How to Measure Keyword Impact on Quality Score: A Step-by-Step Guide

Quality Score is one of those metrics that quietly controls a lot of what happens in your Google Ads account. It influences how much you pay per click, how often your ads show up, and whether you're competing efficiently or burning budget just to stay visible. And yet, in most accounts I audit, it's either completely ignored or checked once and forgotten.

TL;DR: Quality Score is Google's 1–10 rating of how relevant your keywords, ads, and landing pages are to a user's search. It directly affects your CPC and ad rank. This guide walks you through exactly how to measure how individual keywords are influencing your Quality Score — and what to do about it.

If your CPCs have been creeping up or your ads aren't showing as often as they should, keyword-level Quality Score data is usually where the answer lives. The three components — Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, and Landing Page Experience — each tell a different story, and knowing which one is the weak link changes everything about how you fix it.

This guide is for marketers, freelancers, and agency owners who want to stop guessing and start making data-driven decisions inside Google Ads. We'll cover how to pull the right data, what each Quality Score component actually tells you, how to track changes over time, and how to act on what you find — all without drowning in spreadsheets.

Let's get into it.

Step 1: Add Quality Score Columns to Your Keywords Report

Before you can measure anything, you need to make the data visible. By default, Google Ads doesn't show Quality Score in the Keywords view — you have to add it manually.

Here's how to do it: navigate to the Keywords tab in your Google Ads account, click the Columns button (the icon that looks like a grid), then select Modify columns. Under the Quality Score category, you'll find the following columns to add:

Quality Score: The overall 1–10 rating for each keyword. This is the headline number, but it's the components below that actually tell you what to fix.

Expected CTR: Google's prediction of how likely your ad is to get clicked when it's shown for this keyword, relative to other ads in the same position. It's based on historical click data.

Ad Relevance: How closely your keyword matches the intent and language of your ad copy. If you're bidding on "buy running shoes online" but your ad talks generically about footwear, this rating will suffer.

Landing Page Experience: Google's assessment of how relevant, useful, and navigable your landing page is for someone who searched that keyword. This includes content relevance, page speed, and mobile usability.

Each component is rated Below Average, Average, or Above Average. That rating is your diagnostic signal — not just a label.

One thing to note: Quality Score only appears for keywords with enough impression data. Low-volume keywords may show a dash instead of a number. That's not a bug — it just means Google doesn't have enough auction history to generate a reliable score yet.

Quick tip: Once you've added these columns, save the view as a custom column set. Name it something like "QS Diagnostic View" so you can pull it up instantly without rebuilding it every session. That small step saves real time across multiple accounts.

Common pitfall: Don't confuse Quality Score with Ad Rank. Ad Rank is the formula that determines your ad's position in the auction — it uses Quality Score as an input, along with your bid and the expected impact of ad extensions. A high Quality Score helps your Ad Rank, but they're not the same thing. Quality Score is a diagnostic tool; Ad Rank is the outcome.

Step 2: Segment Your Keywords by Quality Score Tier

Now that you can see Quality Score data, the next move is to sort your keywords into tiers. Looking at QS numbers in isolation doesn't tell you much — but grouping them reveals where the real problems are.

Use this simple tiering framework:

High (7–10): These keywords are performing well. Google considers them highly relevant. Your job here is to protect and scale.

Mid (4–6): These are borderline keywords. They're not costing you a ton in wasted spend, but they're not efficient either. With targeted fixes, many of these can be pushed into the high tier.

Low (1–3): These are your problem keywords. They're likely costing more per click than they should, and they may be dragging down the overall health of the ad groups they sit in.

To segment, use the Filters option in the Keywords view to isolate each tier, or export the data to a spreadsheet if you're managing a large account. Either way, the goal is to create a prioritized list.

Here's where most agencies miss a step: once you've tiered your keywords, cross-reference QS with spend data. A keyword sitting at a QS of 2 that's spent a significant portion of your monthly budget is a priority fix. A keyword at QS 3 that's barely spent anything is a lower-urgency issue. Spend-weighted QS analysis is how you decide where to focus first.

Another pattern worth looking for: if an entire ad group is scoring low across multiple keywords, the problem is structural. It's not one bad keyword — it's a mismatch between the ad group's theme, the ad copy, or the landing page. Keyword clustering helps here. If you can see that all your low-QS keywords share a similar intent or topic, that's a signal to restructure the ad group rather than fix keywords one by one.

What usually happens in accounts with a lot of low-QS keywords is that broad match or broad match modifier keywords have attracted a wide range of search terms over time, many of which are only loosely related to the core intent. The keyword's CTR history gets dragged down by all those irrelevant clicks (or non-clicks), and the QS reflects that.

Step 3: Diagnose Which Quality Score Component Is the Weak Link

This is where the real diagnostic work happens. Each of the three QS components points to a different root cause — and the fix is different depending on which one is flagged as Below Average.

