By Kat Matfield
Once you understand the social commerce benefits that reviews offer, the importance of having reviews across your entire product range is obvious. Why keep the conversion uplift, traffic boost, SEO benefits and other advantages restricted to just your top products?
So review breadth is a no-brainer. But what about review depth? Is there a ‘magic number’ of reviews that give the maximum benefit, after which extra reviews don’t make a significant difference?
We’re insatiably curious about questions like this and, fortunately, we’ve got Europe’s most comprehensive social commerce database to help us find an answer.
After analysing the data, we’ve come to a surprising conclusion: there is no magic number. The benefits continue to grow as the number of reviews increases.
The dozen review trap
What interests us most in this graph is the plateau around 10 to 30 reviews, which translate to between 3.0% and 3.3% conversion . If your review collection is delivering only a handful of reviews, it would be easy to assume you were already seeing the maximum benefit of reviews with 10 or 20 reviews per product. Why should you change your strategy if it’s already delivering the best conversion uplift available?
Stuck on this plateau, you’d never realise you were missing out on the full potential of reviews – and a 40% boost to your maximum conversion rate. So don't get complacent and always push for more reviews.
How do you go about getting getting all these reviews? Get proactive. Linda Bustos introduces the basic principles over at Get Elastic, or you could look at the chapter on review depth in our social commerce ebook.
Why review depth is important
The impact of review depth (having enough reviews for each of your products) on conversion is clear from the graph above. But why should it have such a huge impact?
Trust: a score of 9.5 out of 10 based on 6 reviews is innately less convincing that the same score based on 60. If you're not offering enough reviews for users to trust the ratings, they'll go elsewhere to find them. Once they've left, you've lost those sales.
Granularity: A large number of reviews allows you to segment your review content so you can show more relevant content to your customers. 200 reviews will let customers browse a range of opinions from people like them, increasing their confidence and your conversion rate.
SEO: The SEO benefit of reviews is down to the keyword-rich, natural language content they provide on your site. A handful of reviews won’t make a huge difference, but with a dozen or two dozen or more, you’ll really differentiate your site from your competitors in the eyes of search engines.
Find out more about the benefits of getting plenty of reviews across your whole range - and how to get them - in our free social commerce ebook.