Ratings and reviews reference guide

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Ratings and

reviews

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The information in this document:

• Is confidential and intended for Bazaarvoice clients. No part of this document may be shared with anyone outside your company or your company-partners without prior approval from Bazaarvoice.

• Is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.

• Is periodically updated to be in sync with the improvements and/or changes in our product offers.

• May be changed without notice. Some examples depicted herein are provided for illustration only and are not guarantees of a specific result. You bear the risk of using this document.

Bazaarvoice is not liable for any technical or typographical errors that might be inadvertently present in this document. Bazaarvoice might have patents and/or pending patent applications covering subject matter in this document. The furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, or legal rights to any other intellectual property in any Bazaarvoice service or product.

All Bazaarvoice brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of Bazaarvoice in the United States and may be protected as trademarks or registered trademarks in other countries. All other product, service, or company names mentioned here are claimed as trademarks and trade names by their respective companies.

Contact us:

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Toll-Free: (866) 522-9227 | Phone: (512) 551-6000 | Fax: (512) 551-6001

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Ratings and reviews

Let your customers do the selling. Customers love to talk. Capture their authentic conversations wherever they choose to talk — on your site, on your retailers’ site, and on social networks. Then take those online conversations and syndicate them into the purchase path at the right time and place to influence sales. Ratings and reviews from Bazaarvoice lets your customers share their honest feedback on your site directly in the purchase path. This feedback fuels consumer decision-making to drive sales, decrease product returns, and build trust in your brand.

Insights that you gain from ratings and reviews help you understand the manner in which your customers purchase products, the qualities that they value, and the degree to which your brand can fulfill their needs. This information provides the first step to revolutionizing your business through the voice of the customer.

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• Ensure posted content is authentic and adheres to your guidelines with human moderation

• Capture the casual computing audience with content optimized for mobile display

• Extend your global reach with multi-language implementations

See howratings and reviews helped Dell.com shoppers make purchase decisions.

Badges

Content-specific badges

Content-specific badges are based on the quality of the review. Some examples are the featured review badge, best answer badge, syndicated review badge, and verified purchaser badge.

Verified purchaser badge

Each customer who writes a review for a past purchase can now be badged with a verified purchaser badge. This badge identifies the customer as a verified purchaser of the product. The verified purchaser token can be added to any ssURL link wherever they appear. This might include an account history or a past purchases page or any other page or widget that shows users the products they have already bought. A verified purchaser badge can also be placed on a review written as part of a post-interaction email (PIE).

Benefits

Placing a verified purchaser badge on a review indicates that an actual purchaser of the product wrote the review. This badge increases the credibility of reviews by making it clear that they were written by product owners. If you offer sorting and filtering on reviews, other customers will be able to sort and filter content based on verified purchaser reviews.

Prerequisites

You must have an implementation of R&R with the option to request reviews enabled.

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How this works

1. Customer clicks on an ssURL to write a review. This could be on a past purchases or account history page.

2. Customer submits his/her review.

3. Review goes through the moderation process.

4. If approved by the moderation team, review is displayed on your site with a verified purchaser badge.

Bazaarvoice recommendation

Bazaarvoice recommends that the Verified Purchaser badging is used. This functionality is turned on by default. Users can choose to opt out of showing this badge on their content.

Contextual badges

Contextual badges are based on a reviewer’s answers to profile questions on the review-submission form, allowing customers to identify reviewers who are similar to themselves.

Custom staff and expert reviewer badges

In addition to the standard Staff and Expert badges, you can create custom Staff and Expert badges. For example, a bricks-and-mortar business might want a Store Associate staff badge for store employees, while an ecommerce business might want a Client.com Staff badge.

These custom badges are defined and styled by you and implemented by the Bazaarvoice Client Services team. They appear alongside reviews, questions, answers, and campaign content and can be managed when you log in.

Merit badges

Merit badges can be automatically assigned to consumers who consistently contribute useful content. An example of a merit badge is the Top 10 Contributor badge.

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Review badges

Review badges allow customers to quickly identify featured reviews as well as the reviewer’s affiliations and rank. The colors, text, icons, and definitions for these badges can be configured.

The following image shows some example badges.

By default, the badge name is displayed as a popup when the mouse pointer hovers over a reviewer’s name, as the following image shows.

Capture IP address of original content contributor

A first step in detecting content coming from a fraudulent source – such as a competitor's site or a disgruntled user submitting multiple pieces of repetitive content – is to capture the IP address of the original content contributor.

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The capture IP address feature lets you explicitly pass a user's IP address during the submission process. This feature covers the following content types:

• Reviews and comments on reviews

• Questions and answers

• Campaign content and comments on campaign submissions

• Helpfulness votes

• Reporting inappropriate content

To enable this feature, ensure that you have satisfied the following prerequisites:

• Capture the IP address of original content contributor

• Use the Bazaarvoice XML API

How it works

1. Customer submits content.

2. You capture the IP address of the customer.

3. You pass the IP address to Bazaarvoice along with content.

4. Bazaarvoice’s fraud-detection process determines whether the content originated from a fraudulent source.

5. Content fails moderation if content is found to be from a fraudulent source.

Configuration steps

Add auserip = x.x.x.xparameter to all submission requests like you currently do to specify an encrypted user ID.

Configuration options

Bazaarvoice accepts theuserIPparameter at all times. By default, the corresponding field on the XML submission

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Photo, video, product recommendations, and

Facebook sharing for comments

Comments can include a video, photos, or product recommendation. Videos can be either hosted or use video-sharing, such as YouTube or Google, as the following image shows.

