Google users will soon see consumer reviews and product ratings placed inside Google AdWords as yet another slice of the search engine's "experimentation" is revealed.
Announced at a conference earlier this week and later on the Google Merchant Blog, Product Reviews Program is a scheme to throw reviews inside existing AdSense copy for products.
Here is an example from the eyewear sector:
Users see a short message outlining what is the product's "rating". Clicking through on the link will take users to a page with full product reviews.
Google has kicked off the scheme with the help of Bazaarvoice, a provider of user review systems to some of the biggest retail brands on the web including - from the travel sector - Thomas Cook, Norwegian Cruise Line, SpaFinder and eDreams.
Information from their respective review systems will only be included if they agree to participate.
There is a strange paradox to this scheme from the advertiser's perspective:
- To be involved may lay open, for example, a company's hotel property to an aggregated review, which might be less than favourable.
- Including reviews underneath ad copy, however, could make the message more dynamic and increase the chance of a user clicking through.
Certainly from the hotel sector's perspective it would be intriguing to hear the reaction if TripAdvisor agreed to be a review partner with Google, effectively throwing an aggregated ranking for each it its 450,000 hotels in the database into Google AdSense.
In the wider picture of Google-related news this week - namely the Google-ITA Software takeover rumour - this latest piece of functionality is not a show-stopper.
It is, however, another example of what Google is slowly but surely doing to ramp up the information it provides when users carry out a simple search.
Pic credit: Rimmkaufman.com