Quality Score is Google Ads' 1-to-10 rating of how relevant and useful your keywords, ads, and landing pages are. A higher score lowers your cost per click and improves ad rank, so it directly affects how far each dollar of budget stretches.
What feeds Quality Score
- Expected click-through rate: how likely your ad is to be clicked.
- Ad relevance: how closely the ad matches the search intent.
- Landing page experience: how relevant and usable the page is after the click.
Why it is a cost lever, not a vanity score
Two advertisers can bid the same and pay very different prices: the one with the higher Quality Score wins the auction for less. Improving relevance and landing pages is one of the most direct ways to bring down cost per lead without raising budget. It is a standing part of how we structure and maintain accounts. Raising relevance is the durable way to bring costs down; forcing it with a low target instead backfires, as we cover in A low target CPA is not saving you money. It is not a Smart Bidding input you can set, but better relevance lowers the cost of every auction the algorithm enters on your behalf.