The following options are also available:

• Submission through Facebook

• The appearance of a comment can be based on the comment contributor’s badge, such as highlighting a top contributors’ comments

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Configuration

Customer authentication

Customer authentication requires your customers to log in to your website before they can contribute site content. You can force customers to log in to your site before they complete any of the following tasks:

• Rating a product

• Writing a review

• Commenting on a review

• Casting a helpfulness vote

• Report inappropriate content

Best Practice

Bazaarvoice recommends enabling customer authentication.

If you choose not to implement customer authentication, we recommend that you capture your customers’ email addresses in theSubmissionform so that you can contact them if you need to help them resolve issues or if you require their participation in a focus group.

Value

Customer authentication provides the following benefits:

• Customers tend to leave higher-quality reviews

• Reduces the amount of spam and inappropriate content

• Limits reviews to one review per reviewer

• Allows you to track reviewers

• Allows you to contact reviewers to promote campaigns or sweepstakes

What Happens if I Do Not Implement This Feature?

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Character limits for submission

You can choose the length of text that can be entered by a customer who posts a review. You can set the minimum and maximum character limit for the following types of content:

• Title of a review

• Review text

• Comment on a review

• Reviewer profile

As customers type into a text box, a character counter displays the remaining number of available characters.

Best Practice

Bazaarvoice recommends that you implement the following character limits:

• Set the minimum number of characters for reviews to 50

• Set the minimum number of characters for titles, comments, and profiles to 30 Do not set minimum character limits for the following scenarios:

• Products with low price points

• Young customers who tend to leave key words such as Great! !, Must-have, Smells funny, and too cute! Bazaarvoice also recommends that you do not set a maximum number of characters.

Value

Character limits provide the following benefits:

• Lengthier reviews with richer content in the review text as well as the reviewer profile

• Search engine optimization (SEO) benefits increase with an increase in UGC

Character limits for display

Instead of displaying full-length reviews and comments, you can display only the first few lines of each review or comment followed by aRead morelink:

Best Practice

For travel, entertainment, and other industries that tend to attract lengthier submissions, Bazaarvoice recommends that you display only the first few lines of each review or comment followed by aRead morelink.

For industries that tend to receive shorter reviews, Bazaarvoice recommends that you display reviews and comments in their entireties.

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Value

Your customers receive the following benefits when you enable character limits for displaying reviews and comments:

• Quickly scan multiple reviews on the same page without extensive scrolling

• Preferentially select the content that they want to read in greater depth

Ratings and review feeds

Bazaarvoice provides the following data sets with ratings and reviews:

• Ratings-only export feed – Provides the following information for each product:

• Average rating

• Number of reviews

The ratings-only export feed is a comprehensive feed that sends historical as well as new UGC for each product. It is also known as the Top-Rated Products feed and the Product feed.

• Standard client feed – Provides information that you might want to display, such as the following examples:

• Review title

• Text

• Photos and videos

• Overall rating

• Reviewer location

The standard client feed also provides such private data as the moderation status and moderator codes. This feed is incremental - only new data acquired since the previous feed, is sent. If you prefer to receive the complete history of your review data in each feed, contact your Bazaarvoice Client Representative.

Best Practice

Bazaarvoice recommends implementing a ratings-only export feed.

Value

This feature provides value if you want to complete either of the following tasks:

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• Quarterly (pick the day of the month)

Multilingual support

Ratings and reviews can be implemented in more than 20 languages for clients with multilingual web sites. Each language is treated as a separate entity with separate reporting.

Display elements

Content search

Visitors to a product detail page (PDP) can sometimes encounter a large volume of content. A search box placed in a prominent area gives our users one more tool to help easily and quickly navigate to the UGC they seek. The content search feature adds a search box on a PDP for review content. A keyword typed in the search box triggers a full-text search of the following UGC:

• Review title

• Review text

• Tags (including pros and cons)

• Context data values

• Profile attributes

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The following image shows an example of the content search results for the keywords “efficient side loader”.

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3. User can clear the search field by clicking theClear search resultslink.

The scope of each search is limited to the set of published reviews associated with the product page from which the search is initiated.

Helpfulness voting

Customers can quickly indicate whether a review is helpful by clicking voting links that appear below the review text. This feature also enables customers to sort reviews based on their level of helpfulness, as rated by other customers. Helpfulness voting can be configured to allow anonymous voting or to require customers to log in to the site before voting.

The following image shows an example of helpfulness voting.

Product families

Product families allow you to create product associations and control whether content from associated products is displayed on a product page. If a product resides within a family, you can choose to display questions, answers, and reviews from other products in the family.

Product families are useful for addressing the following issues:

• If the UGC for a product of a particular color applies equally to all of the color variants, you can create a family that displays the relevant UGC for all of the product colors. For example, reviews of a red MP3 player can be displayed on the Product page of a blue MP3 player of the same make and model, provided the color of the MP3 player does not factor into the reviews.

• Some products, like a digital camera and a memory stick, are so closely related that the purchase of one item nearly always involves the purchase of the other item. For such bundled items, the UGC that is associated with one of them can be displayed on the Product page of the other item. For each product page, you can choose to display content associated with other products in a family or only with the product in question.

With product families, you can also specify the direction in which UGC is shared. For example, product families let you display reviews for a memory stick on a camera’s product page without forcing you to display reviews for the camera on the memory stick’s product page.

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Product families can be implemented through either of the following methods:

• Log in, clickManage Contentand thenFamily Management Toolto add, view, and manage your product families.

• In your product data feed, add an attributes section with a family identifier to each product entry that you want to include in a family. Specific families are declared within a separate element whose children elements contain the appropriate external identifier as well the value that identifies the family. Contact your Bazaarvoice Client Representative for additional details.

