword perform: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. The 1 to 10 score shown in the account is a rounded summary of those three, which is why two keywords can carry the same headline score for entirely different reasons.
Fixing a low score without knowing which component is dragging it down wastes time. The account needs to isolate expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience separately before changing anything.
New keywords often show a dash instead of a score for the first few weeks, simply because Google has not gathered enough impressions to judge the three components yet. Advertisers new to a Dubai market segment, or launching a fresh product line, sometimes panic at this blank score and start rewriting ads that were never given a fair chance to earn data. The right response is to wait for a reasonable volume of impressions, then judge the components on that evidence rather than the absence of a number.
Expected click-through rate
This component predicts how often people will click an ad for that keyword, based on the past performance of similar ads and keywords, not the account’s own historical CTR alone. A “Below average” rating here usually means the ad copy doesn’t match what the searcher expects to see.
The direct fix: rewrite the headline to mirror the exact phrase a searcher typed, rather than a broader brand message. An advertiser bidding on “google ads audit dubai” gets a stronger signal from an ad that leads with that phrase than one opening with a generic agency tagline.
Ad relevance
Ad relevance measures how closely the ad’s message matches the intent behind the keyword, not just whether the keyword appears somewhere in the copy. A “Below average” rating here signals that Google reads a mismatch between what the keyword implies and what the ad promises.
The direct fix: split broad ad groups into tighter themes so each ad group serves one intent. A single ad group covering “PPC management”, “Google Ads audit” and “paid search agency” forces one ad to satisfy three different searches, and it rarely satisfies any of them well.
Landing page experience
This component looks at whether the page an ad points to is relevant, easy to navigate, transparent about the business, and reasonably fast to load. Google evaluates it per keyword, so the same landing page can score well against one keyword and poorly against another when the intent doesn’t match.
The direct fix: send high-intent keywords to a dedicated page that answers that exact query, instead of the homepage or a general services page. A keyword like “google ads quality score audit” should land on a page built around that audit, with a clear next step, rather than a broad “digital marketing services” page that buries the answer three scrolls down.
Why quality score lowers cost per click
Google’s ad auction uses Quality Score as part of Ad Rank, alongside the bid amount and the expected impact of ad extensions and formats. A higher Quality Score can let an advertiser win the same position at a lower cost per click than a competitor bidding more but scoring lower on relevance and experience. Google sets out the mechanics in its own Quality Score help documentation, worth reading directly rather than relying on second-hand summaries.
An account that raises its average Quality Score from 5 to 8 on its core keywords typically sees cost per click fall on those same keywords, because it is now paying less to win the same auction position. The reverse holds too: an account that ignores Quality Score for months usually discovers the real cost during a wider account review, once someone finally checks why cost per click has drifted upward.
How to check and track quality score properly
Quality Score is visible in the keyword view of Google Ads once the relevant status column is added, alongside the three component ratings (Below average, Average, Above average). A first review should sort keywords by spend rather than by score, so the account fixes the keywords costing the most money first instead of chasing every keyword sitting on a 3 or 4.
Component ratings update over a rolling window as new impressions come in, so changes made this week will not shift the score overnight. A realistic review cycle checks the same keyword set every two to three weeks rather than daily, since daily checks mostly show noise rather than genuine movement.
Quality Score sits alongside the wider account metrics worth tracking on a regular basis. For a broader view of account health, see how to calculate PPC ROI and prove it to stakeholders, and the core PPC strategies and best practices that keep an account efficient beyond the auction itself.
Quality Score problems rarely sit in one place. An account with weak expected CTR on one set of keywords and weak landing page experience on another needs two different fixes running at the same time, and that split is easy to miss without a full account review. Dominate Online’s PPC service runs that account-level audit for Dubai advertisers, isolating which of the three components is costing money on each keyword group before recommending changes.