Google announced today via the Inside AdWords blog that they’re introducing product ratings on Product Listing Ads (PLAs).
Product reviews provide critical information to shoppers making purchase decisions. To help shoppers easily find this information when searching for products, we’re introducing product ratings on Product Listing Ads.
The changes will affect Google users in the United States. Shoppers searching on Google will now see product ratings appear in the form of stars and review counts on Product Listing Ads across google.com and google.com/shopping.
Review data for the product will be compiled from multiple sources including merchants, third party aggregators, editorial sites and users. All the data will come together to produce a rating out of five stars for the product.
Google says they believe these ratings will help differentiate products across google.com and google.com/shopping. These ratings are also intended to help merchants drive more qualified traffic through PLAs. During Google’s initial tests, the product ratings helped increase click-through-rates of PLAs.
How To Enable Product Ratings On Your PLAs
Product ratings are available to merchants targeting the United States who choose to share all of their product review content with Google, either directly or through an approved third party aggregator.
Google is offering a grace period in order to give merchants time to share their review content. The grace period will take place from late July through October, 2014.
During the grace period, Google will allow product ratings to be shown across all PLAs where Google has review data available After the grace period, Google will only show ratings for products from merchants who have opted to share their review data.
Google plans to open up product ratings to merchants targeting countries outside of the United States in the coming months.