Profile snapshot

The profile snapshot provides a quick way for your customers to learn more about the author of a review simply by hovering their mouse pointers over the profile link. A profile snapshot can include the following information:

• Reviewer

• List of the reviewer’s recent reviews on other products

• Average rating assigned by the reviewer

• Reviewer’s helpfulness-voting statistics

• Reviewer’s badges

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Ratings and reviews summary

Bazaarvoice offers a summary section at the top of the review display that can include the aggregated values of the following: • Overall rating • Rating dimensions • Sliders • Tag clouds • User attributes

• Any other information available in the Rating Summary of each review The summary is not displayed when no approved reviews exist.

Filter reviews

Instead of displaying a lengthy list of reviews for a product, you can provide your customers with the ability to filter reviews based on their interests. Specifically, customers can use radio buttons or list boxes to select filtering options like the following examples:

• User attributes

Customers can filter reviews based on the characteristics of the reviewer. For example, customers can select reviews written by males or females, power shoppers or shopping novices, or customers from only their city.

• Overall rating

Customers can select reviews that contain a certain number of stars.

• Secondary rating dimensions, such as tags and rating dimensions

• Helpfulness voting

The following image shows an example of various review filters.

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Ratings snapshot

The primary objective of the ratings snapshot is to provide more detailed information than what is available in the ratings summary. This feature lets customers quickly identify reviews based on the number of stars that the associated product has received.

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A customer can view this snapshot of the ratings by hovering the mouse pointer over . The following image provides an example of a ratings snapshot.

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Review comments in profile

The comments that customers leave on reviews can appear within their profiles. When displayed, profiles include the related review for context, as the following image shows.

Review request

When customers contribute reviews, comments, questions, or answers on theThank Youpage, the review request feature presents them with a series of additional products that they are likely to be in a position to review. In this manner, the review request feature attempts to increase review volume by keeping customers engaged in the participation chain.

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The following image shows an example of a review request feature.

The algorithm that generates the list of products for a user to potentially review utilizes a variety of inputs, including the following examples:

• Products that the customer has recommended

• Products for which the customer has contributed any form of UGC other than reviews

• Products that were reviewed or found helpful by other customers who reviewed the product to which the currentThank Youpage belongs

• Products that are recommended in reviews, questions, or answers that are associated with the product to which the currentThank Youpage belongs

Bazaarvoice tracks the usage of the inputs to the algorithm that generates the highest number of reviews and constantly modifies this algorithm to determine the most efficient method of generating review volume. The review request feature does not display suggested products that a customer has already reviewed.

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Using review request with post-interaction email campaigns

Customers who place an order for multiple products can receive a single PIE that contains separate links for reviewing each product. After a customer clicks a link and starts the review-submission process, he or she might forget or neglect to return to the email and review the other products. To avoid this scenario, Bazaarvoice has created a simple way where customers can write reviews for multiple products within an order. You or your email service provider (ESP) can pass multiple products IDs into each PIE link. The Review Request Module uses these product IDs to display the products on the appropriateThank Youpage, as the following image shows.

This capability can be applied regardless of the party who is responsible for delivering the PIE, whether it be you, your ESP, or Bazaarvoice. However, the adjustment to the link syntax must be made by the responsible party. This adjustment is accomplished by attaching one or more suggested product query string parameters to the end of the simple submission URLs, as shown by the following example.

[SS URL…]&suggestedproduct=ProductExternalID1&suggestedproduct=ProductExternalID2

Outside of PIEs, this syntax can also be used in submission links that are placed elsewhere on your website, such as an order history page, and that are not injected by Bazaarvoice.

Sort reviews

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Summary histograms

Interactive histograms and pie charts are available for displaying the frequency distribution of the following values:

• Primary rating parameters

• Secondary ratings parameters

• Context data values

• Tags (Pros, Cons, and generic) The following image provides an example.

The charts in this example are interactive in the sense that customers can click multiple bars or pies to filter content by one or more values. Selected bars and pies are either checked or displayed in a configurable color.

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The following image shows an example of bars that are checked.

Customers can remove filters by clicking the appropriate bar, pie, or label an additional time.

Follow a product

Customers can follow a product by opting in to receive updates whenever new reviews, questions, and answers are submitted for that product. Following a product is an easy way for you to track customer conversations about your products and services without forcing you to check for updates. Similarly, they provide an easy way for your customers to track new information about a product and to make informed purchasing decisions.

When the option to follow a product is implemented, each product page includes a link that allows any site visitor to subscribe to updates, as the following image shows.

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A subscription page prompts visitors for their email addresses and lets them choose the types of alerts to receive. You can also provide visitors with a check box that lets them identify themselves as business owners, in which case the Business Owner tag is used to track their subscription metrics. The label that is associated with this check box is configurable, as shown by the following image.

The label and check box can be removed if you do not want to include them on your form.

Emails for followed products

An email is triggered whenever new content is published to product pages for followed products in ratings and reviews and question and answer. This email alert is sent to the subscribers for that product and indicates that new content has been published.

The email message includes the following information:

• Link to new content

• Link that allows subscribers to cancel their subscriptions, either to a single product or to all the products to which they are subscribed

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The following image shows an example email.

Helpfulness and inappropriate feedback

submission through API

Submission of helpfulness votes and inappropriate feedback can now be done through the API. The response for the user-generated content has also been updated to display the actual inappropriate feedback and total vote and feedback counts. In order for inappropriate feedback to be populated, the API key must be updated.

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Integrating ratings and reviews into email

campaigns

Leveraging the value of ratings and reviews in email campaigns is an increasingly common integration for Bazaarvoice clients. Email campaigns can be used to drive review volume, to prompt customers to return to your site, and to ultimately drive conversion.

