Ensuring your product feed is fit for Google Shopping is a very important procedure in gaining stars in your Google Shopping product listings. Here's what you'll need to know to get your products showing stars.
If you're not sure what Google Shopping Stars are referring to, please check out our Google Overview page which details every displayable rating within Google.
Requirements
✅ Growth Plan and above
What do I need to display Google Shopping Ads?
Our Growth Plan and above have Google Shopping reviews included. You would also need to achieve the below requirements 👇
Reviews:
⭐️ Collect at least 50 total Product Reviews with at least 3 reviews on 1 of the products.
⭐️ Product reviews must not mention the company name, customer service or delivery.
⭐️ Spelling and grammar needs to be spot on for Google to accept them - any typo's or grammatical mistakes will be non eligible for Google standards.
⭐️ The review MUST have content, blank reviews do not contribute to this count.
Product Feed:
Google will match the reviews to your Google Shopping product based on the following:
Your product reviews feed and shopping feed contain identical GTINs or
Your product reviews feed and shopping feed contain identical MPNs and Brands or
Your product reviews feed and shopping feed contain identical SKU and Brands or
Your product reviews feed and shopping feed contains identical product URLs.
📆 Once you have hit these requirements it will take Google a minimum of 28 days to crawl this information and start displaying those stars.
⚠️ Please be aware you will NOT need to connect your Google shopping feed to your Reviews.io account. This is only used if you do not have any other product feeds available, your Google shopping ads will be automatically crawled by Google once you have met all the necessary requirements ⚠️
The less data you provide for matching reviews to the shopping feed, the higher the probability that you won't get stars on your Google Shopping ads. For product reviews to display in Google shopping, Google requires generally a GTIN or MPN and Brand pair (GTIN is the best option). This helps Google match the reviews collected against these identifiers, to the products listed in your Google PLA's, so the product-specific reviews will pull through into your shopping results.
For more information please speak with your Google rep, your performance marketing agency or visit the Google Merchant Center about unique product identifiers.
FAQ
Should I add multiple feeds to REVIEWS.io (E.g Google Shopping + Shopify) 📢
🗣 We do not recommend doing so. Only one feed is necessary, if this has the requirements for Google Shopping, your stars will populate.
How long will stars take to start appearing in Google Shopping? 📢
🗣 Stars can take anywhere from 1-3 weeks to start appearing once you have passed all of the requirements. Google will pull these from the feed and re-pull data in the above time frame. There is no way to manually trigger this.
Do I not to do anything within my GMC? 📢
🗣 As we have a content licensing agreement, Google bypasses this. Everything is done behind the scenes for your convenience.
I have achieved the requirements for Google Shopping however my stars are not appearing? 📢
🗣 If this was not appearing due to a time-related issue, the other reason these might not be appearing would be due to Google have their own criteria for Product Reviews to be eligible, so the Reviews are run through an approval process on our side before they make it into the Product Ratings feeds.
It checks a couple of things, such as the review length, content, formatting and use of punctuation. For a Product Review to be eligible it can't talk about the company, delivery practices, returns process, pricing or other aspects of the service that are not directly related to the product itself.
My Google Feed is considered a 'Low Performance' feed by Google. What does that mean? 📢
🗣 Once Google pulls your feed it is then assessed. If it runs with low performance, your star ratings will not be available on Google Shopping.
This usually happens when the product reviews feed and/or shopping feed do not contain sufficient product identifiers (GTINs or MPN [Manufacturer Part Number]/brand information).
We recommend that you check if your shopping feed (product feed uploaded to their Google Merchant Centre account) contains strong product identifiers (either GTIN or MPN + brand) and if not to include those to allow matching.