By introducing Review Extensions, Google are helping their advertisers improve their click-through-rates by showing a small snippet of a customer review within the ad, lending more authority, and encouraging users to trust the brand.

This increased click-through-rate thus results in more people landing on your website, which therefore increases the number of conversions that can potentially be generated. So they are a very powerful and much welcomed addition by Google.

They sound great. They look great. But do the results stack up?
At Jellyfish we are continuingly testing all Google’s latest innovations. Most work very well. But from time to time we also find that the latest ‘must-test’ Google Beta can actually have a negative impact on generating subscriptions from the campaigns we run so we always test before rolling them out.

In theory, Review Extensions should return more positive results, but in practice what do the results look like?

Let’s take a look:

With the above example we can see that with Review Extensions the click-through-rate has increased, and most importantly the conversion rate has also increased (by a sizeable amount) so the number of subscriptions generated is far higher by a far greater % than would be expected from the ad that had a much higher number of impressions. This is a great example of Review Extensions working to their full potential. More users are clicking through to the site, with a greater trust in the brand, leading to more subscription conversions. A win-win situation.

Here’s another set of results: