Integration health
A healthy technical integration enables you to successfully use your Bazaarvoice products and services. As a result, you drive higher customer satisfaction and achieve more value from your program.
Bazaarvoice evaluates and informs you about the general health of your integration to ensure your ongoing program runs as smoothly as possible. Bazaarvoice gauges health for several key integration components, including:
The following table shows how Bazaarvoice classifies scores for each integration component.
| Health Component | Healthy:
Products work as expected |
Marginal:
Products are partially functional |
Unhealthy:
Products do not work as expected |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product catalog | 80-100 | 70-79 | 0-69 |
| Tracking and analytics | 90-100 | 80-89 |
0-79 |
| Authenticity | 90-100 | 80-89 | 0-79 |
| Overall | 86-100 | 75-85 | 0-74 |
Bazaarvoice then averages the scores for each integration component to derive your overall integration health score.
Product catalog health score
A fully developed product catalog is critical to gaining full value from your Bazaarvoice integration. The product catalog acts as a translator between retailers and brands, which often use disparate identifiers to describe the same product. By correlating product data, the catalog enables key features of your integration, including syndication, review requests (formerly post-interaction email or PIE), and reporting dashboards.
Learn more: Why is the product catalog important?
Bazaarvoice evaluates the product catalog feed you send us. Bazaarvoice then calculates your score by determining how many of the listed products include all of the required data elements.
How should you score?
Bazaarvoice uses the following scale to rate the health of your product catalog:
- 90-100: Very healthy
- 80-89: Healthy
- 70-79: Unhealthy
- Below 70: Very unhealthy
Data elements needed for a healthy product catalog
The following table lists the data elements required for a healthy product catalog score.
| Product Feed (XML) | Why is this important? | Which products and services are impacted? |
|---|---|---|
| Brand | Matching | Connections, reporting, syndication |
| GTIN (EAN, UPC, ISBN, GTIN-14) | Matching—GTINs are the primary data element used to match products Note: The product catalog supports GTINs up to 13 characters. Bazaarvoice does not enforce length or numerical constraints on GTINs. Values are validated during the catalog import process, however, and only valid values are stored. |
Connections, syndication |
| Vendor ID | Ratings & Reviews Collect-Distribute and Connections sign-ups | Ratings & Reviews Collect-Distribute, Connections |
| Image URL | Matching—Powers images in Workbench | Connections, moderation, reporting, syndication, Workbench |
| Category | Reporting | Connections, moderation, reporting, syndication, Workbench |
| Product name | Matching | Connections, moderation, reporting, syndication, Workbench |
| Product URL | Moderation and matching | Connections, moderation, reporting, syndication, Workbench |
| Description | Matching | Connections, syndication |
| MPN (Manufacturer Part Number) | Matching—MPNs are used if the product catalog does not include GTINs | Connections, syndication |
Verifying your score
To find out how you score, contact Bazaarvoice Support online or by live chat.
Improving your score
To improve your product catalog health score, you can:
- Direct your technical team to the Ratings & Reviews knowledge base, which offers detailed steps and troubleshooting information to help you to identify and address issues. Bazaarvoice recommends you begin with the Product catalog topic.
- Open a case or chat with Bazaarvoice Support who can work with your technical team to identify and resolve issues.
- If your technical team is busy with other projects, or if you need more help, contact the Bazaarvoice Services team. Depending on the scope of work needed, this may involve a services fee.
Tracking and analytics health score
BV Pixel is key to measuring the business impact of user-generated content (UGC). It tracks user behavior to reveal important insights about the value and impact of your UGC program.
To determine your tracking and analytics health score, Bazaarvoice evaluates the data collected on these pages:
- Product page
If you’re using the Bazaarvoice hosted display (Ratings & Reviews), product page data is collected automatically. If you host your own display powered by the Bazaarvoice API, product page data is collected by the BV Pixel. - Order thank-you page
Whether using the Bazaarvoice hosted display or hosting your own display, data from the order thank-you page is collected by the BV Pixel.
