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Requirements for Google Shopping Stars (PLAs)
An in-depth explanation of Google Shopping Requirements.
Cam Andrew avatar
Written by Cam Andrew. Updated over a week ago

Ensuring your product feed is fit for Google Shopping is a very important procedure in gaining stars in your Google Shopping product listings.

Requirements

  • Growth Plan and above

Our Small Business and above plans have Google Shopping reviews included. You would also need to achieve the below requirements:

  1. 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 also needs to be spot on for Google to accept them.)

Then Google will match the reviews to your Google Shopping product based on the following:

  1. Your product reviews feed and shopping feed contain identical GTINs or

  2. Your product reviews feed and shopping feed contain identical MPNs and Brands or

  3. Your product reviews feed and shopping feed contain identical SKU and Brands or

  4. Your product reviews feed and shopping feed contains identical product URLs.

Google Shopping Product Feed-

  • 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.

PLEASE NOTE: 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, and provided is 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.

  • 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.

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