Reviews in Google Shopping

Product ratings are the stars that appear under a product in Google Shopping ads, free listings and the Shopping tab. They are separate from the stars that appear under a normal search result — those come from the review markup Evident already puts on your product pages, and you do not have to do anything to get them.

Shopping ratings work differently. Google will not read them off your storefront. They have to arrive as a product reviews feed: a file Evident hosts and your Merchant Center account reads on a schedule.

The part that quietly goes wrong

A reviews feed does not carry products. It carries reviews, each one pointing at a product that Google then has to find in the catalogue you already send it.

Google tries, in this order:

1. GTIN — the barcode number. UPC, EAN, JAN or ISBN.
2. Brand + MPN — both, together. A brand on its own is not enough.
3. SKU, if your shopping feed happens to carry the same one.
4. The product URL, as a last resort.

If none of those match, that review is dropped. Not rejected — dropped, with no error on the feed. The feed is accepted, Merchant Center reports it as healthy, and the stars never appear.

This is why coverage is worth checking before you set the feed up rather than after. Google takes two to four weeks to review a new feed, and arriving at the end of that with nothing to show is an expensive way to discover that your products have no barcodes on them.

It is your variants that matter, not your products

Every offer in a shopping feed is a single variant. A product with four sizes is four offers, each with its own barcode and MPN, and the parent product is not an offer at all.

This matters more than it sounds. On a real catalogue we measured, 57% of products carried an MPN while 96% of its 5,934 SKUs did — because the MPN is stored on the variant. Judging that store by its products would have said the feed was half-covered when it was nearly complete.

So the report counts SKUs. A review belongs to the whole family — Evident records reviews against a product, never a single variant — and the feed carries each review against every one of that product’s SKUs.

Reading the coverage report

Reviews → Google Shopping shows what Evident knows about your catalogue.

Reviews that can be placed is the headline: of your approved reviews, how many point at a product carrying at least one usable identifier. Counted per review rather than per product, because one popular product with no barcode loses you more than fifty obscure ones.

Reviews on products you have stopped selling are excluded, and reported separately. They are real reviews, but they cannot appear — the product is not in your shopping feed either, so there is nothing for Google to attach them to.

Identifier coverage across your SKUs breaks it down by strength. Each SKU counts once, under the best key it has:

• GTIN — matches reliably. This is the row you want largest.
• Brand + MPN — matches when both are set and spelled as in your shopping feed.
• SKU only — matches only if your shopping feed sends that same SKU. Many do not.
• No identifier — these can never be placed.

Only products carrying an approved review are counted. A catalogue of four thousand products with reviews on five hundred is a five-hundred-product problem, and the report says so rather than alarming you with the bigger number.

Products to fix

Underneath the percentages is the list that actually saves you time: every reviewed product Google cannot place well, ordered by how many reviews ride on it.

That ordering is the useful part. A product with no identifier at all and one review matters less than a product with a SKU and twenty-four reviews, so the top of the list is always where your effort pays back most. Each row tells you what it has today, what to add, and — for a variant family — how many of its SKUs are already covered.

In one store we looked at, the whole blocker was eleven empty MPN fields. That is ten minutes of typing, not a project. Without the list it looks like a platform problem; with it, it is a to-do.

When the numbers refresh

Identifiers are read from your store during a product sync, which runs once a night. It also runs when you first connect a store, and whenever you ask for it.

So if you fill in barcodes in BigCommerce or Shopify this afternoon, the coverage report will reflect them tomorrow. If you would rather not wait, trigger a sync yourself and re-read the report straight away.

The report always shows when your catalogue was last read, and warns you if that was more than a month ago — which should no longer happen, but is worth knowing rather than guessing. Treat an old date as “these numbers describe my catalogue as it was then”, not as a verdict on your data.

A store that was connected before nightly syncs existed may show an old date until its first overnight run.

Your SKU total may fall after that first run, and that is the number getting more accurate rather than less. A variant you deleted on your platform used to be left behind in Evident as a live SKU, which padded the total the percentages are measured against and so understated your coverage. Those are now retired on each sync, and your coverage figures should rise accordingly.

Improving coverage

Coverage is a property of your store’s catalogue, not of Evident, so the fix is in your platform:

• BigCommerce holds barcodes in the product’s UPC/EAN and MPN fields, and brand as a separate record. Evident reads all three.
• Shopify holds the barcode on the variant, and the brand in the product’s Vendor field. Evident reads the first variant’s barcode and SKU up to the product.

Work the Products to fix list from the top rather than going through your whole catalogue. Fill the identifiers in on the variant, not the parent product, since that is what Google reads. The report picks them up after that night’s sync, or immediately if you run one yourself.

Setting up the feed

On the Google Shopping screen under Reviews, choose Create feed URL. That gives you a private address for your feed. It is built fresh from your approved reviews each time Google fetches it, so there is nothing to export or upload, and nothing to re-run after you approve more reviews.

Then, in Merchant Center:

1. Make sure product ratings are switched on for your account.
2. Add a product reviews data source, and set it to fetch from a URL on a schedule.
3. Paste the feed URL.

Google reviews a new feed before any stars appear, which usually takes a few weeks.

What goes in it

Every approved review on a product you still sell. Each review is listed against every SKU of the product it was written for, carrying whatever that SKU has: barcode, brand, MPN and SKU.

Three kinds of review are left out, and the screen tells you how many of each:

• Reviews on products you no longer sell. Those products are not in your shopping feed either, so there is nothing for the review to attach to.
• Reviews on products with no page URL. Google’s format requires one.
• Reviews syndicated from another store. Those belong to the store they were written for.

Evident also tells Google how each review was collected, because Google’s policies ask for it. A review that earned the customer a coupon or loyalty points is marked as incentivized. A review written in reply to a review request is marked as collected after fulfilment. For reviews imported from another platform, Evident has no record of how they were gathered, so it leaves both fields out rather than guess.

The feed never carries a reviewer’s email address, or anything derived from it. Reviewers appear under the name they gave, or as “Anonymous” if they gave none.

Changing or switching off the URL

New URL issues a fresh address and retires the old one immediately, for example if the old one has been shared somewhere it should not have been. Paste the new one into Merchant Center straight away, or Google’s next fetch fails. Switch off removes the feed entirely.

Changing either needs an owner or admin.

Which plans include it

Every plan, including a trial. The feed stops being served if the subscription for that store is cancelled or expires, or if the account is closed: Merchant Center gets a “not found” at its next fetch, and Google then stops showing the ratings. A subscription with a failed payment that is still being retried keeps its feed. Reactivate the subscription and the same URL works again — there is nothing to re-paste.

What Evident does not do for you

Evident does not create your Merchant Center account, and does not connect the feed for you. The steps above are yours to take in Merchant Center. Google’s product reviews programme also requires at least 50 reviews across the account before it will look at a feed at all; the report tells you whether you are over that line.

Google asks that reviews are not dropped from a feed once they are in it, and that a feed refreshes at least monthly. Evident’s feed is rebuilt on every fetch, and a review leaves it only when you unpublish it or stop selling its product.