This guide explains how to display ratings and reviews on your Google Shopping product listings. Displaying reviews on these listings is a proven way to increase clickthrough rates, increasing traffic to your site.
Key notes
- Google has a minimum requirement of 50 reviews to begin showing reviews on Google Shopping listings
- This feature is available on our Business and above; see pricing info here
In this guide
- Introduction to Google Shopping Product Reviews
- Enabling the feed
- Ensuring data matching
- Data feed match example
- Google Exclusions
Introduction to Google Shopping Product Reviews
This feature allows you to display product ratings and review counts on both Google Shopping Ads (PLA) and Google Shopping Search listings. See Examples below:
Google Shopping Listing Ads (PLA)
- Google Shopping Search Listings
Setting up the review feed
This feature requires a review feed that is passed to Google. The review feed can be enabled within Stamped's dashboard, under Settings - Google - Product Ratings:
(Please ensure you save the changes as indicated in the below screenshot)
Once the review feed is created, it will be automatically uploaded to your Google Merchant Center account. The reviews are fetched by Google every Wednesday.
Once Google has this data, it typically takes 7-10 days to be processed and reflected in the Google Shopping listings. However, see guidance below on maximum timeframe.
For existing feeds that are just receiving updates, Google guidance suggests these should be updated 2-3 days after each Wednesday fetch.
However please note the following from Google:
1.) Your provision of a feed does not guarantee that your content will be included in Google Shopping. This is controlled and entirely at the discretion of Google.
2.) Once a product feed has been received from an approved aggregator (Stamped) it can take as much as 4-6 weeks to integrate the reviews onto the GMC platform.
Ensuring Data Matching
Once the feed is enabled, you can download a copy. This can be done here: https://go.stamped.io/#/settings/google
This feed is automatically sent to Google, so you do not need to take any further action. We update the feed data daily and Google pulls the review updates once per week, on Wednesdays. This process is contingent on proper matching between product data that you are pushing to both Stamped and Google.
You are responsible for ensuring that the product data pushed to Stamped is correct - we receive it from your ecommerce platform. Should you run into any issues with matching, we can update your product catalog via CSV (provided by you) to ensure matching.
One of the following combinations is required for the review and product feeds to sync in Google Shopping:
MPN (Manufacturer Part Number) + Brand + Product Url
OR
GTIN (Global Trade Item Numbers) + Brand + Product Url
One of the most common issues is an incorrect Product URL. If you're on Shopify and originally got set up before your store was live, it's possible that the domain name we have on file is yourdomain.myshopify.com. If that's the case, you will need to send our support team a request to update this to ensure proper matching.
If you decide to use MPN as your identifier, the below image indicates the location where you can Edit MPN in the Shopify Google Shopping app. You will simply need to enter the SKU data of the product in the MPN field as shown below:
Kindly take note that the custom product checkbox should be unchecked for the MPN to be registered in Google Merchant Center:
Once this is done, please contact Stamped support to let us know and we will refresh the review feed as well, to register the new data in the feed.
If you're using Products with variants, (e.g., Product = T-Shirt, variant 123 red, variant 124 blue), instead of each product being its own unique Product_ID, you will need to add the following additional field named item_group_id in the product feed. This should contain the product ID value of your e-commerce platform.
This will then match against the SKU value in the review feed, which has been set up in the review feed to contain the same matching value.
Once it's done, you may need to inform the Google representative on your GMC account that the "item_group_id" value in the product feed has been set up to match against the "SKU" value in the review feed for all variants in the store.
If you run into any issues please keep us updated on any communication between you and Google and we'll help as required.
Feed Data Match Example
Review Feed Section using MPN + Brand + URL:
Product Feed Section using MPN + Brand + URL:
Google exclusions
Google doesn't allow reviews with these blacklisted keywords in the review:
- shipped
- shipping
- shipment
- service
- deliver
- arrived
- company
- store
- business
Also, any reviews with less than 30 characters, or for out-of-stock products are automatically removed from the feed.
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