Many of our clients, like yourself, have asked us questions about their ratings and reviews. This article is meant to help answer some of those questions, specifically Syndication.
How syndication works:
When someone places an order on your site, the Shopper Approved survey comes up, and they have a choice to leave ratings, along with the option to leave a review. About 30-40% leave both ratings and a review. The other 60-70% of your customers that fill out the survey only leave ratings - at least initially.
When your customers leave both ratings and reviews, that data is then captured and stored on Shopper Approved servers. We then place that data into a file, known as a "feed." These feeds are then syndicated to Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Each major search engine has its own proprietary way that they request the feed to be sent to them. We prepare the feeds according to the search engine's specifications and send them out weekly.
Initial syndication for new Shopper Approved customers can take up to 4-6 weeks. This all depends on the specific search engine's feed requirements, and they may vary. However, Shopper Approved has built great relationships with the merchant ratings teams within each of these major search engine companies.
What does this mean for you?
Shopper Approved works closely with the seller ratings teams to streamline your reviews with a current, fast, and accurate feed, giving you the best results available.
Shopper Approved sends weekly feeds, so after initial syndication, feeds should be updated 2-4 times a month (depending on the search engine company).
Note: Search engine companies can update their feed requirements at their will and discretion. We work closely to update our feeds to meet these requirements in a timely manner.
FAQs
Because Google, Bing, and Yahoo Syndicate much differently, here are some helpful FAQs that we have compiled:
Why aren't my reviews showing in Google AdWords yet?
Google requires very specific guidelines for what they will display. You must have a minimum of 100 reviews, with quality comments from the last 12 months, 3.5 or higher overall rating, and from the same country. Once you have reached these requirements in Google Seller Ratings, your stars usually show up within 1-2 days.
Do my ratings without comments show in Google AdWords?
While Google doesn't use these in Adwords, they're still very valuable and show up in Bing and Yahoo, on your Shopper Approved seal, in your Shopper Approved certificate, and in various Google organic search results to help increase your social proof.
It looks like you are meeting the minimum requirements in Google Seller Ratings, but it's not showing in AdWords:
Google Seller Ratings is where Google pulls the star ratings to add to Google Adwords and Google Shopping, so if you meet the minimum requirements and the reviews are showing up in Google Seller Ratings but not on your Adwords, then there is a disconnect. This doesn't happen very often.
Fortunately, this is usually very simple to fix, but because it's your Google Adwords account, you'll have to work with your support agent at Google to get this resolved. All you have to do is contact the Google Adwords team and show them your Google Seller Ratings page URL and let them know that the stars aren't appearing in your Adwords or Shopping campaigns and they will fix the issue.
You can contact them by phone, chat, or email by going to this page:
https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/8206?hl=en
Troubleshooting
If you have any other questions regarding syndication please feel free to reach out to our support staff directly at [email protected] and we are happy to help!