Optimize Google Ads: Quality Score, search terms and scaling

Ad Rank and Quality Score

Google doesn't sell the top spot to the highest bidder. Ad Rank combines your bid, ad and landing page quality, expected impact of assets and the search context. A more relevant advertiser can beat a bigger bidder and pay less.

Quality Score (1 to 10 per keyword) is a diagnostic, built from expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience. Don't chase 10 everywhere; focus on high-spend keywords scoring 5 or below. Most clicks come from phones, so a fast mobile page matters.

The search terms report

Your keywords are what you chose; search terms are what people typed. The search terms report shows each with clicks, cost and conversions, and it is the single most useful report for cutting waste. Review it weekly and add irrelevant terms as negatives.

Impression share and Performance Max

Search impression share is how often your ad showed out of all the times it was eligible. Two more columns tell you why you missed the rest: lost to budget or lost to rank. Budget losses on a profitable campaign are a signal to scale; rank losses call for better ads, pages or bids.

Performance Max runs across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps from one campaign. It's only as good as your conversion tracking: count low-value actions and it will find lots of them cheaply. Many advertisers keep Search for their key terms alongside it.

Scale safely

When a campaign hits your target cost per conversion and is losing impression share to budget, raise the budget in steps of about 15 to 20% every few days. For example ₹1,000 → ₹1,200 → ₹1,450 → ₹1,750 over two weeks, checking the cost per lead holds.

Review auto-applied recommendations in settings and turn off anything you want to decide yourself, such as adding keywords or raising budgets.