You just paid to have some expensive, or even free (but you paid programmers) to install product reviews on your website(s). Great idea! You know product reviews have value. Duh. But how to track a return on your investment? Product reviews are a “conversion enhancer” and have lots of other benefits of increasing the effectiveness and customer retention of your site. Trying to get an ROI out of it can be a lot like trying to get the flour out of cookies after you baked them. Even if the cookies are delicious.
So, the question is: Is having product reviews getting you more cookies (yes, I’m going to keep running with this)? I’ve tried to approach this several ways. Of course, it often depends on what your needs are (or those requested from your supervisor). Need to track this back to a P&L response? List out the tangibles and intangibles? Some other objective? Hard, but not impossible. Below are a number of ways to track an ROI, with some detail on how to really get started (not just a direction).
P&L Effect with Product Reviews
Method 1: Track customer acquisition. Most product review services like Bazaarvoice or Power Reviews have some kind of SEO page that gets submitted to the search engines (even if just by Google’s SiteMap XML). So, when a customer searches “Review for Product XYZ”, a page that is just dedicated to reviews of that product – your page, comes up. Now, if you have analytics attached you can tell how many sessions that is nabbing you. You should also be able to scrub that against other paid campaigns (ie – Omniture’s External Campaign tracking) to see if there is a net benefit: Revenue, Orders, or Leads. Don’t discount “assists” in this, that this helped get a customer, even though they came back via search or some other campaign.
Method 2: Track Conversion Differences. This is tricky and may require a complex analytics package like Omniture SiteCatalyst, Webtrends, etc. I’ll explain it in Omniture terms, as it’s the system I know. What you should be able to do is find out a list of products you know that have reviews: call this Test Group. Next, you need the inverse (or called ‘none’ in Omniture reports) which are all other products that do not have reviews: Control Group. Now, if you know you’ve done something recently to burst, increase or cause the number of reviews you’ve gotten to spike, this is an ideal measuring point. If you don’t have this you could take the time before your product reviews were live. So – you have your two groupings of products, and two time sections (before the “burst” and after – or before reviews and after).
In Omniture you can use SAINT and Classifications to group your Test group products. The basis for this is to create a group that “eventually has a review” vs “those that never had a review”. Now – trend them over time, to include a group of time (slice by month preferably). You want at least 3 or more data points for each time period.
Now, if you’ve done all the classifying you can run your product classification report to see what your results are. You will want to use a calculated metric to see what your conversion rate is. I choose [Product Views / Orders]. Product Views, as you see the product review on the product page. Orders because that’s the point!
What I did here was to take the data points of each line, for each time period: Before and After. Take the average conversion rates of those time periods. Is there a differences of those averages from the Before vs the After? Was there growth or shrink? If you had growth – You haz more cookies! If less, maybe you had a lot of negative reviews? Did you have no change? Maybe the reviews weren’t being easily found or advertised.
If you do have a growth number (congrats!), then you can tie this back to a P&L effect. The X% growth means that is growth on those products with reviews that you would not have had if you did not have product reviews. Now, just do a conversion rate comparison to the After time period, on products that had reviews. Reduce the conversion rate by your X%. Apply your segment’s numbers for Average Order Value to both conversion rates. Now you have Revenue with reviews and without reviews = P&L effect! Apply that to the costs of your program and you have a ROI analysis.
Method 3: Marketing Emails
While you can “season” your entire website with product review ratings, don’t be afraid to use them as the prime message in a marketing effort. People love opinion, discussion and feedback. As retailers we can get very price focused because the customer’s appear to only react to price (free shipping, sales, coupon codes, etc).
Try a marketing email with nothing more than products with ratings that include snippets of comments and short stories. Direct links to other product review content can enrich it even more, if your review system supports pictures or video. I’ve seen these emails do about the same sort of performance as an email with a good coupon code or sale. This means margin you’d be spending on a coupon now goes right to the return of your program costs. Of course, you usually need some reviews before doing this, but you don’t need too many to get started!
Method 4: Other Trackable Ideas
These are some ideas that I’d personally like to follow up on, but have not yet done the work. Reduced Returns – If you have a good internal reporting system, you might be able to correlate a product having a review on it (based on the date it went live) against a change in return rates for those items vs those that never had a review. Call Center, Reduced Calls – If you have the ability to track when a call center rep looks at a product (usually this is only when a customer asks them to), then correltate products that have reviews to those that do not have reviews. I don’t think this is valid, as I’ve personally taken calls where a customer asks a question specifically about a review. I mention it as I’ve seen it stated as a reason in other “best practices for ROI”.
These are the best methods I’ve been able to see for getting a good idea, and actionable means for getting an ROI into a presentation for your execs. Maybe even a case study.
You KNOW that product reviews are a great value. Your customers know. Now prove it and show your company that your idea to implement product reviews brought the company $X in money and that they should give you a big raise and bonus. Or maybe a share of the cookie jar 
.
Tags: omniture, product reviews, ROI, tracking
