Place Action Policies
In order to ensure a consistent user experience when interacting with Place Action links, partners must adhere to the following guidelines:
- Place Action links must lead to a dedicated landing page for the event. The links must not lead to the partner's homepage or any other pages.
- Partners must abide by the Actions Center's Support & maintenance guidelines.
Landing Page Requirements
- The event the user selected on Google should be simple to identify when the user lands on a partner's site.
- The landing page should prominently display performer details (artist/team/group name) and venue location details (venue name or address). This information should correspond with the data provided in the feed.
- The price of the event should be easy to identify and adhere to the price policies.
- A user should land on a page where it's straightforward to navigate to purchase the event ticket. Partners should maintain a consistent presentation of the event and pricing the user selected, and a clear path to booking the product found on Google.
- The first step of the deep linked landing page cannot be a login or payment wall, where users cannot continue to complete their booking unless they sign in, create an account or provide payment information.
- The landing page may provide one or more hyperlinks to a static web page or overlay popup that provides additional details about the performers or the venue. In such cases, the information should be statically available when navigating to the web page or opening the overlay popup, without performing any asynchronous data retrieval requests. This allows Google to validate the content without issuing an excessive number of requests to the partner's website.
Primary, verified resale and resale tickets
Each event in the feed must be designated as either primary, verified resale or resale. Based on these designations, partners may receive a specific UI treatment, e.g. in the form of an "official seller" badge.
For a ticket to be designated as primary inventory, the partner must have a direct contract with the event organizer (promoter, venue, sports team, etc.) to sell tickets for the given event. They must offer the initial release of tickets at face value, as authorized by the event organizer.
For a ticket to be designated as verified resale, the partner must have systems in place to authenticate the ticket, ensuring they are real and not counterfeits. This will usually be in the form of a direct integration with the primary ticket seller.
All other resale tickets should be marked as resale. Partners that do not themselves facilitate the sale of tickets, such as aggregators, should mark their inventory as unspecified.
Pricing Policies
The Google policy for prices exists to ensure a good end-to-end experience for users engaging with your prices on Google. Google requires that you maintain a consistent and discernible presentation of the ticket price the user selected on Google's site, and a reasonable booking flow in order to ensure a positive user referral experience.
The ticket price for the event shown on the landing page should be prominently displayed and it should be the same as the ticket price displayed on Google.
Prices should accurately represent the cost of service for a single adult.
The price that's sent to Google should include the lowest ticketed price and all corresponding fees. Base price, and fees are separated into individual fields in the Events integration feed.
In jurisdictions where sales taxes are commonly only calculated at the end of the check-out flow, e.g. in the United States, taxes do not need to be included in the price sent via the feed.
Price Accuracy Crawling
To ensure compliance with the price policy, Google will regularly validate the price the user is presented with when landing on the partner's site and navigating through to the final booking page. This validation may be done with a combination of automated tools and manual processes. Automated systems such as price accuracy crawlers allow us to do broad and frequent checks, while more complex cases are reviewed and evaluated by trained human operators.
Price accuracy crawling process:
The crawler only fetches the resources that are required to get the information we are interested in (price and event details).
Google will send no more than 5,000 queries per day to test data quality.
Price Violations
Google checks partners' prices and websites for violations of the pricing policy. Inaccuracies will negatively impact product placement and participation in Google Events. This may result in listings not being displayed, or for serious issues, a partner being suspended from the platform.