Here's how to read each one:

Expected CTR rated Below Average: This means Google's historical data suggests your ad doesn't get clicked often relative to its position. The causes are usually one of two things: your ad copy isn't compelling or relevant enough to the keyword intent, or irrelevant search terms are triggering the keyword and suppressing overall CTR. This is a bid or ad copy issue — and sometimes a negative keyword issue.

Ad Relevance rated Below Average: This means there's a mismatch between what the keyword implies and what your ad says. The ad copy isn't speaking the same language as the search. A keyword like "buy running shoes online" showing Below Average Ad Relevance almost certainly means the ad headline doesn't include that phrase or anything close to it. The fix here is rewriting ad copy to mirror keyword intent more directly.

Landing Page Experience rated Below Average: This one's trickier to fix quickly. It means Google doesn't think your landing page is a good destination for someone searching that keyword. This could be a content relevance issue (the page doesn't address what the keyword implies), a technical issue (slow load time, poor mobile experience), or a trust/transparency issue (thin content, unclear value proposition).

Here's a practical workflow example. Say you're running a campaign for an e-commerce client and you notice a keyword like "waterproof hiking boots women's" has a QS of 4. You pull up the components: Expected CTR is Average, Ad Relevance is Below Average, Landing Page Experience is Average. That tells you the problem is the ad copy — not the landing page, not the search terms. You don't need to rebuild the page. You need to rewrite the headline to include "waterproof hiking boots" and speak directly to women's sizing or style.

Tip: Always check the Search Terms report alongside your QS components. If you see a lot of irrelevant queries triggering a keyword, that's suppressing your Expected CTR even if your ad copy is solid. The search terms are the noise in the data — and negative keywords are how you filter it out.

Step 4: Track Quality Score Changes Over Time

Here's something that trips up a lot of people: the Quality Score you see in the Google Ads UI is a snapshot of the current score. It doesn't show you a trend line. You can't look at a keyword and see that its QS was 4 three months ago and is now 6. That historical view doesn't exist natively.

This matters because if you're making optimizations — rewriting ad copy, adding negatives, updating landing pages — you need a way to know whether those changes are actually moving the needle on QS over time.

There are a few ways to handle this:

Manual exports: The simplest approach. Export your keyword data with QS columns on a weekly or monthly basis and store it in a tracking doc. Date-stamp each export. Over time, you build a trend log you can actually analyze. It's not glamorous, but it works.

Google Ads Scripts: If you're comfortable with scripts (or have a developer who is), you can set up a script that automatically logs QS data to a Google Sheet on a schedule. This automates the manual export process and gives you a clean historical record without any ongoing effort.

The Compare feature: While you can't see historical QS directly, you can use Google Ads' date comparison feature to see whether CTR, impression share, and other QS-related metrics have shifted between periods. If your CTR improved after an ad copy test, that's a leading indicator that Expected CTR is trending up — even before the QS number changes.

Speaking of which: don't expect instant results. Google recalculates Quality Score as new auction data accumulates. If you rewrote your ad copy yesterday, the QS probably hasn't moved yet. Give it at least a few weeks of impression data before drawing conclusions.

The most important habit here: Log your optimization actions alongside your QS snapshots. Write down what you changed and when — ad copy test started, negative keywords added, landing page updated. That log is how you connect cause and effect. Without it, you're just watching numbers move without knowing why.

Step 5: Test Ad Copy Changes and Measure the CTR Impact

Expected CTR is the most directly actionable of the three QS components — and improving it is usually the fastest lever available to you.

The core principle is simple: write ads that match keyword intent as closely as possible. If someone searches "project management software for small teams," your headline should say something like "Project Management for Small Teams" — not a generic brand tagline. The closer the language match, the higher the expected click-through rate.

Here's a practical approach for running ad copy tests tied to QS improvement:

1. Identify your low Expected CTR keywords from the QS diagnostic view you set up in Step 1.

2. Look at the current ad copy running for those keywords. Is the keyword phrase (or a close variant) in the headline? Is the ad speaking directly to the intent behind that search?

3. Create a new ad variation that mirrors the keyword intent more closely. Use the exact keyword phrase in Headline 1 if possible. Make the value proposition specific to what that keyword implies the user wants.

4. Run both versions simultaneously and let them accumulate enough impressions to be statistically meaningful. Check CTR after a few weeks, not a few days.

5. Once you have a clear winner, pause the lower-performing variation and check whether the Expected CTR rating has shifted in the following weeks.

The keyword-to-ad group relationship matters a lot here. If your ad group contains 30 loosely related keywords, it's nearly impossible to write ad copy that's highly relevant to all of them. Tightly themed ad groups — where all keywords share a clear, specific intent — allow you to write ads that speak directly to that intent. That's what drives higher Ad Relevance and Expected CTR scores.

Tip: Junk search terms are a silent killer of Expected CTR. If irrelevant queries are triggering your keyword, they generate impressions without clicks, which tanks your historical CTR. Cleaning up your search terms report is often the fastest way to see QS improvement — and it's something you can act on immediately without waiting for ad copy tests to run.

