- Google Merchant Center customer reviews.
They look fantastic on your shopping ads.
How do you set them up?
I'm gonna show you exactly how to do it in this video.
Let's go.
(upbeat music)
I get asked this a lot,
so I'm going to show you in this video
how to set up customer reviews in Google Merchant Center.
It is super easy.
Google Merchant Center customer reviews are awesome
because they build social proof.
They help with your click through rate,
and they just look fantastic on your Google shopping ads.
If you're new here, my name is Sam,
and I make a lot of tutorials,
case studies, strategy videos,
on how to grow your e-commerce store remotely.
Please consider subscribing and follow along
as I grow my own stores and show you exactly how I do it.
Okay, so what are the requirements
to getting customer reviews in Google Merchant Center?
One, you need at least 50 reviews across your whole store.
Two, have a merchant center account
and sign up for the feature,
and three, product reviews in a format that Google accepts.
Hi guys, Sam here from keycommerce.com,
and now we're in Google Merchant Center.
Let's get those reviews enabled.
Okay, so we go over here to Growth,
and then we go to Manage Programs.
Okay, once we're in the manage program screen,
you have all these extra programs and stuff
that you can enable.
We wanna scroll down to the very bottom
and then go to product ratings.
This is what you need to do, okay?
You need to fill out this form here,
and get approved by Google
before they'll let you see and upload
and connect in your reviews.
So you need to fill out this form.
So how many reviews do you have?
So you go to your site,
check whatever review aggregator you're using,
and add in how many reviews so that you have.
Name of your store, your merchant ID,
your merchant homepage URL.
Basically fill out all this stuff here.
Let's get all my information.
And then, but you're gonna fill out your own information,
role, and then do you currently collect reviews
on your site?
Yes or no?
Click submit.
There you go.
That's how you get started.
You do need 50 reviews already.
And so put that in, if you have 50, and then submit,
and then you're good to go.
It does take some time, sometimes a day,
sometimes three days in our experience.
Once you get reviewed,
you'll then be able to see an option
in your merchant center account
to see the reviews section, basically.
Now that we're approved,
this doesn't actually give us customer reviews.
We need to get them imported in, into merchant center.
Okay, so I'll outline the ways we can do this,
and then I'll walk you through each one.
The first way and the free way
is to use Google's review collection program
to collect the reviews.
The benefits are that it's really easy to set up
and it's free.
The negatives are you can't import past views.
With many other software programs
that you can use for your reviews,
You can actually import as a CSV file,
or the past reviews that you may have collected
over the years or even in the last couple of months.
With the Google reviews program, you can't do this.
You have to collect reviews from today.
The second negative is that it only requests reviews
from customers that have already opted in.
When a customer goes to your thank you page,
they're gonna get a box that says,
"Hey do you want to opt in to give feedback later?"
And not every customer is going to tick yes.
So it means that you're only going to request reviews
from some of your customers,
which means it's gonna take longer and longer
to actually get enough reviews to make this worthwhile.
The third negative is that it's a worst customer experience
in my opinion.
If you go with a paid app,
you can customize all the emails
and the whole experience of requesting a review,
even the language,
so what best suits what your brand is
and how you communicate with your target market.
The Google reviews program sends a templated email
that you can't edit and you just have to accept it,
but it is free.
The second way is a paid way,
and that's using a reviews aggregator.
Basically, a software that you plug into your store
and it collects reviews for you.
The benefits are, I say it's even easier to set up,
but I'm gonna walk you through that anyway.
The second benefit is that you send it
to every single customer, whether they opt in or not.
The third benefit is you can import past reviews.
This is insanely powerful, really, really powerful,
especially if you already have an eBay store,
AT store, Amazon store,
and you wanna import those reviews into your Shopify store.
Man, you can get social proof right out the gate.
And I've seen stores get a massive bumping conversion rate
just by importing their past reviews
from their old platforms.
The fourth benefit is that you can customize the branding
of the emails and how you communicate with these people.
This can have a substantial impact on the conversion rate
of collecting these reviews,
because you're talking to people as who they are.
The negatives, obviously it's the cost.
You're gonna have to pay a monthly fee
or whatever it is for this software.
But in my opinion, depending on the size of your store,
it's really worth it.
If you're just testing out the waters of e-commerce
and learning the ropes, I wouldn't recommend it.
But if you're taking your store seriously,
then a reviews aggregator is gonna make life a lot easier.
It's not just for Google Merchant Center either.
You're gonna be using this app over your whole store.
But a lot of these apps like Stamped.io
which I'll talk about today
make it really easy to display those reviews on your website
in a really nice way that shows the value
of the products to your customers.
Okay, I'm gonna show you the free way with Google,
and then I'm going to show you
the paid way that I recommend too.
Okay, depending on your approach,
there's going to be a bunch of links
that you'll need access to.
I'm gonna leave a link in the description
to a page that has all the links there,
so you can access them really easy.
Just check the description down below.
Okay, let's get into my computer
and let's set up the Google customer reviews.
Hey guys, Sam here from keycommerce.com.
I'm now on my computer again,
and I'm gonna show you how to activate
the Google customer review collection app process
sort of thing.
So we're in merchant center right here.
Let's go down to growth
and let's go down to manage programs again.
So we should have already activated the product ratings.
Now we're gonna go to the customer review section
and then click enable.
It's gonna give you this agreement here.
Make sure you read that.
Click I read and then continue once it loads up. Awesome.
So now what it does is it gives us this code
that we need to go and edit now and put that on our website.
Now I've created a blog post for this video.
It's in the description.
Check the description for that link.
