Google AdWords will no longer show Review Extensions come mid-January 2018, which means they may have already stopped showing by the time you’re reading this. However, this isn’t really the big deal it may seem because Review Extensions were hard to get approved from the beginning.
For those who don’t know, a Review Extension was a type of Ad Extension, an additional piece of information about your business that would show up as part of your ad to provide potential customer’s more information about your business. Other examples of Ad Extensions are Call Extensions, which allow customers to click on your ad to call you directly, Sitelinks, which direct customers to specific pages of your website, and Offer Extensions, which allow an advertiser to put a link to a coupon that users can print or save to show in store.
The problem with Review extensions was that Google found it difficult to verify on third-party sites whether a review was legitimate or not. Toward the end of its Review extensions’ lifetime, Google wasn’t even approving reviews that came from the Better Business Bureau’s website. In its place, Google suggests using callouts, sitelinks, and structured snippet extensions, which simply provide a customer with more information about a company’s products and/or services.
Because Google is completely removing Review Extensions as an AdWords feature, anyone with information they want to save needs to download that information from AdWords. Otherwise, it will be deleted and all that information will be lost.
The removal of Review Extensions may affect some businesses, but, for the most part, nothing changes for the majority of companies. The fact that Review Extensions rarely appeared in search results means that it’s not a feature most people used enough to miss once it’s gone. As for Google users, if they are looking for reviews, they will continue doing what they always have and look at Yelp or Google My Business reviews.
