The benefit of a paid search ad with seller ratings is that they let the searcher know that the advertiser is rated well by their customers. An ad with seller ratings helps customers make more informed decisions when clicking on an ad and purchasing from a company.

A user is more likely to click on an ad with seller reviews versus an ad without reviews. Ads with seller ratings generally earn more clicks than an ad without, thus increasing your click-through-rates.

Ads with seller ratings can be seen on Google.com and Google Search Partners on both desktop browsers and high-end mobile devices that have full Internet browsers.

Below is a screen shot of a paid search ad on Google.com that has 351 seller reviews.

How do you add seller rating extensions? Google looks at customer-submitted ratings (and not product reviews) and matches these reviews to your ad using the display URL of your ad.   The ratings are collected by Google Product Search which collects reviews from third party vendors such as Reseller Ratings, Bizrate, ReviewCentre.com and Viewpoints.

Ads must meet the following criteria to be eligible to appear with seller ratings extensions:

• The campaign must be opted into 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 paid goods or services

• Your business must have at least 30 unique reviews and a rating of four stars or higher on Google Product Search.

Please note that you do not need to have a Google Merchant Center account for your ads to be eligible for seller ratings. In addition, if you have a seller rating of four stars or higher but have bad customer reviews, users will be able to read any bad reviews.

A few weeks ago, Google announced an update to its Privacy Policy. The new policy will allow Google to combine data gathered from all its 70+ services. This means that if users have Google+, Gmail, and YouTube accounts; Google will treat each signed-in Google user as a single user across all its products. At the same time, users will have the option to opt out, adjust or delete information collected by Google; this will be possible using the Ads Preferences Manager.

With this policy, Google has the ability to deliver more relevant search engine results pages to a user’s query. This will be the case for Paid Ads as well.

But how is this going to work? You may ask. – Allow me to illustrate with following example:
A user has expressed interest on jeeps on his Google+, he watches jeep videos on YouTube, and received emails on his Gmail account about new jeep soft tops. When this user searches on Google.com for the query “bikini top” Google may display ads for bikini tops for jeep instead of the clothing related query.

The same will happen with SEO, staying with the “bikini top” scenario, Google may rank jeep stores that sell bikini soft tops versus any clothing store selling bikinis.

Overall, Google’s new privacy policy will benefit advertisers all across the globe. It will help advertisers to connect to their audience based on their interests. Search results rankings will also benefit from this new policy since Google will have a better understanding of its users.

Google has introduced a new look to its AdWords Sitelinks by adding a small arrow on the left side of where the sitelinks begin.

A Google spokesperson confirmed that these new sitelinks are currently rolling out everywhere this week.

The screen shot below shows both the old and new look of Google Sitelinks.

Google Sitelinks appear with your ad on Google.com, and in some cases across the Google Display Network. Adding sitelinks is free, although you are still charged per click on your ad. They give potential customers more reasons to click on your ad by including additional information within your paid search ad.

Google has expanded ad extensions with Social extensions, Dynamic search ads, location extensions, product extensions, call extensions and seller ratings.  In addition, Google may be introducing additional Ad Extensions in the future.

To enable Sitelinks in your Google AdWords ads, click on the “Ad Extensions” tab within your Campaigns tab.