Last week, Google announced the launch of a new product extension called, Seller Extension Rating on Google AdWords.

This new feature will make it easier for users to identify highly-rated merchants on Google. These star ratings, aggregated from review sites all around the web, allow people to find merchants that are highly recommended by other online shoppers.

How does this work?

Seller rating extensions attract the star rating of the merchant from Google product search to the AdWords ads. If a merchant’s online store is rated in Google Product Search, and they have on average 4 stars or more (Google will not promote poorly related merchants) and at least 30 reviews, they will automatically get seller ratings showing on their ads.

It’s a free service, and comes at no additional cost to the advertiser, who will only be charged if someone clicks on the headline of the ad – clicks on the review link are free.

These star ratings allow users to find highly recommended merchants by the reviews of online shoppers. This means that it will only show those merchants who have 30 or more ratings. These seller extension ratings are available in English language searches on Google.com and Google.co.uk.

What does this mean?

For Users: A nice addition from Google that will help users find reputable products when searching on Google.

For Merchants: I expect Merchants will be rewarded with higher CTR on their PPC ad’s as well as an increase in their overall brand reputation for delivering quality services and products.

At Net Media Planet we are supporting our clients by promoting their services through Google Product Search and managing the process of uploading their data feeds to Google. We are currently waiting for review stars to go live in Google AdWords, but we will be interested to see how these reseller stars effect ad performance and we’ll report back with our findings soon.