The following types of campaigns provide examples of common email integrations:

• Post-interaction emails that are intended to solicit reviews

• Top-rated product promotional emails

Depending on the email campaign that you want to implement, an integration can require additional effort on the part of your site, third-party resources like email service providers (ESPs), or Bazaarvoice.

Integrating ratings and reviews with site navigation

Just as the star ratings display allows you to embed ratings and reviews content into product listings and site search results, such content can also be integrated with your site navigation. A common example involves creating an option to navigate by top-rated products. Bazaarvoice can provide you with a daily ratings-only export feed that contains the current overall rating for all products. Your site consumes and translates the feed into a navigable element on your site.

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The following image shows an example of ratings and reviews content that is integrated with a client’s site navigation.

Internationalization

The term internationalization refers to a suite of features designed for clients who have websites in multiple languages across multiple countries. Internationalization is sometimes abbreviated as i18n because 18 letters reside between the initial i and final n.

To enable the i18n suite of features, ensure that the following prerequisites are satisfied:

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• Microsite language switcher

• Locale sort priority

The following sections describe these features in more detail.

One Bazaarvoice account

With i18n, you can have a single, unified account from which you can use the locale filters to filter your reports and alerts, as the following image shows.

Content sharing

Content from all of your locales is now aggregated and shared on all of your sites for your customers to view. For example, a customer on your US site can read content on your Australian site.

The following content types can be shared between sites. For ratings and reviews:

• Reviews • Review comments • Profiles For campaigns: • Profiles Bazaarvoice Confidential 30

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• Campaign content

• Comments on campaign content For question and answer:

• Profiles

• Answers

• Questions

• Content that is specific to any other Bazaarvoice product to which you subscribe. Sharing content globally increases the following numbers:

• Overall UGC volume

• The total percentage of your products with at least one review, campaign item, question, or answer.

• The average number of reviews, campaign items, questions, or answers.

• SEO value for all sites

Note

With i18n, the Ratings Summary is based on the ratings for all of the locales that you choose to share on each site.

Client specified languages or locales per site

On each site that you support, you can display content from all your supported languages or merely a subset of those languages. For example, you might operate seven sites, each in a different language. However, you might want to display content in only three of these languages on your Canadian site. Visitors to the Canadian site can view content in only these three languages and do not have the option to view content from your other four sites. In this example, the Ratings Summary is based on ratings from the corresponding three sites.

Note

The Client Specified Languages or Locales per Site feature is not available with microsites. If you use microsites, contact your Bazaarvoice Client Representative to upgrade to SEO integtration.

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Language filter for customers

Customers can utilize a language filter to view content that is submitted in one or more languages and that you make available on each site. For example, if you display content in English, Spanish, and French on your US site, customers can choose one or more of these languages by using the language filter that is shown in the following image.

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Language filters for ratings and reviews

Although content from only the selected language is displayed, primary and secondary Ratings Summaries are based on ratings from all three languages. The summary section is recalculated to reflect the current filtered display, as the following image shows.

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Microsite language switcher

The Microsite Language Switcher is a filter that allows your customers to switch between the site’s default language and other languages that you support on the same site or on other sites.

This feature is available only for clients with microsites.

Locale sort priority

You can determine the sort priority for displaying locale-specific content on each of your sites. This priority applies only on initial page-load. After a customer applies the language filter, locale content is sorted in order that he or she chooses.

Best practices

Bazaarvoice recommends that you implement i18n to take advantage of content-sharing across your sites. If you have not already implemented SEO integration, we recommend that you contact your Bazaarvoice Client Representative to implement this feature.

Configuration options

Provide your Bazaarvoice Client Representative with the following information:

• The list of locales and languages from which you want to display content on each site

• Any customizations to indicate the source of the content, as follows:

• Identifying text, such as “This French review was originally collected from ourclient.ca site.”

• An image of the national flag of the locale

Media gallery

The Bazaarvoice media gallery aggregates all user-generated photos into a single customer-facing component. Customers can use this gallery to quickly view photos as well as the associated reviews and comments.

The media gallery can be displayed in either of the following locations:

• Product page in a section of your choice

• Existing, embedded Bazaarvoice display

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If you have purchased multiple Bazaarvoice products, the media gallery can be configured to display only photos for a particular product or to aggregate photos from all of the implemented products.

Media gallery display options:

The media gallery displays a thumbnail line that includes a subset of thumbnail images of the user-generated photos for a given product. The thumbnail line includes right and left arrows that can be used to navigate the available images within the line.

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The following image provides an example of the content and links that are displayed with a hero image.

Notifications

When customers contribute to your community, they want to know the degree to which their opinions and input impact the conversations on your website. Notifications keeps your customers updated on the results of their contributions.

For example, an email is sent to a customer whenever his or her question are answered. This turnkey solution lets your customers know that their participation makes a difference to you as well as to other consumers. Further, notification emails encourage customers to return to your site.

For more information, refer to Bazaarvoice's Notifications reference guide.

Passing contextual data values upon submission

Many of Bazaarvoice’s clients store customer-relevant data that is useful within the context of a review in their backend systems. This data can be included as part of the submission process.

For example, if a customer writes a review on a product that was purchased from your site, Bazaarvoice can display a contextual badge that indicates the reviewer is a verified purchaser of the product. This information is displayed to reviewers prior to submission, at which point they can decide whether to keep this information in their review or to remove it.

Personalization and relevance sorting

On average, consumers read seven reviews before making up their mind. Help consumers make better decisions faster. Automatically sort content by what is proven to engage them the most – as determined by helpfulness votes, recency, content length, and richness of media.

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Consumers want the full picture to help them make purchasing decisions, but they typically only read the first 7 to 10 reviews. If reviews are sorted by date, some of the most useful, relevant content is never read. Our goal is to serve up the most relevant content to consumers to help drive an informed purchase.

