How Does Website Performance Affect PPC Quality Score?

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction
2. What is a PPC quality score?

• How is it evaluated?
• What are its components?

3. What is website performance?

• Key performance metrics
• Why performance matters

4. How do these two components connect to each other?

5. What to look at to avoid this from happening?

• Always monitor your website’s performance
• Speed up your website
• Use session recording software to understand your visitors
• Always check your campaigns’ quality scores

6. Conclusion

1.  Introduction

Pay-per-click advertisements (PPC) are really controlling the online advertising environment. Google generates approximately $300 billion annually from its advertising network, and the majority of that number is generated from PPC advertisements. But it is not a coincidence that this form of advertisement is really popular amongst advertisers. On average, advertisers generate $8 from every spent $1 thanks to this ad type.

However, creating a great PPC advertisement is harder than ever. Just think about that: according to Google’s own communication, there will be more than 7 million active advertisers globally in 2026, which is the biggest number ever. To surpass your competitors’ performance, you need perfect ad and keyword settings, delivering back more and more accurate data to the system, and finally, creating a well-performing site. In this article, we will demonstrate how website performance affects PPC advertising success and how it determines your future performance.

2.  What is a PPC Quality Score?

Most of Google’s profits come from its advertising systems. That’s why many of you may think that Google’s main goal is to get more money from advertisers. Well, you are not completely wrong, but they have to think in the long term.

If they only rank paid ad placements based on the maximum bids they set on their accounts, they may harm their own business, as this decision would become counterproductive within months. In this case, advertisers’ main motivation would be to spend more and more without any further improvements. In that case, no advertiser would be motivated to enhance the quality of their ads or their website where they direct the traffic.

That would mean Google search system users would get irrelevant results for their queries, become frustrated, and actively start searching for alternatives. That’s why Google introduced quality scores back in the day for PPC, which ensures that not only money determines your advertising power.

• How is it Evaluated?

Google’s algorithm evaluates quality scores on a 1 to 10 scale. Low numbers show a poor quality score, while bigger ones express better ratings. After this process, Google multiplies your maximum bid by your quality score and determines your placement.

Let’s demonstrate its working mechanism with an example.

There are three companies battling in the same auction (to get better positions for worthy keywords).

Company “A” offers a maximum bid of $10 (the maximum amount Google can spend to secure a click from the user), and has a 1/10 quality score. = 10*1 = 10

Company “B” offers a maximum bid of $5 and has a 5/10 quality score. = 5*5 = 25

Company “C” offers a maximum bid of $1 and has a 10/10 quality score.  = 10*1 = 10

In this case, company “B” would win this battle and have the chance to display its ad at the top of the search page.

• What are Its Components?

There are three components of PPC quality scores, all equally important.

• Google measures the synergy between your ads and your website
• Google evaluates your ads’ historical CTR (click-through rate) scores
• Landing Page Experience: The quality, transparency, and relevance of your website once a user arrives

3.  What is Website Performance?

When we are talking about website performance, we are talking about technical efficiency.

• Key Performance Metrics

The most important metric of website performance is LCP, or largest contentful paint. LCP indicates how many seconds your website’s main content needs to load. It usually requires 2.5 seconds (but as web servers are improving constantly, this time will be even lower in the future.

The other key metric is INP (or interaction to next paint). This indicator measures how long it takes to make a user interaction go through on your website. That is usually under 200 milliseconds.

But there are many other metrics, which may not determine your site’s success in the first place, but can indicate several issues that can spoil the user experience.

• Why Performance Matters

There are 1,5 billion websites on the internet in 2026, but that number is rapidly growing. AI applications, like Loveable, can create websites in under 10 minutes now! Therefore, your online competition will probably also grow.

That’s why user requirements are bigger than ever. According to Google’s own research, if a website from a mobile device takes more than three seconds to load, on average, 53% of the users abandon your website.  So a little mistake can lead you to lose half of your potential customers. However, this is only one part of the problem. The other is connected to the system of quality scores.

4.  How Do These Two Components Connect to Each Other?

As we discussed earlier, there are three components of Google’s quality score. Out of these three, two follow users’ intents before actually landing on your website, but there is one that follows the after effects.

This one is the landing page experience. Google not just crawls your website with crawling bots, but also gathers information about user behaviour. The algorithm wants to know the user experience, how engaged your users get, or how frustrated because of certain issues.

If most of your users abandon your site even before it loads up, there couldn’t be a more precise signal for Google: these users don’t want to be on your site because of slow load time. When Google’s algorithm understands this information, it starts to penalize your site. Your ads won’t appear on top positions, as even if users click on your ad, they would lose their interest instantly. And this negative decision affects everything: it would increase your campaign budgets (to maintain the same traffic volume as before), but also the number of conversions, and your revenue as well.

5.  What to Look at to Avoid This From Happening?

In this section of the article, we will show you some tips, which helps avoid these situations.

• Always Monitor Your Website’s Performance

A  website creation process is always full of testing. There’s always something that doesn’t necessarily work, and you need to fix it before publishing. You need to implement these kinds of checks by focusing on key performance metrics as well. And constantly checking these metrics is not that hard either: there are many sites that offer free LCP or INP checks, so you don’t need expensive programs to evaluate your website’s performance.

But of course, when the site is already published, there could be changes in its technical parts. For example, adding new code snippets, creating more enhanced measurements, or adding good quality videos to some of your website pages. These can all slow your site quickly, so after every change, running a test is mandatory.

• Speed Up Your Website

If you run a test and the result is disappointing, you need to take action. Out of the tests’ metadata, your programmers will figure out the main source of the problem. But the thing is: there are many different possibilities why your website is so slow, as there are several different components that affect website performance. Maybe it’s because of your hosting service provider, your overcrowded measurement setup, or other reasons. It’s your task to detect the most crucial aspect, and make changes.

• Use Session Recording Software to Understand Your Visitors

Sometimes, a slow loading website is not the main reason for a poor quality score performance. Like, the landing page experience can be awful without having any performance issues. In these cases, pinpointing the actual problem can be tough. It may be hidden from your eyes (for example, a possible bug) that is impossible to see without carefully replaying your visitors’ sessions.

Fortunately, there are many session recording software programs that let you do this, in some cases, without any fees at all. You just need to add the session recording software code in your site’s main code (or through a second-hand measurement handler, like Google tag manager). And you can now replay what your users did on your site and pinpoint the hidden issues.

Be aware: as per the strict European GDPR regulations, inside the European Union, you can’t record these sessions without getting permission from the recorder user (this usually happens through cookie banners).

• Always Check Your Campaigns’ Quality Scores

But sometimes, you can even get poor quality scores without any site-based issues at all. Well, that’s completely normal, as there are two other components of quality scores. Therefore, you must establish professional advertisements and be aware of advertising to those keywords that you might really benefit from.

Operate with the right campaigns, and only turn on AI functions if you can check its results on a daily basis. If something goes wrong, you must act quickly.

6.  Conclusion

In this article, we introduced the working mechanism of PPC quality scores to you and how it can affect website performance. We also added some tips on how to eliminate these simple mistakes before bigger problems occur.

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