Two plumbing businesses in the same city. Both bidding on the keyword “emergency plumber near me.” Both appearing in position three on the same results page.
Business A is paying £5.40 per click. Business B is paying £14.20 per click.
Business B is spending 163 percent more for the same ad position and the same keyword. Over a month of 200 clicks each, Business A spends £1,080. Business B spends £2,840. Same number of leads. More than £1,700 difference in cost.
Business B has no idea this is happening. They see their spend, they see their leads, and they assume that is just what Google Ads costs. They have never heard of Quality Score.
What Quality Score Is and Why Google Uses It
Google Ads operates as an auction. But it is not simply a highest-bidder-wins auction. The actual cost per click and the actual ad position are both determined by a combination of your bid and your Quality Score.
Quality Score is a number from 1 to 10 that Google assigns to each keyword in your account. It reflects how relevant and useful Google considers your ad and landing page to be for that specific search query. A high Quality Score (7 to 10) means Google considers your ad to be a good match for what the searcher is looking for. A low Quality Score (1 to 4) means Google considers your ad to be a poor match.
The practical consequence of this scoring is that advertisers with high Quality Scores pay less per click for the same position than advertisers with low Quality Scores. Google rewards relevance with lower costs. It penalises irrelevance with higher costs. This penalty is applied silently, on every click, and most advertisers have never looked at their Quality Score data in their account.
The Three Things Google Measures to Calculate Your Quality Score
Expected Click-Through Rate
Google uses its historical data to predict how likely your ad is to be clicked when it appears for a specific search. An ad that uses the exact words the searcher typed, that has a compelling headline directly matching the search intent, and that has a clear value proposition converts predictions of likely clicks into a high expected CTR component.
An ad with a generic headline that could apply to any plumber in any city, regardless of what the searcher typed, has a lower predicted CTR. That lower prediction reduces the Quality Score component from this factor.
The fix: for each keyword group, write ad copy that specifically reflects what someone typing that keyword is looking for. “Emergency Plumber Available Now” for emergency keywords. “Boiler Repair Specialists” for boiler keywords. The more precisely your headline mirrors the search intent, the higher your expected CTR and the better this component of your Quality Score.
Ad Relevance
Ad relevance measures how closely your ad copy matches the intent of the keyword it is triggered by. If your ad for “boiler repair” talks about general plumbing services, Google considers the match poor. If it specifically addresses boiler repair, the match is strong.
Most Google Ads accounts have too few ad groups with too many keywords in each one. Every keyword in an ad group gets served the same ad copy. A single ad group containing “emergency plumber,” “boiler repair,” “blocked drain,” and “bathroom fitting” is serving one set of ad copy for four completely different search intents. The result is poor ad relevance for every keyword in the group except the one that most closely matches the headline.
The fix is to break your keywords into tighter, more specific ad groups, each with dedicated ad copy that specifically addresses the intent of the keywords in that group.
Landing Page Experience
Google also evaluates the quality of the page your ad links to. A landing page that specifically addresses what the searcher typed, loads quickly, and makes it easy for the visitor to take the next action receives a high landing page experience score. A landing page that is slow, generic, or requires the visitor to search for the specific information they came for receives a low score.
This is why a low Quality Score is not only a bidding problem. It is connected to the quality of your entire paid search user journey, from the search query to the click to the page the visitor lands on. Fixing each component in sequence is what moves Quality Scores from 3 to 8.
What the Numbers Look Like When Quality Score Improves
Google’s own published data shows the relationship between Quality Score and cost per click. At a Quality Score of 6, advertisers pay roughly the benchmark rate. At Quality Score 4, they pay approximately 25 percent above benchmark. At Quality Score 2, they pay approximately 400 percent above benchmark.
At Quality Score 8, they pay approximately 37 percent below benchmark. At Quality Score 10, they pay approximately 50 percent below benchmark.
For a business spending £3,000 per month on Google Ads with average Quality Scores of 3 to 4, improving those scores to 7 to 8 through the specific fixes above produces roughly the same results from approximately £1,800 to £2,000 in spend. The same budget suddenly generates 40 to 50 percent more clicks, more leads, and more booked jobs, without increasing what is spent.
Business B, in the opening example, implemented tighter ad groups, rewrote their ad copy for each keyword group, and improved their landing page load time and relevance. Three months later their average Quality Score on core keywords had moved from 3.4 to 7.8. Their average CPC on the same keywords had dropped from £14.20 to £5.80. Their monthly spend stayed the same. Their monthly leads nearly tripled.
Book your free Google Ads Quality Score audit here.
Digiwolves manages Google Ads campaigns for contractors and businesses across the US and UK. Google Premier Partner certified.
