The ultimate guide for showing reviews and ratings in Catalog Ads

What's the best way to create trust between your company and users who see your ad?

You could offer guarantees or highlight that you care about quality, but nothing speaks louder than the voice of your previous customers.

According to a report by Bizrate Insights, 32% of consumers say that a high review score or rating plays the most important part in their decision to make a purchase. This is higher than offering free shipping (only 24%), and even than coupons or discounts (22% of respondents).

The lower price levels you have compared to competitors, the better showing Social Proof will typically perform.

Affordable shops see a +72% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing Social proof
Mid-end shops see a +32% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing Social Proof
High-end/ Luxury shops see a +10% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing Social Proof

This means that honest positive reviews are more likely to help convert users than all your marketing texts and ad copies combined.

Here's how showing social proof on average influence Catalog Ads:

Return On Ad Spend

+31%

Cost Per Purchase

-1%

Click Through Rate

-22%

Cost Per Click

+19%

Conversion Rate

+46%

Usage

11%

Online reviews and ratings are the modern-day equivalent of word-of-mouth marketing, which is the single most trustworthy source of information in the eyes of buyers. Even if users don't know or trust your brand too much, they surely trust other users similar to them.

And looking at our dataset, Catalog Ads showcasing some form of social proof reach, on average, 31% higher ROAS!

Having a history of satisfied customers makes your brand more trustworthy and lowers the perceived risk of buying. That's why 79% of consumers specifically look for shops with existing product reviews.

After all, if your past customers all had a positive experience shopping with you, chances are it'll be the same for your future buyers.

We also found the following when showing social proof:

1% lower Cost per action
19% higher Cost per click
46% higher on-site Conversion rate
22% lower Click-through rate

Different ways to show reviews

Fundamentally, there's two options when adding reviews to your creatives.

You can either include reviews focused on your shop overall (for example Trustpilot), or product ratings.

Overall brand reviews help customers decide IF they should buy from you, while product reviews provide product-specific ratings to decide WHAT they should buy.

Shop reviews

Let's start with the easiest option of them all - adding the overall shop reviews to your designs.

Since the reviews are pertaining to your brand, rather than individual items, it doesn't have to change from one product to another.

That means it can be as simple as adding an image of your Trustpilot badge, which literally takes just 3 clicks in Confect.

Alternatively, if you don't use Trustpilot, or don't want to add the badge to your creative, you could also simply use text, as this advertiser did.

One way or another, shop reviews help you establish yourself as a trustworthy retailer, known for providing an exceptional experience.

Product rating

The second option is showing product-specific ratings you've gathered on your webshop.

In some cases, product reviews are more relevant that shop reviews.

If we take this example, Bog&idé is already really well-known and recognised in Denmark - they already have plenty of trust from consumers. That's why it is more important to show that other customers have enjoyed a specific book.

This option is a bit more complicated to implement as it needs to be dynamic and change from one item to another. However, it's still relatively straight forward.

First, you'll need to push this information from your website into your product feed, adding a new product attribute field for these ratings.

Once this data is available in your feed, it's as simple as creating a product asset to show the correct number of stars. Read about product assets here.

Alternatively, it's also possible to simply use text (i.e. "Rating: X/100").

Review highlight

And lastly, you could choose to only highlight a single review from a happy customer.

This one is great because it allows you to communicate your unique selling propositions without sounding salesy, using the testimony of a buyer.

Which do you think is more trustworthy? You saying "The widest selection", or a customer saying "Wow, such a wide selection"? (spoiler: it's number 2)

Especially customers who don't know you or your products find a lot of trust in your social proof - the earlier in your marketing funnel customers are, the more effective Social Proof is.

Top-funnel ads see a +58% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing Social Proof
Bottom-funnel ads see a +35% improvement in Return on Ad Spend when showing Social Proof

Adding a sentence or two of your customers' opinions can take up a lot of space though, so it's best to either keep the reviews short, or not add too many other elements to not overwhelm the visual.

To do this, you'll first need to hand pick the best reviews.

Then you can choose to either add them manually as text (so all products show the same review), or add a different review to each product in your feed (so different products have unique testimonies).

Then, a simple text layer is used to display these reviews.