Quality Score Is a Diagnostic Metric, Not a Business Metric
Quality score is NOT the end goal of any ads account.
I'd rather have an account with average Quality Scores that generates profitable leads than an account full of 9s and 10s that struggles to produce meaningful business results.
Having a perfect or high quality score is not going to suddenly get more leads for a business and focusing time and attention on quality score without considering the keywords, targeting, and offer presented on the landing page is going to lead to frustration for everyone involved.
What Is Quality Score In Google Ads
Quality Score matters because it affects the price you pay to compete in the auction.
When relevance is strong, Google is often willing to give you more visibility for less money.
When relevance is weak, you're usually paying a premium just to stay competitive in the ad auction.
That's why I tell my clients who hire me for coaching that Quality Score less as a metric to optimize and more as a diagnostic tool that helps explain why an account's costs are higher or lower than expected.
Why I Push Back on Quality Score Conversations
A few months ago, I spoke with a prospective client who had already worked with several freelancers. When the lead called me every conversation seemed to come back to improving Quality Score.
The lead was convinced that whenever their Quality Scores were above 7, conversions improved.
While I respect their experience and observations, I wasn't comfortable making higher Quality Scores the primary goal of the engagement.
In the end, I chose not to take on the project because I didn't feel I could promise that increasing Quality Score would solve the underlying business problem.
Well Structured Accounts Can Have Low Quality Scores
Over the years, I've audited plenty of accounts that appeared well-structured, followed Google's best practices, and delivered a strong user experience, yet still had Quality Scores that seemed unusually low.
I've also seen accounts with excellent Quality Scores that struggled to generate profitable results.
Quality Score Is Not A Goal
Quality score just isn't always a reliable explanation for why an account succeeds or fails.
I always tell my clients business outcomes, conversion quality, and profitability are much more important metrics to focus on than the score Google assigns to a keyword.
What We Think We Know About Quality Score and CPCs
Before we look at the chart below, it's important to understand that Google does not publicly disclose the exact mathematical relationship between Quality Score and CPCs.
The chart comes from the team at Store Growers, who pulled together information from various Google resources and industry observations to create a model of how Quality Score may affect advertising costs.
I read through the full article and followed each link and while I think their blog post is thoughtful effort, I also think it's important to recognize that some assumptions are clearly involved. (they said this in the post but I didn’t think it was super clear so I want to highlight this as I am sharing the information here)
In other words, I would not treat this chart as a proven representation of how the auction works behind the scenes.
No Google Ads expert outside Google have access to that level of detail.
What I do think the chart does well is illustrate a concept that most ad experts have observed over time: relevance matters. Accounts with stronger relevance signals often earn traffic more efficiently, while accounts with weaker signals frequently face higher costs.
So rather than viewing the chart as a precise formula, I would view it as a helpful visual model for understanding the general relationship between Quality Score and auction efficiency.
So, Should You Actually Care About Quality Score?
If I were talking to a client, I'd tell them not to worry about Quality Score.
I know that sounds bold, especially after spending an entire article discussing it, but I can't think of a recent coaching call, audit, or account review where Quality Score was the thing that changed my recommendation.
When I'm evaluating an account, I'm usually looking at search terms, conversion data, lead quality, tracking accuracy, bidding strategy, landing pages, and whether the account is actually helping the business grow. Quality Score never. makes that list, not even to support a point.
That's not because it's useless.
It's just because I've found that quality score tends to improve naturally when the fundamentals are in place.
If you're targeting the right searches, writing relevant ads, and sending people to a landing page that matches their intent, Quality Score often takes care of itself.
At this point, it's largely background information for me. I notice it. I don't ignore its existence. But I also don't spend anytime trying to improve it directly.
I'd much rather spend time figuring out why a business isn't getting leads, why leads aren't turning into customers, or why Google Ads is failing to generate a return.
None of this is found in Quality Score.