Our algorithm finds the best reviews by taking the following into account:

• Recency - While recency is not the only criteria that makes content useful, we do take it into account.

• Helpfulness - Was the content voted helpful by the user community?

• Media - Does the content include photos and videos?

• Length - Is the content long enough that it is likely to include helpful details?

• Personalization - Give reviews a boost if the reviewer profile matches the consumer's profile.

Example personalization and relevance sorting walkthrough

The following example shows how personalization and relevance sorting is different than sorting by date, and how personalization can be used to deliver the most helpful impressions to consumers.

Sorting by date

When a consumer arrives at a web site to read user-generated content, reviews are sorted by date with the most recent first. While recent reviews can be helpful, they might not be the most helpful. For example, the most recent reviews might be short and lacking in descriptive details. They might not include images or video, which we know are helpful to consumers. Also, all the reviews might be only positive. Negative reviews, at least the ones that contain useful details, provide important context and actually help consumers make good purchasing decisions. While the consumer could use theSort byfield to sort by review length or helpfulness votes, our research shows that a great majority of visitors do not take advantage of this feature. The result is that the seven to 10 most recent reviews might be the only criteria used to make a purchasing decision.

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The following image shows the top of a sample page where reviews have been sorted by date. The image has been cropped to show more detail, but you can see that the first top two reviews contain little detail and were voted unhelpful by other consumers.

Sorting by relevance

When a consumer arrives at a page where user-generated content is sorted by relevance, our proprietary sorting algorithm boosts reviews that:

• Contain more descriptive text (but not too much)

• Include photos or videos

• Have been voted helpful by other consumers

• Contain useful contrarian options, if any exist

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Personalizing UGC

Personalizing UGC means that consumers can choose to see content from other consumers who are the same age, gender, level of expertise, or other criteria. Personalization criteria are based on your site's review Quick Take summary. The following image shows a consumer using personalization to see reviews from other consumers who described themselves as "beginners."

After making the selection, the reviews from beginners are boosted. The interface makes selecting and clearing filter options intuitive.

Note

Boosting reviews based on a personalization selection is a new behavior. Before this release, selecting a

personalization option filtered out all reviews that did not meet the selected criteria. However, our research shows that consumers still want access to all content even after selecting a personalization option.

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• Badges

• Date of comment

• Comment text

The following image shows an example comment as it might appear on a landing page.

Conditional content submission

Conditional content submission allows you to solicit relevant, targeted, and accurate information about your customers’ experiences with a product.

Use this feature to complete the following tasks:

• Solicit information only from customers who have responded in a particular way to a question on the submission form.

For example, if you ask a customer “Do you suffer from dry skin?” Bazaarvoice can display a follow-up question or statement that depends on the response as follows:

• If a customer selectsNo, a follow-up question or statement is not necessary

• If a customer selectsYes, then you can ask “Is it only in winter?” with the answer options being “No, its year round” and “Yes, only in winter”

• Request follow-up information that is relevant and targeted to a customer’s response.

For example, an automobile manufacturer might want to solicit information about a customer’s experience with a feature that was available only during certain years for a particular model. In this example, the customer is presented with a request like: “Select the model and year of your vehicle”. If the customer selects the model and year during which the feature was available, a follow-up question about the feature appears.

• Tailor contextual data based upon the questions that a customer has answered previously.

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For example, a travel company might ask whether a trip that a customer has booked is for business or leisure. In this example, the customer is presented with a set of applicable contextual data values in a follow-up question that depends on the answer as follows:

• If a customer selectsLeisure, he or she can be asked to select from a list of options likeRomantic Getaway, Family Vacation, andSightseeing Tour

• If a customer selectsBusiness, he or she can be asked to select from a list of options likeVisiting Clients,

Conference, andTrade Show. The following rules typically apply:

• A contextual data value (CDV) can trigger different follow-up questions, either CDV or free-text, based on a customer’s response to the CDV.

• Conditional submission questions can trigger the display of one or more additional text boxes.

• Currently, Bazaarvoice offers only a single tier of conditional options. Consequently, we do not support the ability for a triggered, dependent question to also function as the parent of a follow-up question.

The following image shows an example of aPlease explaintext box that appears after a customer selectsNoin response to the question “At check-in, was everything as you expected?”

Best Practice

Bazaarvoice recommends implementing the conditional content submission feature if you have questions that are important, but not relevant to all reviewers.

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on the data from this question to make improvements in merchandising, product quality, customer service or other areas of the business, then the question should not be included.

Value

Customers not only learn how the product is used by other customers but can find reviews from people who are similar to them.

Custom text boxes

During review submission, Bazaarvoice can capture any customized content that is submitted through an editable text box, moderate it, and display it in reviews. Custom text boxes appear in a separate section of the submission form, below the section that includes the review text.

The following image shows an example of customizable text boxes as they might appear on a landing page.

Best Practice

Bazaarvoice recommends only asking questions on the review submission form if the answer to a question satisfies one of the following criteria:

• Customers learn how the reviewer used the product

• Customers have information about the type of person that is reviewing the product

• One or more departments within your company will use this information to improve product quality, make merchandizing/marketing decisions, or for some other purpose, even if the answer is not displayed on your website

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If the answer to these questions only gives a marginal or no additional substantial information to help customers make a purchase decision, and no department within the company is responsible for reporting and taking action on the data from this question to make improvements in merchandising, product quality, customer service or other areas of the business, then the question should not be included.

When deciding whether the additional questions should be free-text or context data values, consider whether the data from this question will be analyzed on the aggregate to drive business decisions. Text boxes encourage more creative responses, but are difficult to analyze for sentiment because customers use different words to describe similar experiences and ideas.

