As insights technology continues to innovate, retailers have no shortage of analytics to glean from the UGC collected across their e-commerce site. Data from UGC can tell you how consumers feel about different your products and brands, which products are performing best, and which products are in need of improvement.

UGC program insights

From product review coverage to overall customer sentiment, these are the five types of insights retailers should consider regularly monitoring through analysis of their UGC program data. And that’s irregardless of whether you’re a Bazaarvoice client or not.

1. Measure the conversion impact of UGC on your site

Your UGC program data should be able to show you exactly how it’s impacting your bottom line and what types of UGC increases conversion rates. 

You want to be able to identify key UGC drivers on your product detail pages (PDPs). You’ll gain valuable insights when you can monitor how shoppers engage with UGC and identify how it affects sales on your e-commerce platform. For example, across the Bazaarvoice Network, we found a 136% lift in conversion rate when shoppers interact with UGC on best-in-class sites.

By measuring shoppers engagement with different UGC, you’ll discover the difference between:

• How customers convert when there’s no content
• When there’s content but they didn’t actively engage with content
• If they passively or actively engaged with content

If you’re a Bazaarvoice client, you can keep close tabs on this UGC program data with the Conversion Impact Report. This report allows you to easily monitor how shoppers engage with UGC and identify how that affects sales on your e-commerce platform.

2. Evaluate product coverage

Evaluate product coverage to see where you can improve your PDPs by seeing which pages lack adequate review coverage. By regularly identifying products with high page views but low review volume, you can better understand popularity and gaps.

You want the content that performs well — which UGC does — to be in as many places as possible. Especially where you know you customers will see it. 

Bazaarvoice clients can easily track the percentage of products or page views with at least one review, regardless of whether the review came in via native, sampling, syndication, or product families, and view a list of popular products with few reviews or a list of products with high page views and low review volume.

3. Track at the brand/product/category level

As a retailer, it’s important for you to know what brands are performing well and which are underperforming. By tracking UGC program insights at the brand, product, and category levels, you can quickly identify areas of opportunity and prioritize accordingly. 

Bazaarvoice clients have access to Product Performance Insights, which allows you to easily view products, brands, or categories that have a low average rating. And with a vendor scorecard, you can take those insights and score brands or products for performance with average rating, review volume, and percent of questions answered.

You can then send the scorecard to your brands to show them what they need to do to improve sales. 

4. Understand customer sentiment

Discover how shoppers really feel about your products to improve your products and/or messaging by leveraging UGC program data to identify areas of praise and complaint. An ideal customer sentiment insights strategy should analyze the lowlights and highlights, revealing what customers love and hate about products.

It should also have the capabilities to extract notable quotes in reviews that will level up your marketing strategy. Nestle Canada noticed a stream of negative customer reviews about a product. Noticing the insights provided, the team changed the recipe and the average rating increased from 1.7 to 4 stars. 

With Bazaarvoice, clients can easily access customer sentiment insights to identify Products with Lowlights/Highlights and Products with Notable Marketing Quotes. This helps you quickly identify what your customers are saying about the products you sell — especially beneficial for your private label items.

5. Track performance

On top of analyzing insights at a micro-level, make sure you’re monitoring insights from a birds eye view. Keep tabs on content collection and overall UGC program performance. A successful UGC program should have insights that allows retailers to monitor broad trends and review volume holistically. 

Retailers should also monitor the performance of post-interaction review request emails asking for reviews and track unexpected changes. For example, you should know quickly if volume drops drastically month-over-month, so you could adjust your strategy accordingly. 

Bazaarvoice clients can seamlessly monitor the performance of their review request emails with the Email Engagement Dashboard, as well as broad trends and review volume with the Program Overview and Inbound Syndication Dashboard.

Start your UGC program audit now

By monitoring these five insights, you can easily keep your finger on the pulse of the health of your business and see how your UGC program is helping your business grow. 

If you’re a Bazaarvoice client, jump down to our UGC audit masterclass to take your UGC program to the next level. If you’re not a Bazaarvoice client, you can learn more about our Insights and Reports tools here.

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But actually, they’re arguably the most valuable tools we offer brands and retailers. We’re here to show you why.

Consumers actively seek out advice to guide their decision-making for purchases great and small but aren’t necessarily keen to trust a brand’s own content or advertising. What they do trust, however, are other consumers’ opinions. Bazaarvoice ROI benchmark data shows that when consumers engage with any user-generated content (UGC), like written reviews or customer imagery, there’s a 144% increase in conversion.

A brand can say they’re “authentic,” but only true mutual engagement tells that story. UGC delivers unfiltered insights directly from the source. Asking your customers for their feedback and input is critical, but listening to what they’re proactively telling you will offer a reality check of what’s working and what isn’t.

But what to do with all of that raw data? We have three use cases that illustrate how Bazaarvoice’s Insights and Reports tools can help product marketing managers train their focus on the most effective UGC metrics for tracking their brand’s e-commerce performance.

Fine-tune your customer feedback loops

The product detail page is a make-or-break moment for an e-commerce brand. In our downloadable guide to using customer insights (2021), we point out that shoppers said reviews are what’s most important to them on a product page, followed by product descriptions and imagery. In fact, 92% of consumers said they think online reviews are just as trustworthy as personal recommendations from friends. Reviews reinforce the idea of social proof — since many people chose to take a certain action, it must be the correct one.

