The introduction of Google Seller Ratings is significant because it can increase paid search traffic and click-through rates, and potentially increase conversions due to the visibility of the seller ratings and the inherent trust that is created by their presence. Seller ratings are like a personal referral from other customer about which merchants to purchase products and services from.
Seller ratings can really make your ad stand out from the competitors. The bright colour of star ratings is easily recognised and the bigger size of ads when seller ratings are added can increase your click through rate.
What are Google Seller Ratings?
The Google Seller Rating extension provides user-submitted ratings information about sellers next to their AdWords ads. They are matched to Adwords advertisers’ ads through the domain of the display URL of the ads.
The Seller Rating stars are generally a useful tool for advertisers: they are free, add a visual dimension to ads and, most crucially, enhance the advertisers’ reputations and increase users’ trust in them.
If your ad has an extremely high quality score and shows in the top panel (above natural results), the extension will also display the number of qualified reviews next to the rating.
Where do the ratings in Seller Rating extensions come from?
Ratings are based on the user reviews collected by Google Product Search, which aggregates reviews from a broad base of sources across the web, including TrustPilot, ReviewCentre, Ciao, TrustE-Marketing, Bizrate and Dooyoo. Google then re-scale the original rating to a 1-5 scale to get a consistent measure.
Google uses a variety of signals to make sure Seller Ratings reflect not only the quantity of review scores, but also how representative and high-quality the reviews are. However, Google does not list all of its sources for seller ratings in any one place.
How can I get Seller Ratings extensions?
Once you meet the following criteria, you’re automatically opted in to showing seller ratings with your ads on Google.com and Google Search partners. The criteria are:
- Your campaign must be opted in to Google search.
- The user must be searching on Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.de, Google.fr, or Google.nl.
- You must be an advertiser that provides users with paid goods or services, or one that enables the buying or selling of products or services via a marketplace.
- Your business must have at least 30 unique reviews and a rating of four stars or above on Google Product Search.
- At least 10 of these reviews must be in the user’s Google interface language.
How do I get 30 or more customers reviews?
If your challenge is gaining the 30+ required reviews, we have provided a few suggestions to generate reviews for your website that will lead to seller ratings being included with your ads:
1. Existing customers & employees – Request that existing customers and employees to complete a review. These are people that are familiar with your products or services and can make an immediate review based on their experiences. They are also more likely to provide a positive review which will be helpful in the event that your site receives some unfavourable reviews.
2. Confirmation page request – After a person has made a purchase on your site is a good time for you to request a review. They have demonstrated their desire for your product by their purchase, and this is also an ideal time to produce a positive review.
3. Email voucher incentive– Sending out an email periodically and requesting reviews from your customers is another great method of increasing the number of reviews for your site. Email subscribers usually have favourable views of the products and services that you offer and simply need to convey this in a review. Including a list of the review sites would be helpful to ensure that your reviews are spread out across several sites.
The thing you should definitely NOT do is to begin posting fake reviews. For one, this is highly unethical, but more importantly, Google is more adept at spotting fake reviews than you might imagine.
What does it cost?
It’s a free service, and comes at no additional cost to the advertiser, who will only be charged if someone clicks on the headline of the ad – clicks on the review link are free.
How long does it take?
Reviews are not added to Google Product Search results in real-time, so you may notice a delay between receiving a new review and its addition to your rating in the Google Product Search results. In some cases it may take up to 10 days.
How can I measure its impact?
Currently Google does not provide data regarding how often users directly interact with Seller Rating Extensions or even how often they appear for a given ad. So it best to carry out a test over a short period and isolate the CTR% and CR% as a measure of success.
Visible seller ratings should make your ads more appealing to the user and drive more clicks to your site so you would hope to see an increase in CTR%. Google Seller Ratings also help users make more informed web browsing and purchase decisions while helping advertisers increase their potential for earning more qualified leads. More qualified leads should lead to more sales thus increasing the average CR%. It’s a free service, and comes at no additional cost to the advertiser, who will only be charged if someone clicks on the headline of the ad – clicks on the review link are free.
Written by Jay Shah, Marketing Consultant
