What’s new in Google Product Reviews Program?
Google Product Reviews Program will increase traffic and exposure for your websites.
On April 21 2010, Google announced the Google Product Reviews Program: “The web has made it easy to make decisions: when I’m going out to eat, I can easily check to see what people thought of that hot new restaurant, and when I’m about to buy a new digital camera for my upcoming trip to Portugal, I can read through dozens of reviews to help me make the best choice.
User reviews and ratings give ordinary consumers a voice, and are particularly important when a prospective customer can’t go into a physical store to ask questions or play with the product. That’s why, at today’s Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit, Product Director Sameer Samat announced the Google Product Reviews Program. Through the program, we will begin featuring full-length product reviews and user ratings from participating retailers and manufacturers wherever it will help users with their shopping, including in our search results and advertising programs. On Google Product Search, for example, we’ll feature your logo alongside representative reviews from your site, increasing brand exposure for your web store at a key point in the conversion process.
To kick off this program, we’ll be working with Bazaarvoice, a leader in the user reviews space. If you’re a Bazaarvoice client, all you need to do to participate is to let Bazaarvoice know you’re interested in submitting your reviews to Google, and to make sure you’ve specified your canonical URLs for products in your web store. If you’re not a Bazaarvoice client, hold tight – we hope to add additional partners, as well as a self-submission model, soon.”
Google Product Reviews Program:
Google’s new system is both more detailed and more aggressively monetized: it involves serving product reviews anytime a Google result shows you something you can buy. Unlike Facebook’s Like system, Google’s doesn’t have a social aspect; it serves product reviews from strangers who’ve rated those products on other big retail sites.
Google’s upstart service is powered by Bazaarvoice, which provides the backend product-ratings functions for over 800 branded websites, including Best Buy (BBY), Costco (COST), Dell (DELL), Macy’s (M), P&G (PGP), Panasonic (PC), QVC and others. The company claims to have served more than 100 billion pieces of customer-generated content in its five-year existence; when you see a product rated “five stars” on, say, BestBuy.com, you’re viewing a piece of Bazaarvoice content. All those ratings will now show up in Google results.
Increase traffic and exposure through the Google Product Reviews Program:
If you already submit your product data to Google, you know it’s a great way to get free, qualified traffic through enhanced ad formats and Google Product Search. Now, through the Google Product Reviews Program, we’d like to help you leverage your high-quality user reviews and ratings to attract more customers, by surfacing this content wherever it’s relevant for shoppers on Google, including our search results and our advertising programs. On Google Product Search, for example, we’ll feature your logo alongside representative reviews from your site, increasing brand exposure for your web store at a key point in the conversion process.
Ready to participate? The first step is to work with your webmaster to make sure you’ve specified your canonical URLs for products in your web store. Next, if you’re a client of one of the reviews platform providers listed below, all you need to do is contact them and let them know you’d like to submit your user reviews to Google. If not, we’ll be adding more platforms soon, as well as a process for submitting reviews directly to Google. In the meantime, remember to specify canonical URLs for your website so you’ll be ready to participate.
Bazaarvoice enables the world’s largest brands to capture and amplify the voices of their customers to build sales, bringing word of mouth to ecommerce. Bazaarvoice enables consumers to share ratings, reviews, questions, answers, and stories about products and brands on client websites. Bazaarvoice helps clients maximize the strategic impact of user-generated review content through community management, search engine optimization, and syndication across the Web and through the channel.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.