What is Google integration?

Google is and remains one of the central contact points for all people who research products online and shop on the web. For this reason, well thought-out search engine marketing is extremely important for you as an online retailer. As one of the few Google Review Partners worldwide, Trusted Shops offers you the option to display your collected shop and Product Reviews in Google’s paid search results with Google integration.

How does Google integration benefit my shop?

Google integration has a number of advantages for your shop:

  • High level of awareness: Stars in your Google Ads grab the attention and encourage visitors to click.
  • Stronger trust: Your potential customers can see at a glance that other consumers have rated you, ideally positively. This helps establish trust in your online shop.
  • More clicks: Higher attention and stronger trust lead to more traffic in your online shop, and this leads to more customers.
  • Lower costs: Google Ads evaluates a high click rate positively. This way your quality factor improves and the cost per click (CPC) decreases.

Where are the star ratings displayed?

Once you have booked Google integration, Trusted Shops transfers your collected ratings to your Google Merchant Center daily via a direct interface.

Although Trusted Shops sends your ratings to Google daily after booking the Google integration, it can take between six and eight weeks before they are published by Google for the first time. Even after this initial delay, the publication date of new ratings on Google can lag up to ten days behind.

After this time, the ratings can be displayed at various points. On the one hand, your collected shop reviews can be displayed in the Google Ads you booked. In these ads, the star ratings appear directly below the Page Title and the URL. In the organic search results, however, the shop reviews are not displayed.

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Google integration does not guarantee that your star ratings will appear in every Google Ads campaign. The search engine itself decides on the basis of its algorithms whether and in which search results it displays the stars. Trusted Shops has no more influence on this than you do as a retailer. With the help of Google integration, however, you create the conditions for your ratings to be transferred to Google, for the search engine to know about your star ratings and for it to display them. You can check how often your stars are actually displayed in your Google Ads account. In this article we will explain the steps necessary for this.

In addition, the ratings from Google Shopping are used. The review information in the provider details next to a product leads to the Google Shopping review profile of the respective shop. There customers can get detailed information about the ratings given to a particular shop.

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Google converts the star ratings for the shop into a percentage shown in green. The orange stars, on the other hand, are the Product Review stars, which come from customers who have rated the product. For this, Google relies not only on the ratings you provide, but also on reviews from other shops. That is why the number of Product Reviews on Google may differ significantly from the number of reviews in your shop.

How can I use Google Integration?

To be able to use Google integration, you will first need to meet a few requirements. On the one hand, both an ad in Google Ads and an entry in Google Shopping are paid advertising. So you will need a Google Ads account to display ads in the search results and an account in the Merchant Center to advertise on Google Shopping. When registering, make sure that you enter the same domain with both Trusted Shops and the Merchant Center so that the collected ratings can be transferred without errors.

On the other hand, Google only displays the collected star ratings for your shop once you have collected at least 100 shop reviews in the past 12 months and their average score is at least 3.5 out of 5 stars. By the way, you must have collected these 100 ratings not only from Trusted Shops, but from all providers. This includes the ratings received by Google itself. For Product Reviews, there needs to be at least 50 reviews with comments across all your products.

Google must be able to assign the Product Reviews you provide to the appropriate items. For this purpose, the ratings given in your shop must be linked to the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) belonging to the product.

Once you meet or are about to meet the above requirements, you can book Google Integration in your upgrade centre as an additional option for your membership. Your ratings will then be transmitted daily to Google. Since this transmission runs over an interface between Trusted Shops and Google, you do not have to do anything yourself.

Note: You can check whether ratings are already stored in the Merchant Center at the URL

https://www.google.com/shopping/ratings/account/lookup?q=example.com.

Simply copy this URL into the address bar of your browser. Then replace the section of the URL that is marked in bold (example.com) with the web address of your shop, but without the www at the start.

Also interesting in the context of Google:
Google My Business vs. Google Seller reviews: Google services encrypted


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