In a blog post, Google today announced that it is adding product ratings to its Product Listing Ads within searches. The stars will come from a variety of reviews and sources, including merchants, third-party review sites, users, and more. Google says that adding product ratings to its Listing Ads within searches will drive higher traffic through these ads. The company claims that this change also helped increase click-through rates of Product Listing Ads in early testing.
We believe these ratings will help differentiate products across google.com and google.com/shopping and will help merchants drive more qualified traffic through Product Listing Ads. In initial tests, product ratings also helped increase click-through-rates of Product Listing Ads.
Adding product ratings also further blurs the lines between paid sponsored results and organic results in search, which is clearly something that advertisers have been hounding Google to do for ages now. The addition of ratings makes the sponsored product results seem far more organic than they actually are, especially when the reviews are favorable.
Product ratings will appear on the main Google search page, in addition to the Google.com/shopping portal. Ratings may not also show up, as Google says this change is “one of several extensions” it may show within results. The change also only applies to users in the United States.
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