One question that universally provides a richer customer experience is asking reviewers for their location (i.e. city or state).

Value

Customers not only learn how the product is used by other customers but can find reviews from people who are similar to them or live in the same location as them.

Generic submission process for writing a review

Review submission now includes an option where end users select the desired product for which they want to submit a review. The step to select the product appears immediately before the end user starts entering their review.

Potential uses are as follows:

• Email campaigns

• Splash pages advertising ratings and reviews

• Social Networking sites

For both the simple submission URL format and the longer, form submission URL format, the product-selector step appears when the submission URL does not include a product ID. Review submissions that use this additional step can be configured either to require user authentication or to be submitted anonymously. Further, this feature can be used with a client’s existing submission container. No client-side changes are required.

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TheProduct Selectorpage includes options to search and browse the product category, as the following image shows.

As the user starts typing in in the search box, the search box grows vertically, listing up to 8 products by default. Product title and image are displayed by default; clients can choose to include a product ID.

Link to the submission form.

When a user selects the appropriate product, he or she is directed toward the standard review-submission process, starting with theReview Editpage.

Bazaarvoice plans to track the usage of this link to understand the demand for more advanced functionality that can assist users with their product searches.

Because the product selector relies on product- and category-specific information in the product catalog feed that clients send to Bazaarvoice as a part of the standard ratings and reviews implementation, the catalog feed data must be of high quality, especially in terms of images and the names of product and category names. Additionally, a client’s catalog must be indexed within Bazaarvoice systems as a requirement for the product selector to function appropriately. Bazaarvoice does not currently index the product catalog of every client as a part of the standard ratings and reviews implementation.

Related Links

Product pickeron page 48

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Net promoter scores

Net promoter scores allows customers to rate your company in addition to your product. By using a standardized, 10-point scale, the net promoter score is based on the number of reviewers who recommend your company versus the number of reviews who do no. Responses are not published on your site, but can be used internally to amplify the customer voice and drive improvements inside your company.

The following image shows an example net promoter scores as it might appear on the Submission page.

Best Practice

Bazaarvoice recommends implementing the net promoter score.

Value

The net promoter score helps drive internal improvements by, for instance, evaluating customer service by department or measuring brand loyalty.

Photos

Your customers can submit up to six images and captions per review. Images must be 5MB or smaller in size and be saved as one of the following formats:

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The following image shows an example of a photo display:

Images and captions are moderated by Bazaarvoice for appropriateness.

Best Practice

Bazaarvoice recommends implementing the photo reviews for most industries. This feature becomes especially relevant if you have products that can be styled (e.g. party supplies) where reviewers can show how they used or modified the product or where a reviewer’s personal style might add relevance to the review (e.g. apparel).

Value

Photo reviews create the following opportunities:

• Allow customers to express their experience in pictures

• Supplement written reviews with image reviews

• Help customers show other customers the real-life usage of products

• Adds a face and more personality to a review

• Leverage customer images as marketing collateral for proliferation in other online or offline channels

Product picker

Bazaarvoice’s Product Picker is used by to help contributors choose products to write about or recommend.

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Based on feedback from the ever-growing number of clients who have already implemented the product picker functionality, Bazaarvoice offers three configuration enhancements to make the product picker more flexible:

1. You can choose different configurations for each Bazaarvoice feature: ratings and reviews, question and answer, and campaigns.

For example, suppose you want to exclude perfume from your “Father’s Day” campaign. You can now configure the product picker to exclude the Perfume category. Meanwhile, your R&R and Q&A product picker still shows the full product catalog.

2. You can build “Generic Write a Review” links that limit the product picker to a particular category.

For example, if a travel agency wants to send out a generic “Write a Review” link in an email blast, they can limit the product picker to a particular category, such as Hotels, to drive volume in that particular category.

3. If you have product families, you can compel users to review individual items, rather than the family as a whole.

For example, if you sell gift baskets, a user clicking on the “Write a review” link from the gift-basket page will see only products that are part of the gift-basket family.

Related Links

Generic submission process for writing a reviewon page 45

Product recommendationson page 49

Product recommendations

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Customers select recommended products through a customized product-picker. The following image shows an example of product recommendations they might appear on theSubmissionpage. The user clicks the plus icon to select products to recommend.

Best Practice

Bazaarvoice highly recommends implementing product recommendations if you have a large number of products that are related. Work with your Bazaarvoice Client Representative to determine the most appropriate wording, for example “What goes well with this outfit?”, to encourage reviewers to contribute.

Bazaarvoice does not recommend product recommendations if you have a limited product catalog or your products are mutually exclusive.

Value

The product recommendation feature creates additional cross-sell opportunities and provides valuable insights about the relationships between products.

Related Links

Product pickeron page 48

Add product recommendations in client response

You can recommend one or more products in your response to customer reviews by selecting the appropriate products from the product-selection interface in your Bazaarvoice account. Your response contains the name and

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image with a link to the landing page for each product that you recommend. This display is similar to the manner in which product recommendations are displayed in a review or comment.

The following image shows an example response with product recommendations.

Product sliders

Product sliders allow customers to rate products on a continuum instead of a numeric rank. The following conditions apply to product sliders:

• Sliders are built on a scale from 1 to 7, with 4 representing the neutral point of the scale

• The default display is based on a 49-point scale

• A selection is identified only when a slider is actually moved

• As the slider is moved over each point within the scale, the related selection is highlighted to the right of the associated slider

• Sliders are not required, but you can choose a configuration that makes them required

• Sliders are customizable at a root category level

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The following image shows a pair of example product sliders as they might appear on a landing page.

