Note: Display 3 documentation is provided as a courtesy for clients on this legacy version of PowerReviews. It is no longer supported. We recommend contacting your Account Manager to discuss upgrading to our newer Display 4.1 version as soon as possible.
About Reviewer and Answer Badging
Reviewer and Answer badging is the process of recognizing reviewers and people who answer questions who meet any of a variety of criteria, such as verified buyers (people who actually purchased the product from you), or top contributors—in short, any criteria that you choose. NOTE Unless stated otherwise, all references in this document to “reviewers” and “reviews” also refer to “people who answer questions” and “answers”, respectively. By badging reviewers, you increase their reviews’ credibility and provide an incentive for people to write more reviews (and answer more questions). Also, by clearly identifying reviews (and answers) that are written by staff members you provide confidence to shoppers that this is a trusted source. Badges appear directly below a reviewer’s name in the review.
Requirements and Dependencies
Note the following requirements for using the latest custom badging features:
- Review Display 2.0.
(Automated badges only) Profiles must be enabled (which is necessary for the “See all my reviews” feature). And if you are not passing the merchant_user_id, profiles are unavailable for badging (although you can still create and assign specific user badges).
Automated badges are not updated in real time. Every 7 days an automated process runs that updates user profiles with the appropriate badge. Any new automated badging assignments will be reflected in the following day’s Daily ZIP file.
Reviewer Badging Best Practices
To ensure the biggest impact for reviewer badging, as well as to maintain credibility and shopper confidence, it is important to badge an appropriate number of reviewers—too few and you’re missing out on highlighting credible reviews; too many and shoppers think it’s a gimmick and the reviews lose their credibility.
As a rule of thumb, we recommend that you badge approximately 15% to 20% of your reviewers. To help you select which reviewers to badge, we can provide detailed reviews reports; contact your Client Success Director (CSD) for more information.
Badge Categories and Types
There are two categories of badges:
- Specific users: Badges associated with specific email addresses, domain names, or your merchant user ID. There are three types of Specific Users badges (see “Specific User Badges” below for more details):
- Verified buyer: Badge that is automatically assigned to reviewers (and people who answer questions) who have purchased the product from you.
Staff: Default badges to recognize your staff members who contribute reviews/answers. Staff members can be associated with either the staff or staff-expert badge. (You can also create your own custom staff badges; see below.)
You cannot delete staff badges, nor edit a staff badge’s Name or Staff Badge checkbox setting or change its Image. However, you can add and remove individual email addresses and/or domains from staff badges’ list of Specific Users.
Custom: Badges that you add to recognize any specific user(s) who you add to a badge’s list of Specific Users. You can assign any name to custom badges and choose any image (your own custom image or one of our sample badges). For information about adding custom badges and users. Custom badges are available only to Enterprise and Platinum Express clients.
Automated Badging: Badges that are automatically assigned to reviewers based on a business rule (a statement that describes with whom a badge is associated) and corresponding trigger value (the number that triggers the display of the badge) that you select when you create the badge.
Automated badges are a type of custom badge. There are no default automated badges and you maintain total control over them: you can delete them, change their image, and change their trigger value. (However, after you choose an automated badge’s business rule, it cannot be changed.)
Availability Notes
Automated badges are available only for Enterprise Customer Reviews For the list of available business rules, see Automated Badges.
Automated badges availability requires that profiles be enabled (which is necessary for the “See all my reviews” feature). And if you are not passing the merchant_user_id, profiles are unavailable for badging.
Specific User Badges
Custom badges (such as specific user badges other than staff and staff-expert and all automated badges) are enabled by default. When you manage custom specific user badges, keep the following in mind:
To manage badges, your user account’s access privileges must be configured with the proper access privilege settings.
Specific user’s merchant_user_id values, email addresses (such as user@yourDomain.com), and domains (such as yourDomain.com) can be associated with only one badge.
Note, though, that even if you associate a domain with one badge, you can still associate a specific user’s email address in that domain to a different badge. For example, if the domain yourDomain.com is associated with domain-badge, but the email address user@yourDomain.com is associated with user-badge, the user with the indicated email address is associated with user-badge (not domain-badge).
Specific user badges can be associated with the merchant_user_id that you pass to the platform along with the review; use the moderation functions (after the review is approved) to assign a badge this way. You only have to do this once per reviewer, and then all future reviews for this reviewer will automatically be badged.
Custom specific user badges, like reviews, are shared across all merchants within a merchant group. However, you can customize the appearance of the badges at a merchant-locale level (so that each combination of merchant and locale can have its own custom badge) by using CSS overrides.
Automated Badges
If you are an Enterprise client using Customer Reviews, you can use business rules to configure Automated custom badges. (Automated badges are unavailable for Social Answers clients.) When you add a custom badge, you associate it with a business rule for identifying reviewers.
Business rules are automatically reevaluated every seven days and badging assignments are automatically updated as a result. So, for example, if you add a badge for 8 Helpful Votes and a reviewer received 7 helpful votes, they would not be associated with the badge. But as soon as one more helpful vote is received, the 8 Helpful Votes badge is assigned to that reviewer.
The business rules are as follows:
Specific user: Reviewers with specific email addresses, domain names, or your merchant user ID.
The specific user business rule corresponds to the specific users category of badges. That is, if you are an Enterprise client, you use the specific user business rule to add a specific user badge.
Number of Helpful Votes: Reviewers whose reviews receive a certain number of helpful votes. The helpful vote count is cumulative over all a reviewer’s reviews. For example, if the Number of Helpful Votes trigger value is 10, a reviewer with two reviews that both received five votes will be badged with the Number of Helpful Votes badge.
Number of Reviews: Reviewers who submit a certain number of reviews that are approved. The review count is a running cumulative count.