The Importance of Reviews in Your Google AdWords Strategy
In our last article, Online Reviews: The Golden Key to a Solid SEO Strategy, we dove into how reviews can impact your Google SEO investment to increase your appearance in consumer searches. Reviews will also impact the ROI of your Google Adwords campaigns, and so it's important to understand how reviews come into play for advertisers before you commit to a substantial pay-per-click budget.
First and foremost, your reviews impact your Google Seller Score, specifically, it is your average rating that counts here. Google Seller Ratings showcase advertisers with high ratings (must be above 3.5 stars) aggregated by Google from reputable business review sources. This should be seen as a base requirement, and the good news for dealers is that the vast majority are above this threshold. A point to keep in mind is that better seller ratings display higher in search results reaping the benefits of building a strong reputation.
Better seller ratings also have higher conversion rates, which can influence the ROI of your AdWords spend. Google states Seller Ratings can boost your text ads' CTR by up to 10%, which can make a big difference to any company battling with their competitors on Google ads.
Looking past seller ratings, we can see in a study by Brightlocal (below) how your average review score on Google impacts your click-through rate. You can see that a 5-star dealer can expect to get 24% more clicks than a 3-star dealer.
The obvious benefit is that you get more clicks to your website, but ad campaigns that get a higher click-through rate get a higher quality score from Google and are thus rewarded with a lower cost per click. The bottom line here is that a 4.5-star dealer can spend significantly less to get the same amount of clicks that a 3.5-star dealer would get, and why would anyone purposely want to spend more for the same end benefit?
On a side note, if you have recently invested in separating your Google Service and Parts pages, and a primary focus now is to generate more calls, driving directions, and web clicks, then it's important to know that Google has a new ad format which allows a dealer to promote their GMB listing and their reviews in map search results (the map pack) to drive these actions from your Google My Business page specifically.
The final point here is to reiterate what was said in the beginning and that dealers need to stop thinking of review counts and average ratings solely as a measure of customer service, but instead that your reviews, specifically on Google, are a basic building block to a successful advertising and SEO strategy, and so an integral part of your marketing program.