Stars on AdWords : Seller Ratings Hits the UK
Google seems to be rolling out seller ratings to the UK AdWords results today, just in time to take advantage of increased Christmas marketing budgets.
This feature has been in existence for a few months on Google.com but today is the first time I’ve seen it on Google.co.uk. Last week Google was still telling people on forums that this was only for US campaigns.
The new change means that if you advertise on AdWords you simply have to put some effort into making sure you have 4 or 5 stars in the reviews on Google Product Search – the links point directly to a review page like this one for John Lewis which no doubt customers will be reading and taking note of.
Click the image below for a full size version.
The biggest problem that brands have with reviews is that people often only leave reviews if the service is bad – how many people would order a mobile phone and leave a positive review just because it all went smoothly and the product arrived on time? The key with reviews is to encourage your happy customers to leave positive reviews and hope that these counteract the negative ones that pretty much any business will have.
Another issue is that brands with a small number of reviews can very quickly see their overall score drop if competitors decide to leave fake negative reviews. Take the example of a big brand that has 34 reviews & 4 stars – if they get 30 reviews of zero stars then that 4 star rating drops to 2 stars for just a couple of hours work from a competing site. A 2 star rating will have a noticeable effect on Quality Score, the campaign cost per click will go up & the brand is suddenly struggling and has to figure out a way to get loads of positive reviews to cover the negative ones. If they had hundreds of reviews to start with then sabotage is a lot harder.
This is probably a good time to point out that reviewing your own business by pretending to be a customer is illegal in the UK 
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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Is having friends and family review your site illegal as well?
I will be ontrigued to see if they add this to travel ad’s, such as hotels! Now that would be a problem as it puts control in the hands of Trioadvisor (in the main) who of courseare owned by….a major advertiser.
That’s cool, thanks for the heads up..
http://goo.gl/mA6B
I am sure incentivising customers to provide feedback is also wrong, but I have noticed loads of retailers promoting feedback via prize draws, I think a few customers think they have a better chance of winning if they say nice things.
Presumably if they weren’t customers, it would be.
Not impressed by this development at all – how long before we see jobs on digitalpoint for “50 1-2 star reviews of a website” as people sabotage competitors, then we’ll have a corresponding thread from someone else wanting to buy 5 star ones to undo the effects of false reviews.
I’d much prefer it if the business owner could opt out of the reviews, but that in itself might make people wary of your site.
I assume that if you dont link your google base account to your adwords then the star ratings won’t appear?
Also if you don’t have any ratings, therefore no stars you’d assume your going to get a lower CTR as the stars will attract the searches eye.
Interesting points! I will keep an eye out for these seller ratings. It is alarming that this process is open to manipulation by competitors especially for smaller businesses who would receive fewer reviews and therefore would be easier to manipulate their ratings. I wonder how this will affect which businesses use a pay per click campaign.
I am glad to see that this campaign did not leave the UK out.
This is a great way of finding out the reputation of the seller a bit live amazon and ebay. I always buy form high rated sellers.
@Mikael. I’m not a lawyer but yes, I believe it is illegal as it is misleading, ie. not true. The grey area is if it is a genuine purchase, the argument being if it was a genuine review or biased. I’d avoid this.
I’ve recently started to use the hReview feature but have yet to see any results in the natural search. Does anyone have any advice or experience of using microformats?
@anmol, its not really a true representaion of all sellers as your ratings only show if you have a 4 or more star rating see http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/ratings.html
Also whats interesting is if a user clicks on the star rating part of you advert you dont get charged, however the user journey is awful as a business you dont get to edit the seller rating landing page (as far as im aware?) so no clear call to action or even “visit the website” link or anything is currently present.
Personally i think its currently not a good thing to have a star rating in the listings, yes it makes you more visible in the SERPS but if people click on the ratings chances are you’ve lost the chance on that particular user journey to convert them into an action. I would much prefer someone to reach my page and hopefully convert. As always a test is in order.
I’ve not seen any reports to see how many people click on your seller rating?
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October 26, 2010 at 7:33am
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