Step 6: Audit Landing Pages for Keyword Relevance

Landing Page Experience is the QS component most often neglected — and honestly, it's the hardest to fix quickly. Unlike ad copy, which you can change in minutes, landing pages often require developer time, design resources, or client approval. But ignoring it means leaving Quality Score points on the table.

Start by checking whether the keyword's core intent is actually reflected on the landing page. Look at the headline, the body copy, and the page's overall topic. If someone searches "enterprise HR software" and lands on a generic homepage that talks about your company history, the relevance signal is weak. The page needs to speak directly to what the keyword implies the user is looking for.

Beyond content relevance, Google also factors in technical performance. Page speed and mobile usability are part of Landing Page Experience. Use Google's PageSpeed Insights (a free, publicly available tool) to identify technical issues slowing down your pages. A page that loads slowly on mobile is going to hurt your Landing Page Experience rating regardless of how relevant the content is. If mobile performance is a recurring issue across your campaigns, it's worth reviewing how to optimize keywords for mobile searches as part of your broader strategy.

For agency owners managing multiple clients, the most efficient approach is to build a landing page audit checklist tied to keyword themes rather than reviewing pages in isolation. Group your keywords by intent cluster, identify which landing page each cluster points to, and audit each page against the keyword theme it's supposed to serve. This gives you a systematic view of where the gaps are across an account.

Tip: If you can't change the landing page — maybe it's a client-side constraint or a slow development queue — check whether a different existing page on the site is a better match for that keyword. Sometimes the right landing page already exists; it's just not the one being used. Switching the destination URL is a quick fix that can meaningfully improve Landing Page Experience without any new content being created.

Step 7: Build a Repeatable QS Monitoring Workflow

The mistake most agencies make is treating Quality Score as a one-time audit rather than an ongoing practice. You do a deep dive, fix some things, and then don't look at it again for six months. By then, ad copy has changed, new keywords have been added, and the QS picture looks completely different.

Building a repeatable monitoring workflow is what separates accounts that consistently improve from accounts that stay stuck.

Here's what a solid QS monitoring cadence looks like:

Weekly (active campaigns): Pull the QS diagnostic view, check for any new keywords that have dropped below your threshold, and review the search terms report for junk queries dragging down Expected CTR. This doesn't need to take more than 20–30 minutes if your column views are set up correctly.

Bi-weekly or monthly (stable campaigns): Do a more thorough review — compare QS snapshots to the previous period, check whether ad copy tests have moved the needle, and review landing page performance metrics alongside QS components.

Define a clear threshold for action. For example: any keyword with a QS below 5 that has exceeded a set spend threshold gets flagged for review in that session. This keeps you focused on the keywords that actually matter to the account's performance rather than chasing every low-QS keyword regardless of spend.

Create a simple tracking document that logs keyword, QS score, component ratings, spend, and the optimization action taken. It doesn't have to be elaborate — a Google Sheet with date-stamped entries works fine. The goal is to build a record that connects your actions to outcomes over time.

For agencies: build QS trends into your monthly client reporting. Show clients whether their keyword quality is improving, holding steady, or declining. It adds narrative context to the performance numbers and demonstrates that you're managing the account proactively, not just reacting to spend fluctuations. If you're managing negatives across multiple accounts, a structured approach to managing negative keywords across multiple campaigns will make this workflow significantly more efficient.

On the search terms side of this workflow: if you're still doing this manually by exporting to spreadsheets, it's worth looking at tools that can speed up the process. Keywordme, for example, lets you clean up junk search terms and add negatives directly inside the Google Ads interface — no exporting, no tab-switching, no spreadsheet gymnastics. For agencies managing multiple accounts, that kind of workflow compression adds up fast.

Putting It All Together

Measuring keyword impact on Quality Score comes down to a repeatable process: pull the right data, segment by tier, diagnose the weak component, test fixes, and track results over time. None of these steps are complicated in isolation — the challenge is doing them consistently.

Here's a quick checklist to make sure you've covered the essentials:

✅ Quality Score columns added to your Keywords view (QS, Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, Landing Page Experience)

✅ Keywords segmented into High (7–10), Mid (4–6), and Low (1–3) tiers, cross-referenced with spend data

✅ Root cause identified per low-QS keyword — is it CTR, Ad Relevance, or Landing Page Experience?

✅ Ad copy tests running for keywords with Below Average Expected CTR or Ad Relevance

✅ Landing pages audited for keyword relevance, page speed, and mobile usability

✅ QS tracking log set up with a recurring review schedule and optimization actions documented

If your search terms report is full of irrelevant queries dragging down your Expected CTR, that's often the fastest place to start. It's a quick win that doesn't require ad copy rewrites or landing page updates — just clean negative keyword management.

Tools like Keywordme let you handle that directly inside Google Ads, removing junk terms and building negative keyword lists without leaving the interface or opening a spreadsheet. If you're spending meaningful time on manual search terms cleanup every week, it's worth trying. Start your free 7-day trial and see how much faster the workflow gets — then it's just $12/month to keep the efficiency going.