The following table details the data elements and weighing factors that combine to make a good tracking score. The Match weighting factor combines ratings from SKU and Pageview.
| Pixel | PDP | Match |
|---|---|---|
| Total | Pageview | ProductIDMatch (SKU + Pageview) |
| Currency | InView | |
| SKU | ViewedUGC | |
| Price | Impression | |
| Quantity |
How should you score?
Bazaarvoice uses the following scale to rate your analytics coverage through desktop and mobile applications:
- 90-100: Healthy. Fully configured and all data fields are operating as expected. ROI reports, such as the Conversion Impact report, will have a high level of confidence.
- 80-89: Unhealthy. The data that Bazaarvoice is receiving has issues. ROI reports, such as the Conversion Impact report, will have a lowered level of confidence.
- 0-79: Very Unhealthy. The data that Bazaarvoice is receiving has major problems. ROI reports, such as the Conversion Impact report, will have a low level of confidence.
Verifying your score
To find out how you score, contact Bazaarvoice Support online or by live chat.
Improving your score
Common issues that contribute to low scores include:
-
Not firing the BV Pixel on all pages that display ratings and reviews, questions and answers, or other UGC.
Note: This issue occurs only if you're hosting your own display and using the API or a feed to get content, rather than the Bazaarvoice hosted display products (Ratings & Reviews or Ratings & Reviews legacy (PRR)). -
Lazy loading
product display page (PDP) contents, preventing the Page View event from firing when the page loads. -
Firing the show_reviews or show_questions call more than once on each PDP, which causes the InView and ViewedCGC events not to fire.
To improve your tracking and analytics health score, you can:
- Direct your technical team to the Ratings & Reviews knowledge base, which offers detailed steps and troubleshooting information to help you to identify and address issues. Bazaarvoice recommends you begin with the BV Pixel implementation topic.
- Open a case or chat with Bazaarvoice Support who can work with your technical team to identify and resolve issues.
- If your technical team is busy with other projects, or if you need more help, contact the Bazaarvoice Services team. Depending on the scope of work needed, this may involve a services fee.
Authenticity health score
Bazaarvoice is committed to honest, authentic review content. Bazaarvoice works to protect you and your consumers by ensuring that the Bazaarvoice Network continues to display UGC free of spam and fraud.
Bazaarvoice uses special authenticity code—among other tools—to identify and filter fraudulent reviews. Without this safeguard, you risk losing your consumers’ trust due to spam or the insertion of:
- Fraudulent, positive reviews that drive up the average rating for a product. These might be created by suppliers or employees in an effort to increase sales. Regardless, they hurt consumers’ confidence in reviews and other UGC.
- Fraudulent, negative reviews that drag down the average rating for your products. These might come from your or your suppliers’ competitors, intent on damaging your sales.
How should you score?
Your authenticity score is based on the percentage of submitted UGC that includes required Bazaarvoice authenticity data, comprising:
- Device fingerprint
- IP address of the reviewer
Using a simple example, if you receive 100 reviews each day, and only 25 of those reviews include the authenticity data, your authenticity score would be 25.
Improving your score
You must ensure that you’re passing Bazaarvoice the authenticity data on all of your submission forms, including:
- Web
- Mobile web
- iOS native app
- Android native app
You can choose from the following two approaches.
Option 1: Use the Bazaarvoice hosted submission form
When you use the hosted submission form, authenticity data is gathered automatically. As an added benefit, any innovations Bazaarvoice makes for content collection are enabled automatically.
To use the hosted submission form, you must add Bazaarvoice code into <div> tags on your submission page. Read Submission forms for details about implementing the hosted submission form.
Option 2: Add the authenticity code to your submission form
If you use the Bazaarvoice API, you must make changes to your submission forms for reviews, questions, answers, and comments to ensure you correctly pass the authenticity data. Bazaarvoice can supply you a code package to do this. It will automatically collect the device fingerprint. Additionally, you will need to provide the reviewer’s IP address.
