Social Proofing, in Webtrends Optimize, refers specifically to taking a real-time aggregate count of behaviour, and surfacing back into the user experience.

For example, taking a count of all Views that each Product ID is getting in the past 24hrs, and surfacing this back as a tooltip/badge saying "50 people saw this product today".

We typically see it's uses come under two categories.

First, there's security. If a brand or particular product isn't very well known and so doesn't have a trusted reputation, showing a real count of how much attention and how many transactions are flowing through it can provide vital reassurance to others. Safety in numbers, "I'm not alone", that kind of feeling.

The second is urgency. If you're selling a resource which is both scarce and popular, such as clothing on a FMCG site, limited-edition drops of beauty products, cinema/theatre tickets, flights, etc. - they can run out quickly and users should understand the risk of not being able to attend if they don't act.

For these type of goods in particular, we see Social Proofing be incredibly effective at driving same-session purchases.

Unlike Recommendations, there are no prerequisites for Social Proofing. We can typically operate with data scraped off the front-end of a website.

However, if this information is not available, such as the brand name of products purchased, we would need to work out how to get our hands on this data. It could be:

Please make sure that any attributes you wish to aggregate are present on all pages where the behaviour is to be captured. Beyond that, the website is ready to run Social Proofing.

There is preparation work required for Social Proofing, namely the capture of the data you wish to collect.

We do not currently do this by default, as the data needs to reside in a real-time database that we configure for you.

Details of how data should be sent into this service are available in the Social Proofing - API spec document.