Supplying strong ID data for your product ratings is critical to ensure they get attributed to the correct product in your catalogue.   

How do Google match products?

To give yourself the best opportunity for star ratings to appear alongside your products in your Google Shopping Ads you need to understand how Google match up your products.

Your review data from a Product Ratings feed is matched to your products based on several factors, the strongest of which being globally unique product identifiers such as Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs).

If no GTIN data is available, Google will attempt to match a review using other metadata such as:

  • SKU
  • Brand + Manufacturer Part Number (MPN) pairs
  • Product URLs

These alternatives don’t always offer the best match however, and could cause issues to occur, which is why GTINs are preferred.

How can I supply strong ID data to Feefo?

There are several ways to supply this information to Feefo:

Recommended option

  • Set up a connection between your Feefo and Google Merchant Centre accounts

Alternative options

  • Provide the product GTIN along with each transaction in your sales data:
    1. If you send data via a sales file
    2. If you send data via our Entersaleremotely API
  • Upload a manual product catalogue to your Feefo account, providing a list of your product SKUs and their corresponding GTINs

If your Feefo account spans multiple language domains we recommend supplying the GTIN data via your transactional feed, alternatively please contact Feefo Support for further guidance.

All of the above methods also support a Manufacturer Part Number (MPN) if your products do not have a GTIN, but please note that Google emphasise that this option does not guarantee as reliable a match.

Adding the product GTIN etc to the sales data is the only way that multi language customers can provide this if it is all from one website URL, so that they can ensure the right product description and URL match to the right language.

It is a standard, which means it represents an agreed industry-wide format for expressing something, in this case the number that identifies an item. Please be aware that a GTIN is allocated centrally by the organisation GS1, cannot be arbitrarily assigned and are strictly numeric. 

The inclusion of gtin or mpn and brand in your sales data or product catalogues will be required in future releases. Maximum character length is 14 characters (see below for the different formats). Mainly used by retail merchants selling branded products to ensure accurate matching of Feefo reviews to products when submitting to Google’s product rating programme.  gtin is not used for unbranded products or for those that do not have a GTIN; use mpn and brand instead. 

Usage is as follows:

File type
TXT/CSV file field name

XML field name (case sensitive)

Required/Optional

Default value

Sales file
gtin
gtin
Optional (but recommended if known to support future releases)

None

Product catalogue
gtin
N/A
Optional (but recommended if known to support future releases)
None

Supported values are:

UPC (in North America/GTIN-12) 

  • 12-digit number e.g. 323456789012.
  • 8-digit UPC-E codes should be converted to 12-digit codes.

EAN (in Europe/GTIN-13)

  • 13-digit number e.g. 3001234567892.

JAN (in Japan/GTIN-13)

  • 8 or 13-digit number e.g. 49123456 or 4901234567894.

ISBN (for books)

  • 10 or 13-digit number e.g. 1455582344 or 978-1455582341 (exclude any hyphens). If you have both, only include the 13-digit number. ISBN-10 are deprecated and should be converted to ISBN-13. 

ITF-14 (for multipacks/GTIN-14)

  • 14-digit number like 10856435001702.

Schema.org property

  • Product.isbn
  • Product.gtin8
  • Product.gtin12
  • Product.gtin13
  • Product.gtin14