Are you wasting money in Google Ads?

Find out with an instant audit of your account with the Free Google Ads Performance Grader.

See how your Google Ads are really performing

This free assessment, designed with small businesses and agencies in mind, grades your account against 10 key metrics and offers deep insights, actionable next steps, and an overall account score to help you understand what’s working and where you can improve.

Improve your quality score

Compare yours with industry benchmarks and learn how to improve it so you can raise your Ad Rank and lower your cost per click.

Maintain your impression share

Make sure you’re getting the exposure you need to stay profitable with budget weighted impression share metrics.

Eliminate your wasted spend

Save thousands of dollars and improve your ROI with negative keywords.

Monitor your account activity

Stay ahead of competitors by keeping up with specific actions in your account.

The Google Ads Grader that thousands of businesses trust

6.4M

total free Google Ads reports generated

$36B

Google Ads spend analyzed

312K

account improvements suggested

“The tool is efficient enough to provide insightful analysis on par with the audits one would receive from an agency or consultant.”
— Navneet Kaushal, Page Traffic Buzz

Stop guessing — get your grade

Get your detailed report now and start getting more out of your Google Ads budget!

• Quality score
• Benchmarks
• Impression share
• Account activity
• Wasted spend
• Best practices
• Best & worst text ad
• Click-through rate
• Account structure
• Performance tracker
• Display & Shopping ads

Powered by our Google Premier Marketing Partnership.

Frequently asked questions

What is Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords?

Google Ads is a pay-per-click ( PPC) advertising platform that enables businesses to run ad campaigns on Google properties.

The most popular Google Ads campaign type is paid search ads, where users pay to have their ad appear at the top of the search engine results page ( SERP) for queries relevant to their offer.

How does Google Ads work?

• Google Ads works like an auction, where advertisers bid on keywords, the terms their potential customers are typing into Google. However, winners aren’t determined by bid alone, which levels the playing field for businesses big and small.
• This is due to Quality Score, which Google assigns to ads based on their relevance to the targeted keyword, landing page experience, and expected click-through rate.
• Relevance and Quality Score also play a role in Display campaigns, where AdSense technologies are used to figure out what ads to show on what pages throughout the Google Display network.

How does the Google Ads Performance Grader work?

The Google Ads Performance Grader is a free tool to help Google advertisers better understand how well their campaigns are performing compared to PPC best practices. Using a proprietary grading algorithm, the Google Ads Performance Grader generates a free, easy-to-read report that includes an overall grade as well as individual grades in four key areas of pay-per-click marketing:

• Wasted spend – Are you making proper use of negative keywords? Or are you wasting hundreds, even thousands of dollars per month on irrelevant keywords that never convert?
• Quality Score – Are your campaigns Google-approved? High Quality Scores have a major impact on your ROI, improving your rankings and lowering your costs.
• Impression share – How often do your ads appear for relevant search queries? Increased impression share can improve exposure and multiply your lead generation results.
• Account activity – To maintain performance, you need to spend active time in your account. How often are you checking under the hood?
• You’ll learn how well you’re really doing in each of these important areas, as well as how you can improve your performance, driving more leads and sales at lower costs.

What improvements have been made to the Google Ads Performance Grader?

In 2011, we created the Google Ads Performance Grader to help advertisers audit and analyze their Google Ads accounts. We recently passed a pretty big milestone: The Performance Grader has been used to audit Google Ads accounts representing over $3 billion in collective advertising spend. That’s an incredible amount of insight and analysis that we’ve offered to advertisers around the world, all for free. Now, we’ve taken all that rich data and used it to improve the Grader. The newly relaunched Google Ads Grader includes new features and functionality that make it even more valuable to busy marketers and small businesses. The improvements include:

• Performance Tracker: Automatically track and analyze your account every 30 days, so you can see how your overall performance and key metrics are trending over time. For example, advertisers can use Performance Tracker to easily monitor and act on changes in Quality Score, something Google just doesn’t offer.
• Mobile Readiness Score: Assess your mobile PPC preparedness and optimization, including an evaluation of your account’s adherence to mobile best practices.
• New and Improved Benchmarks: We’ve revisited our competitive benchmarks for PPC, so all of the KPIs in your performance report (including Quality Score, click-through rate, account activity, and wasted spend) are more current based on the thousands of accounts we’ve analyzed.

What are some Google Ads best practices?

In addition to a full breakdown of your current Google Ads account performance, your report will include actionable tips on how you can improve your score specifically. But here are some overall best practices for Google Ads account management:

• Filter out wasteful, irrelevant clicks and non-converting traffic with negative keywords.
• Maximize relevance across your campaigns for higher Quality Scores.
• Raise click-through rates with strong keyword, text ad, and ad group targeting and organization.
• Practice regular, active account management and optimization.

