How to Setup Google Customer Reviews and Collect Reviews for Free
– 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: marketing strategies, operations,
all that sort of stuff, please consider subscribing. I release videos very regularly 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. (upbeat music).
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