Best Practice

Bazaarvoice recommends that you implement product sliders if you are in the apparel business because customers prefer to evaluate shoes, shirts, and dresses with descriptions like Runs narrow, Fits right, or Runs wide.

Product sliders address this preference by allowing customers to rate products on a continuum instead of with numeric rank.

Bazaarvoice recommends implementing the Slider Quick Take Summary for all product sliders.

Value

Product sliders supplement overall ratings by providing a richer rating level for a product.

Rating dimensions

Rating dimensions present a more comprehensive way for customers to rate a product. In addition to assigning overall ratings, customers can rate the different categories or dimensions that are associated with a product. For example, customers who want to provide an overall rating for a home hardware product can also rate the product’s appearance, workmanship, ease of assembly, and value.

The following conditions apply to rating dimensions:

• All product categories must contain the overall rating.

• You can define rating dimensions globally across all products or by product category.

• You can make rating dimensions required or optional.

• You can display rating dimensions in the rating summary section of your product pages.

• Rating dimensions must be defined at the root level category unless you send Bazaarvoice an XML product feed, in which case you can define rating dimensions at any level in the taxonomy.

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The following image shows example rating dimensions as they might appear on a submission form.

The following image shows example rating dimensions as they might appear on a landing page.

Best Practice

Rating dimensions, TagShare, and sliders provide different ways to capture ratings, and different features work most ideally for different business models. As a result, Bazaarvoice recommends implementing just one of these features for a product. Presenting all three to your customers might overwhelm them.

Implement rating dimensions when the attribute in question is best described on a relative, value-based scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is the most negative value and 5 is the most positive value.

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Terms & Conditions check box

You can choose to display the Terms & Conditions (T&C) check box on either the submission-edit page or the submission-preview page. By default, the T&C check box appears on the edit page of the review and

review-comments submission forms. Contributors must select the check box before they can proceed to the preview page.

Videos

Your customers can use the following methods to add video content to their reviews:

• Directly upload video files along with their review

• Videos are hosted by Bazaarvoice and displayed with a non-branded video player either in a modal window or embedded directly within the review.

• Link to existing YouTube videos

Regardless of which option is enabled, all video content is moderated by the Bazaarvoice Content Moderation team before it is posted to your website.

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The following image shows an example video as it might appear on a landing page.

Best Practice

Bazaarvoice recommends implementing the video review feature especially if you have a product that lends itself to a dynamic display or requires how-to instructions. Some examples are apparel, outdoor equipment and do-it-yourself projects.

We find video reviews to be most effective when customers are passionate and of a younger demographic.

Value

Video Reviews create the following opportunities:

• Allow customers to express their experience in a real-time video

• Help customers show other customers the real-life usage of products

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Reviewer profile

Reviewer profile fields

Reviewer profile fields are questions that you can ask your customers during the review-submission process. These questions are intended to gather data that is specific to the reviewer, not the product.

Reviewer profile fields possess the following characteristics:

• You can define them globally across all products or by category

• You must define them at the root level category unless you send Bazaarvoice an XML Product feed, in which case you can define reviewer profile fields at any level in the taxonomy

• You can automatically populate answers to repeat questions for returning customers

• You do not need to display customer content that is collected in reviewer profile fields if the information is intended for internal use only

• You can use contextual badges only if you implement the reviewer profile fields feature

• You can capture responses to reviewer profile fields by using radio buttons or list boxes

• You can customize the location at which reviewer profile responses are displayed

For example, you might want to ask customers, “How often do you shop at CompanyXYZ.com?” so that other customers can view the answer next to the review, as the following example shows.

“I bought this and was so impressed when I opened the box. This has some real weight to it and a great finish. I’m very impressed. Great deal for the price!”

How often do you shop at CompanyXYZ.com? Weekly.

Standard reviewer profile content

The standard implementation of Bazaarvoice profiles includes the following content areas:

• User name

• Badges

• Share profile links

• User statistics

• User-generated content

For more information, refer to the Bazaarvoice Profiles reference guide.

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Best Practice

Bazaarvoice recommends implementing the Reviewer Profile feature with the following guidelines:

• Limit the number of profile questions to three

• Determine questions that are relevant to the customer

• Let reviewers know that they should not use their first and last name

• When a review is posted before the reviewer nickname has been approved, the nickname should read “pending” instead of anonymous to avoid confusion

• Display review content and contributor statistics on the reviewer profile

SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, boosts your site's rankings in search engines like Google and Bing. Reviews, questions, answers, and other forms of customer-written content are the best and most efficient way to increase the freshness of your website. Our SEO solution easily integrates into your website in the places where freshness matters most.

Improving content richness and freshness typically result in a noteworthy increase in search traffic. Although the process of forecasting the precise change in traffic for a particular site depends on numerous factors within an overall SEO strategy, client case studies show a 17 to 200 percent increase in traffic when UGC is exposed to search engine crawlers like Googlebot. Every Bazaarvoice Conversations implementation includes our industry-leading SEO integration.

See these case studies to learn about the dramatic impact of SEO:

• 17% increase in OpenTable's natural search

• Evans Cycles increases product page search traffic by 23%

Social network integration

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The following image shows an example of social bookmarking.

Publish to Facebook

Prompt contributors to share content while they are in the submission process on their Facebook pages. An abbreviated section of this content appears in the news-feed section of the appropriate Facebook page, drawing friends to your site for more information.

Contributors have the option to publish to Facebook on the following pages:

• Submission page

• Preview page

• Thank you page

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Content published to Facebook appears in a Facebook user’s newsfeed, as the following image shows.

By appearing in a newsfeed, reviews, questions and answers, and campaign content can draw a customer’s friends to your site.

