Seller ratings are online customer reviews from Google that reflect the overall quality of the advertiser and consumer experience when shopping with the advertiser.
When advertising on Google it is important to be fully aware of how Google customer reviews can impact your click-through rates and other factors within your Google Ads account. To gain the best insight into how to improve your click-through rates, and conversion rates and gain a return on ad spend, you could look into Google Ads Management.
These Seller ratings are an account-level automated extension type that highlights advertisers with high ratings.
What are the benefits of Google Seller Ratings?
Seller ratings in Google ads can impact the way that your ads perform. But how do star ratings impact your google ads? With a high amount of Google Stars and good quality reviews, you can vastly improve your ad visibility and relevance, as well as increase your click-through rates and conversions.
This is because you are advertising yourself as a trustworthy and reputable company that provides a good consumer experience and you are providing evidence from the consumers themselves to prove this.
This boosted credibility and trust with your potential clients can make you stand out from your competitor’s ads and this can make the difference between a potential lead clicking on your ads or going to a competitor.
Receiving overall post-fulfilment customer ex reviews in general gives a company the benefit of receiving valuable consumer insights and feedback on the product or service that they offer. This allows companies to build off of these reviews and the underlying feedback that they receive can lead to an improvement in customer service, and the product or service itself.
Paid Ads and Google Stars
The way that seller ratings are shown in Google ads depends on what type of ad you are running.
Seller ratings will always show a rating out of five stars, the number of ratings that the business has and this will be in brackets, there will also be a qualifier to highlight why the company received the rating if that data is available.
The Seller ratings on Google are created by Google accumulating reputable source third-party independent review sites that accumulate business reviews.
You will not be charged any additional fees for seller ratings, so when a user clicks on your ad with seller ratings, the charge will be the same as if there were no seller ratings.
How to hide seller ratings in Google Ads
You can hide the seller ratings on your ads if you don’t want them to show, to do this you will need to sign into your Google ads account and click on the ‘ads and assets’ from the side menu on the left of the page.
Then you will need to click on the ‘association’ tab from the drop-down menu. From here you will need to click on the three vertical dots and select ‘account level automated assets’. You can then turn off specific automated assets from here and choose what asset you wish to disable.
You can also select the reason for turning off the asset and to complete you will need to click the ‘turn off’ button.
What are Google Ads Seller Rating Requirements?
In order for your seller ratings to show you will need to meet some requirements. The first one is that Google will have needed to have received enough unique reviews for the country that your search network campaigns are showing in within the last 12 months across the third-party review partner sites or the Google Customer Reviews itself.
Most merchants can gain a rating after receiving 100 or more eligible reviews however this can vary for each company. If you do not have enough eligible reviews, you can still receive a seller rating, but Google will also have needed to complete a research evaluation of your website.
Once this has been completed you will need to meet the criteria of both an average rating of 3.5 stars or higher for text ads, and the ad’s URL domain needs to match the domain for which Google has the ratings. It is important to note that Google can still show seller ratings if the average rating is less than 3.5 stars.
It is also important to note that reviews from customers in a given country will only contribute to the company’s rating in that country and that Google may not show seller ratings if the underlying feedback is irrelevant to what is advertised in the ad.
How to improve your Google Seller Ratings
The best way to collect seller ratings is to simply ask your customers to complete a rating or review for your company. It’s important that you ask for reviews at the most appropriate time in the customer’s journey with your company, ideally after you have had a successful engagement with the customer.
In order to get good quality seller ratings – the bottom line is to provide a positive customer experience. Without a quality experience, there is no point in doing any of the above as you need a minimum star rating of 3.5, so to meet this minimum star rating, you need to provide a good experience for all of your customers.
Product Ratings vs Seller ratings.
Product ratings are a review of the product whereas seller ratings are a review of the overall business. The two differ quite vastly and product ratings appear below the product description in SEPRs or actually below the product name within the Google catalogue.
The Google Merchant Centre product ratings program allows you to show reviews for your products when displaying google shopping ads. These ratings like seller ratings can help customers to make informed decisions about purchasing a product and help to drive more legit and qualified leads to your page.
You can get started with product ratings and seller ratings by signing up for free with Google Customer Reviews visit the seller ratings page on Google. It is also very important to note that these reviews and ratings are based on a wide range of factors and the main one being that unique product identifies (for example, Global Trade Item Numbers).
Without this data, Google will attempt to match the review through other means like Stock Keeping Units, brands and manufacturer parts numbers and product URLs how these additional product identifiers don’t often give a match as good as a GTIN.
In order to display product ratings you need a minimum of 50 reviews in the product ratings feed. Retailers will also need to share all of their reviews with Google in an update each month, the review feeds must comply with content policies, be of high quality, be collected and owned by the retailer and any images in the product reviews must be user generated.
How to check if you have a seller rating
In order to see if you have a seller rating then you will need to edit the URL: https://www.google.com/shopping/ratings/account/lookup?q={yourdomain} and replace the ‘your domain’ part of the URL with your actual domain.
Here it will show seller ratings and you can view information about your shop. You will only be able to view this if your site meets Google’s minimum seller rating thresholds. You also will not be able to view this information if you provide an invalid URL value or if you provide the wrong homepage URL.
How to check if your Seller Ratings are working properly
First, it is important that you check that you are meeting all of the seller ratings guidelines and criteria. When this is done and you can confirm that everything on your end is in order – you can perform a search of your shop domain in the Google shopping search bar. Look at this in a list view to ensure that you have enough room for the seller ratings to show. To access more information regarding your seller ratings you can use the domain mentioned above to view the information about your shop.