Paid Search
Why Your Google Ads Quality Score is Dropping
Quality Score is a diagnostic, not a target. What its three components measure, the usual reasons it falls, and the fixes that also lower what you pay per click.
BenchMarketing editorial team Updated October 2, 2026 3 min readShare
Quality Score is Google's 1 to 10 rating of how relevant your ads, keywords and landing pages are compared with other advertisers on the same keyword. A falling score is worth investigating, because the things it measures are the same things that decide how much you pay for each click.
What it measures
Google rates three components as above average, average or below average:
- Expected click-through rate: how likely your ad is to be clicked for this keyword, compared with competitors.
- Ad relevance: how closely your ad matches the intent behind the search.
- Landing page experience: how relevant and useful the page is for people who click.
Google describes Quality Score as a diagnostic tool rather than a direct input to the auction. The auction uses real-time versions of the same signals, so improving the components still improves your ad rank and cost per click.
Common reasons it drops
- Broader matching. Switching to broad match, or Google matching your keywords to looser searches, puts your ads in front of people searching for other things. Expected CTR falls.
- A stronger competitor. Quality Score is relative. If a competitor improves their ads on your keywords, your score can fall without you changing anything.
- Ad copy that drifted from the keyword. Responsive search ads mix headlines automatically. If few headlines mention the keyword's topic, relevance suffers.
- Landing page changes. A redesign, a slower page, or sending traffic to the home page instead of a specific page can lower landing page experience.
- Too many keywords per ad group. One ad cannot be highly relevant to twenty different themes.
How to find the cause
Add the Quality Score, expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience columns at keyword level, and compare with an earlier period. The component that moved tells you where to look. Then check the search terms report: if the searches triggering your ads have drifted from what you sell, fix that first with tighter match types and negative keywords.
Fixes that last
- Group keywords tightly so each ad group's ads can speak to one theme.
- Put the keyword's theme in several headlines and pin one where it helps.
- Send each ad group to the most specific relevant page, and make that page fast on mobile.
- Pause keywords with persistently low expected CTR that do not convert.
The search CTR median in our data is 6.11%; if your non-brand CTR sits well below 3.2%, expected CTR is the likely culprit. Estimate the effect of improvements with the Quality Score estimator.
About the figures
Benchmark figures in this article come from the BenchMarketing dataset and update when the benchmark pages do. Each benchmark page lists its sources and period; see our methodology.
Sources
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