Go to the blog post
and I've actually edited this code for you,
so it's pretty much ready to use.
You just need to edit a little things
before we put it on your website.
Let me pull it up for you, one second.
Okay, so here we have the code
that will be on my blog post here.
And it has these variables here that are made by Shopify.
So it can pull in the different details.
So you'll see in comparison here,
it's very, very similar,
but it means for the order_id, it'll pull it in dynamically.
So if every single order that someone makes on your website,
this gets shown on the thank you page.
They don't actually see this code, but there'll be a pop-up.
And this tells Google the right information
that is required to make this whole thing work.
So it pulls in all this sort of stuff here.
The only thing you need to really change
is firstly the merchant_id, really important.
See here, it has the merchant_id.
Just put in exactly what that is there.
So what I would do is copy that and then paste this here.
You're gonna have this code here,
but it's gonna be the XXX.
You're gonna change that to your merchant center ID.
The other thing is the estimated delivery date.
So what this does here is it actually creates
the year, the month, and the day,
but based on when the order was created,
and then you can add a delay.
So if someone orders today,
you don't wanna send the review collection email today
because then people haven't even received the product yet.
So you wanna wait some time.
So what I've done is I've created this Google sheet here,
and you'll get access to this in that blog post.
And this is basically a calculator.
So you can put in.
So at the moment, it's got in seven days here,
which is just the default in this formula.
What you can do here is say that even if maybe
they always get the product within one day,
you can change this to three days,
and then that's the total seconds.
And then you would just replace that there.
So that's how long Google is going to wait
after someone orders before they send them the review email.
Now that that's done, and that's gonna be,
you have to think about how that works for your store.
Now that that's done,
we then copy that code and that's all ready to go.
We then pull up our Shopify dashboard right here,
and then we're gonna go into settings.
We're gonna go into checkout.
And then we're gonna scroll all the way down
until we see additional scripts.
Once you paste that in,
that's then gonna be all ready to go.
Awesome. Fantastic.
That was actually a bit of something
I was gonna show you in a second.
But basically, yeah, there's the code there.
And just take note that first time access,
this is really great thing for Shopify.
It means that if someone goes back to review the order
and review the thank you page,
it's not gonna reset, so they receive multiple emails.
They only wanna receive one email for their order.
And this means that this will only be fired
if it's the first time someone
has reached that thank you page.
So that's all good.
Boom, and then just click save.
And then that's activated now
and that's everything you need to do
to get those reviews sorted.
That's all awesome.
And then once it's verified,
once it starts collecting those reviews,
you can actually test to see if your reviews are active
by going to this URL that will be in the blog post as well,
and then putting in your store here.
So this is one of the stores that I work with.
And you can see here that they have all these reviews
that are being collected,
but they're being collected by a review app, basically.
But if it's being collected by that app with Google,
it's gonna start showing here.
So you can check that for yourself.
So there you go.
That's how you install the code
for the free Google customer reviews collection app.
Hey guys, so now I'm in merchant center,
and I'm gonna set up the Stamped.io product reviews feed
straight from Stamped.io into merchant center.
So let's do it right now.
So I'm in the dashboard here
and now after filling out that form
that you've filled out earlier in this video,
you should now have access
to product reviews under marketing.
This is exactly what we need right here.
This is for product ratings.
So it says your account is eligible for product ratings.
Whew, your star ratings will be displayed
on your product listings.
So they're on your Google shopping ads.
So let's go here over to product reviews feeds.
I had a feed that I added in earlier,
but we're gonna create a new one here
just like you would do.
The feed name is gonna be Stamped.io, scheduled fetch.
Awesome, the file name is going to be,
well, here's what you need to get the file name.
So basically you need to log in to Stamped.io.
I'm logged into my account right here.
And then go to this URL.
So I'm gonna put this URL in my blog post here.
Once you put that in,
it then opens up the settings into the SEO section,
and then you can scroll down here to Google shopping.
And if you've upgraded to the plan,
you'll be able to access the Google shopping reviews.
Here is your feed URL.
See, it's an XML file.
So go back.
Let's put that all the way down here.
But the file name is going to be here
and it's going to be basically the pubkey.
Oh, and .XML.
So you should get that last,
basically that last bit of text there.
So boom, all the way to XML,
and we don't need that dash there. Awesome.
So basically, the daily frequency of fetching it
is gonna be daily.
That's fine, 12:00 AM.
That's just when it's gonna fetch it,
that doesn't matter too much,
and that's gonna be blank and blank.
And then you're gonna click create feed.
Fantastic. We now have our feed imported like that.
And then once that goes, is added in, it's now processing.
So once it takes a few minutes,
but you can also click fetch now to fetch that feed.
And then it's gonna tell you if there are any issues.
Now this is a feed specifically made by Stamped.io.
So if do have any problems,
they've got really fantastic support over there.
And I've dealt with them so many times,
and they're really good at helping to fix these issues
with the feed.
So you can get it set up really quickly.
They'll even go in and make edits to your feed,
your product reviews feed
to make sure it matches what Google needs.
So that's how you set up the Stamped.io feed.
There you go.
Okay, we've now set up customer reviews
in Google Merchant Center.
That wasn't too bad, was it?
If you have any questions about this process,
please just leave a comment
and I'll answer you as soon as I can.
If this video helped you set up
your customer reviews in merchant center,
please give it a like.
That tells YouTube that I'm making great content
for my audience out there.
If you want to learn more about
how you can grow your store remotely,
more tutorials just like this one:
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please consider subscribing.
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on how to grow your e-commerce store remotely.
Thanks so much for watching
and I'll see you in the next video.
Bye for now.
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