With social buttons, after the content is live on the site, anyone can share it to Facebook. As this user flow is not typical for a contributor, the effectiveness is limited to the number of contributors who return to view the content they submitted.

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The following image shows a potential flow path to share content on Facebook. With this option, thePreview

page can feature aPublish this <content> to Facebookcheck box. After clickingSubmit, users are taken through the steps to connect to Facebook and share their content.

Similarly, the following image shows an alternate way to share content on Facebook. With this option, instead of prompting the user on thePreviewpage, we can prompt the user to share to Facebook on theThank Youpage.

The following aspects of sharing content on Facebook can be customized to meet your specific views and policies about sharing content.

• The point at which a customer is prompted to share content can be as follows:

• Aggressive approach – Customers can check a check box on the Preview page to share to Facebook.

• Passive approach – Customers can be prompted on the Thank You page to share to Facebook. Bazaarvoice Confidential

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• The time at which content is posted to Facebook can be one of the following:

• Immediately – Upon granting approval, the feed content can be posted immediately to Facebook.

• Post-moderation – Even though the customer’s friends are the only people who have access to the content, you might not want to post it to Facebook until after it has been moderated. This approach provides another way to protect your brand, even if it might not meet the expectations of some of your customers.

• The content that is posted to Facebook. Bazaarvoice provides significant flexibility concerning the content that you want to post to Facebook as part of the feed content. For example, if you want to post immediately but are concerned about your brand, you can elect to display a sanitized version that contains only the following information:

• Product about which the customer submitted content

• Star rating if applicable

• Links to the product

A default post to Facebook contains the following information:

• Title of review, question, answer or campaign submission

• Review stars if applicable

• Content of review, question, answer or campaign submission

• Product image

• Pros and cons

• Links to the product and the related content

Best practice

Bazaarvoice recommends the following:

• Display the option to share content on Facebook on both thePreviewandThank Youpages

• Post content immediately upon submission with star rating, link to product, and product image

Value

Sharing content on Facebook is an easy way to amplify the impact of UGC that was created on your site to the most popular global social networking site, Facebook.

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Benefits

Recommending products and categories to family and friends on the Google network draws more visitors back to your site.

Prerequisites

• You must be able to send a high-quality, recent XML product feed with category or product page URLs.

• We recommended you set up Google Webmaster Tools for analytics

How this works

1. User clicks the Google +1 button next to their favorite product.

The Google authentication window appears if the user is not already logged into their Google account (e.g., Gmail, Google Docs, Google Plus, Google Voice).

2. User logs in using their Google-account credentials

The Google +1 button on the product page turns blue. If there are other Google +1 buttons on the same page, they will remain the same and turn blue only when the page is refreshed.

3. The user’s profile page displays the products the user +1’d.

4. For users signed into their Google account, a Google search for this product will show:

• +1 annotations from their Google connections

• Aggregate count of +1 annotations from everyone who +1’d this product

For more information, visit the official Google +1 site:http://www.google.com/+1/button/

Limitations

• Google +1 is not supported by all browsers. A list of supported browsers is available on this Google page:

http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1151309

• Google +1 is controlled by Google. Bazaarvoice cannot guarantee any SLAs/uptime of the feature or make any behavior changes to the feature.

Twitter

Tweet icon

All new client implementations that include the twitter sharing functionality, will get twitter’s official “Tweet” button.

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Twitter count

Counters for the twitter button will be off by default. Clients can choose from the following configuration options:

• Tweet button with a vertical counter

• Tweet button with a horizontal counter

• Tweet button without a counter

Languages supported by the Tweet button

Check the twitter page for the latest list ofsupported languages.

Facebook Like

At a high level, theFacebook Likebutton enables customers to make connections with your site and to share content with their friends on Facebook with one click.

Bazaarvoice supports the following configuration options for Facebook Like:

• Product level – Callout appears near the ratings summary or above the set of reviews

• Individual review level – Every review features its own, separateFacebook Likebutton

Although some flexibility exists regarding the placement of theFacebook Likebutton, it typically resides next to the other social buttons as shown in the following image.

Ratings and reviews reference guide

Ratings and

reviews

Contact us:

Contents

Ratings and reviews

Badges

Content-specific badges

Verified purchaser badge

Benefits

Prerequisites

How this works

Bazaarvoice recommendation

Contextual badges

Custom staff and expert reviewer badges

Merit badges

Review badges

Capture IP address of original content contributor

How it works

Configuration steps

Configuration options

Photo, video, product recommendations, and

Facebook sharing for comments

Configuration

Customer authentication

Character limits for submission

Character limits for display

Ratings and review feeds

Multilingual support

Display elements

Content search

Helpfulness voting

Product families

Profile snapshot

Ratings and reviews summary

Filter reviews

Tag clouds

Ratings snapshot

Review comments in profile

Review request

Using review request with post-interaction email campaigns

Sort reviews

Summary histograms

Follow a product

Emails for followed products

Helpfulness and inappropriate feedback

submission through API

Integrating ratings and reviews into email

campaigns

Integrating ratings and reviews with site navigation

Internationalization

One Bazaarvoice account

Content sharing

Client specified languages or locales per site

Language filter for customers

Microsite language switcher

Locale sort priority

Best practices

Configuration options

Media gallery

Notifications

Passing contextual data values upon submission

Personalization and relevance sorting

Example personalization and relevance sorting walkthrough

Conditional content submission

Custom text boxes

Generic submission process for writing a review

Net promoter scores

Photos

Product picker

Product recommendations

Add product recommendations in client response

Product sliders

Rating dimensions

Tags

Terms & Conditions check box

Videos

Reviewer profile

Reviewer profile fields

Standard reviewer profile content