For product marketing managers, the number of reviews for each product and determining which products need more review coverage will be top-of-mind considerations for analyzing how each product detail page is performing. Bazaarvoice analyzes data for clients (using machine learning in the case of Premium Network Insights) then surfaces that information for the client to take action on.

This helps marketers pinpoint pages with too few reviews or uncover opportunities to deliver more value by integrating visual UGC sourced from social media.

For insulated water bottle brand Takeya, using Bazaarvoice’s AI tools led them to display reviews for all of their products on both their own and partner sites, like Target.com, leading to a measurable increase in sales via both platforms. The brand used both Insights and Reports and Galleries analytics to achieve different ends.

Direct-to-consumer cycling gear brand Le Col uses reviews not only to build social proof of their brand’s quality but also to help customers find the right product fit. Andrew Longley, Le Col’s head of digital, notes that “post-purchase sizing was one of our biggest reasons for seeing customer returns. Our review implementation has helped us get on top of this issue.”

Marketers and UX designers can consider that each element on the product detail page is its own customer touchpoint, from the product description and the gallery of images to the social proof of ratings and reviews. And each of these touchpoints offers the potential for mining rich insights that can help improve the user experience and increase conversion.

Share social media content that converts

Reviews are a powerful form of customer feedback, but social media provides a window into how a brand actually fits into our day-to-day lives. Seeing how an outfit looks on a customer who actually bought it or how a sofa fits in someone’s living room lets the customer relate to the product and picture it in their own world.

The availability of photos from previous shoppers — not influencers — is important when making online purchasing decisions. Fashion shoppers, in particular, seek guidance in their decision-making to close the gap between online and offline shopping and the ability to compare and try on items firsthand.

In the past two years, e-commerce fashion brands and marketplaces have experienced explosive growth. According to a Shopify fashion industry roundup, “in the US alone, the apparel and accessory industries accounted for 29.5% of all ecommerce sales in 2021. In Europe, it’s expected that by 2025, each consumer will spend $999 on fashion-related items over the course of a year.”

With shoppers six times more likely to purchase an item if the product page contains images from social media, unquestionably, we’re just beginning to crest the wave of social commerce — the ability to make purchases directly from social media.

American clothing brand Tuckernuck uses Bazaarvoice’s gallery modules across a number of high-traffic pages to integrate social UGC directly into their website, including a full-page #tuckernucking gallery to highlight Instagram tagged content. As a result, the brand has seen a 140% lift in conversion rate, a 164% increase in time on site, and a higher average order value.

Pro tip: Tuckernuck also leverages Bazaarvoice’s social analytics tools (which aren’t part of Insights and Reports but actually are part of our Social Commerce portal) to zoom in on the details of how their social content is driving conversions. These tools combine computer vision and AI to learn which content is engaging their customers and when to post it, and the value of each impression in terms of revenue.

Tuckernuck is able to clearly identify which content drives the most traffic from social to the site and get real-time metrics on product interactions to help continually optimize their content strategy.

In the future, marketers will see the increased prominence of behavioral analytics, opening up whole new pathways for understanding customers. Today, the rise of AI-powered analytics tools is leading to more curated and tailored user experiences based on taste, preference, usage patterns, and personality traits.

Convert negative feedback into positive action

Sentiment analysis reveals insights into customers’ feelings, opinions, and attitudes toward a brand. It’s generally measured on a spectrum between positive and negative, but as analysis tools grow in sophistication, they can also extract emotional states like anger, frustration, or joy. 

Additionally, sentiment analysis can indicate customer purchase intent and level of interest. Marketers can decide to tune into holistic brand analysis or focus on specific products and services to help identify trends and surface insights, such as:

• Whether your brand reputation corresponds with a particular customer sentiment?
• How customers feel about your products, based on reviews
• If customer sentiment has shifted recently for products

Within a month of hitting the shelves, customers reacted strongly to Nestlé Canada’s newly formulated recipe for one of their iced tea products. Negative reviews and customer complaints poured through the brand’s feedback channels, and in a short amount of time, sales dropped.

Customer reviews and questions provide the Nestlé team with an in-depth look into the minds of their customers, directly informing brand strategy.

We surface opportunities in our coverage area and our consumer sentiment analysis provides direct feedback on what your clients love about your products or where you may need to make tweaks.

Amy Degner, Product Marketing Manager, Bazaarvoice

AI and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms are continuously evolving to develop a nuanced vocabulary that expresses a range of emotions and perspectives. Bazaarvoice platforms can help to render this analysis in real time, because we refresh sentiment weekly. Meaning, it’s easier to align every department on customer behavior and pain points and to respond with both short- and long-term actions to retain customers.

Leverage Bazaarvoice Insights and Reports tools for a competitive edge

Product marketers, or really anyone managing a product, know they need to triangulate customer data from multiple sources for the most effective e-commerce reporting. Bazaarvoice’s Insights and Reports tools roll all of that rich information into a single, customizable dashboard view that helps you track performance and refine tactics at scale.

Looking at the volume and distribution of reviews helps to even out marketing program efforts and refine the most effective approaches for collecting and harnessing customer feedback. Gathering UGC from social media generates real-life social proof that helps brands communicate authentically and tell compelling and resonant brand stories. Addressing negative sentiments head-on not only advances product and experience development but also builds customer trust and loyalty through transparency.

Bazaarvoice’s Insights and Reports arm you with the data that prepares your team for growth and shows your retail partners that you’re putting in the work it takes to turn browsers into buyers.

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