What are some other reasons to use the Google Ads Performance Grader & get free Google Ads help?

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do you have a sneaking suspicion that your Google Ads (AdWords) campaigns could be doing better?
• Need to justify greater investment in PPC to your management?
• Just curious if all your hard work in PPC has paid off?
• Want to show off to your coworkers what a PPC rock star you are?

How do I use the Google Ads Performance Grader?

To use the Google Ads Performance Grader, enter your email, pick your account type, and sign in with Google. Once you allow us to access your account, you can provide more optional business information or just get right to the report.

The Performance Grader is used in different ways:

• New advertisers – Learn where to focus your efforts for a profitable and efficient campaign.
• Experienced advertisers – Get a thorough and comprehensive report on where you can improve results and save money.
• Agencies – Use the reports to explain your work to clients in a format they can easily understand.

Can I manage Google Ads by myself?

Anyone with a website and credit card can do pay per click advertising on Google Ads. However, we’ve found that most advertisers are not well-informed on how to create an effective advertising campaign to drive paid clicks to real business leads. That’s why we created the Google Ads Performance Grader — a free tool that breaks down the technical aspects of PPC so you know which parts of your Google Ads account to improve.

What is Google Ads Quality Score?

Quality Score is a score between 1 and 10 that Google assigns to your ads, that measures how helpful it is to the users it’s targeting. Because Google strives to serve the most relevant and helpful ads possible, the higher your Quality Score, the higher your chances are of winning a top ad position. Even better, a high Quality Score leads to:

• Lower costs – Google rewards advertisers with high Quality Scores by lowering their cost per click (CPC), which can subsequently lower your cost per conversion.
• More exposure – When you have high Quality Scores, your ads will display more often and in better positions. You can get more exposure, more clicks, and more conversions without having to raise your bids.

What is a good Quality Score in Google Ads?

Quality Score is a keyword-level metric, meaning there is no such thing as a Quality Score for your campaign or entire account. But you can calculate the average Quality Score across all the keywords in your Google Ads account (which the Google Ads Grader takes care of).

A good Quality Score depends on the type of keyword you’re targeting. For example:

• Branded keywords: 8-10
• High-intent commercial keywords: 7-9
• Low-intent keywords: 7
• Competitor keywords: 3+

How do I improve my Google Ads quality score?

Your Quality Score is determined by several factors, including relevance of the ad to the keyword and its corresponding landing page, the ad’s click-through rate, your historical account performance, and more. But the main idea is to create ads that make for the best search experience possible by improving your:

• Keyword relevance: Write ads that closely match the intent behind the keywords they’re targeting and build tight ad groups to make this easy for you. If you’re targeting a keyword with intent to learn rather than purchase, your ad should be for a guide or resource and describe it as such.
• Landing page relevance: Make sure the copy matches that of the ad and makes it easy for your prospects to do what they need to do.
• Click-through rate: Think carefully about what your prospects are trying to accomplish and shape your offers and ad copy to match their goals.

What makes a good landing page for Google Ads?

High-quality landing pages are a necessary part of a good Google Quality Score. Everything should be tailored to helping the user obtain what they clicked the ad for (i.e., complete a conversion!).

There are a number of landing page best practices, but here are a few key elements to improve your Quality Score and conversion rates.

• Keyword segmentation – Different types of keywords should take visitors to different landing pages that match intent.
• Clean, attractive design – Organize your information and make sure it’s trustworthy, professional, and consistent with your brand.
• Clear copy – A strong headline relevant to your keyword and compelling features and benefits.
• Easy experience – Short forms, intuitive navigation, and an eye-catching, prominent, and clear call to action.

Note that a “good” conversion rate depends on what the conversion is and your industry. While conversions can range from 0-50%, 2% is quite common. See how you stack up with our conversion rate benchmarks.

Why aren’t my Google ads showing up?

There are a number of reasons for Google Ads not showing, but here are a few:

• Your ads weren’t getting clicked. It’s possible they were initially showing up, but if those impressions weren’t turning into clicks, that would signify to Google that your ads weren’t resonating with the users who saw them.
• Your keywords and ads don’t closely match. When determining which ads to show for a particular search query, Google Ads looks closely at keyword relevance—a measure of how closely your ads match the keywords they’re tied to.
• Your ads and landing pages don’t closely match. When picking the winners of a particular ad auction, Google Ads doesn’t only look at the relationship between your target keywords and your ads; you’re also judged on the relationship between your ads and your landing pages. Simply put, you need to deliver a seamless, cohesive user experience across your ads and landing pages.