Social Proofing has the potential to act as an influential marketing tactic to help customers make a purchase or complete an action based on what other users have been doing.
For example; social proofing allows you to show messaging to customers to help reassure current users that other customers have also been reviewing or purchasing the same product (aka great minds think alike). This then helps to encourage/reconfirm to customers that your brand and product or service has some like-ability and trustworthiness.
So now you know a little more about what Social Proofing is; here are the initial steps to get started:
Building a Database
We reccomend using our Social Proofing API to store and retrieve your social proofing data for ease of use.
Advantages:
Built to store the data against Unique Visitor Session IDs
No need to setup a database
Timely event aggregation
Personalised read API
We can also help you with setup
Read more about the Social Proofing - API spec
However if you decide to build your own here is what you will need:
Unique Visitor ID
You may already have unique customer identifiers that you can use, or you could assign random cookies to each customer.
Database
You will need to be able to save and retrieve the collected data from a database
Typical data that would need to be saved would be:
Unique customer Identifier
Product sku / ID
Events - e.g. view, add_to_cart, purchase
Database Unique Id (auto generated)
Example data table:
Unique User Identifier | SKU/Product ID | Event | Auto Generated ID (from the database) |
12346 | SKU 890 | view | 001 |
12347 | SKU890 | view | 002 |
12348 | SKU890 | view | 003 |
12349 | SKU890 | view | 004 |
Design and Messaging
Design and Styling: Consider the design and styling, if you are a managed service client, we can help and recommend what this should look like on your site and where it should be placed.
Messaging examples:
Within the last 24 hours x amount of people also viewed this product
Within the last 2 hours X amount of people purchased this product.
Building your Webtrends Experience
When building a social proof test this can be done within the Webtrends Optimize platform either by using the Visual Editor or using the Advanced Editor. Whether you opt to use the Visual Editor or the Advanced Editor both will have to be code-based.
When building your test you will need to use javascript to:
Retrieve the aggregated events for a specific product
Display the relevant messaging