How Product Reviews in Google Shopping Can Bring You More Sales

Online shoppers rely heavily on product reviews before making a purchase or even clicking on your shopping ads at the first glance. Most of the time, your customers pick up on the “yellow stars” - the icon that showcases the rating of your products - as they are going through your product listings on Google Shopping.

The higher the star ratings, the more customers are tempted to click on your products. While product descriptions are helpful, the star ratings and product reviews give customers more insights to choose their desired products.

Reading product reviews is no different from getting a product recommendation from a customer’s social circle. Around 84% of people trust online product reviews as much as they trust their friends. Thus, featuring your product reviews on Google Shopping is a great idea. In this article, we'll discuss:

1. How product reviews impact your Google Shopping Ads
2. How to integrate your product reviews on Google Shopping

How product reviews impact your Google Shopping ads

1. Star ratings help you stay ahead of competitors

When consumers search for products on Google Shopping, they are exposed to hundreds of product listings. Your products need to compete with many other vendors for attention, and a prominent star rating is what usually makes consumers stop at your products.  

Higher star ratings enhance the visual appeal of your shopping ad and ensure it appears at the top as people come anticipating products with good reviews. In fact, Reevoo found that 50 or more reviews per product lead to a 4.6% increase in conversion rates. If some of your competitors don’t have any product reviews, you are one more step closer to a successful purchase.

2. Higher average star rating leads to more sales

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The relationship between star ratings and purchase likelihood is interesting. Research from Spiegel shows that the purchase likelihood peaks at 4 to 4.7-star ratings, then begins to decrease as the star ratings get closer to 5 since most customers feel that a 5-star rating is too good to be true.

The number of reviews also has a strong impact on revenues. Businesses with more than 9 reviews submitted in the past 90 days earn 52% more than average, and they can earn 108% more if the number of recent reviews surpasses 25. 

Besides, when customers see 2 products with the same ratings, they will purchase the product that has a higher number of reviews. Therefore, both higher average star ratings and number of reviews are important to your business.

3. Reviews are user generate contents so they act as a social proof

Product reviews have a strong influence on purchasing decision because they acts as a social proof. Social proof is a phenomenon where people believe in the experiences of other people with a product without trying that product themselves. For example, if you are considering two products, you’ll be more likely to choose the one that your friend is recommending.  

While positive reviews encourage more purchases, negative reviews can stop an average of 40% of buyers from wanting to buy from a business, according to BrightLocal. However, Reevoo found that 95% of customers get suspicious of a rating if there are no negative reviews. Therefore, both positive and negative reviews are necessary to make your social proof more realistic.

How to integrate your product reviews on Google Shopping

To grow your business and expand your reach online, Google Shopping is an incredibly powerful tool. Here is how you can add your product reviews to Google Shopping to boost your rankings and conversions on searches.

To begin with, you need to have a Google Merchant Center Account for your business. You can create one by entering the required information such as your business name, the country you will operate, time zone, products, language, and more. Once your Merchant Center account is up and running, you will need a product data feed to upload the information about your products. The data feed is critical to getting the right information about the status of products in your inventory, their description, and even the user ratings. There are several ways to generate your product feed. You can either do it manually every day by entering information or automate it using apps like Feed for Google Shopping to collect it from your website periodically. 

Then, you can send product reviews data to Google through any of these methods: 

1. Create Product Reviews feed (XML file) in Judge.me and upload to your Merchant Center account. This article describes how to upload products and Judge.me reviews on Google Shopping. 

2. Collect reviews through Google Customer Reviews (free to use). It enables you to have seller ratings along with product ratings to give more visibility on searches. To set yours up here is how you can create a link for your customers to write a review with.

3. You can also send your product ratings data through an approved third party aggregator by signing up using the interest form. Google then works with the aggregator directly for the feed set up and management.

After you have signed up for the Merchant Center account and are ready with your feeds, sign up for Shopping Ads, and complete the setup by providing all the essential details. You will be eligible for product ratings with 50 or more reviews from all your catalog and at least 3 reviews for each product.

Conclusion

The impact of product reviews on Google Shopping Ads cannot be overstated, given the statistics and proven psychological effect on purchasing decisions. So, go ahead and create your Google product listings with product reviews right away!