Enhance Your Google Paid Search Ads with Seller Ratings

Anne Garcia - February 20, 2012

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.