January 2010 – Online Insights: Social Media

A Thumbs-Up for Five-Star Ratings

YouTube inspired some social media soul searching last autumn, after a blog post revealed that five stars are the norm for their video ratings. “If the majority of videos are getting five stars, how useful is this system, really?” the post asked. “Would a thumbs up/thumbs down be more effective, or does favoriting do the trick of declaring your love for a video?” Hundreds of commentators on the site and across the web weighed in on how they rate videos, how they use ratings and what works best: five stars, 10 stars, three stars or a more binary “like it/hate it” type of rating.

These are clearly very important questions for YouTube–and the rest of us. From our work with hundreds of advertisers, retailers and media sites, it’s clear that a five-star rating system without related comments would fail YouTube users; you either like a video (five stars) or you don’t (no rating given, or perhaps one star if you really didn’t like it).

FIVE STARS AND PRODUCT RATINGS
However, five-star ratings systems for products remain extremely useful on sites like Amazon.com, BestBuy and thousands of others–even when four- and five-star ratings outnumber the rest. Our analysis across 600 brands shows the average rating to be 4.3 out of five stars. These ratings serve a definite purpose: filtering products and pulling people into a deeper conversation with the brand.

Unlike on YouTube, when you see a star rating on a site like BestBuy or Macy’s, it means the reviewer took the time to evaluate the product’s attributes (price, usability, design, quality), rate it, tag it and write a more detailed review to explain their reasoning. A thumbs up/thumbs down system or a three-star rating system simply don’t give the level of depth that shoppers need to make a purchase decision.

Five-star ratings provide the best way for shoppers to find products they like. When I search for products on a site, I’m much more likely to click through on a product with a rating of three stars or greater. Ratings also give brands a great way to surface and present their best products in a category, on a web page or in an e-mail. In fact, our data shows that simply including top-rated products in an e-mail increases revenue per e-mail by over 40 percent.

Star ratings also play a critical role in driving shoppers to the more helpful content: the review itself. By including five-star ratings in paid search campaigns, Office Depot was able to increase click-through rates by 78.5 percent, conversion by 23.8 percent and revenue by 196.6 percent!

Even Google acknowledges the difference between star ratings for video content and star ratings for products and services. At the same time its YouTube property is questioning its ratings system, Google has introduced consumer-generated star ratings into organic search results after finding that searchers are more likely to click on highly rated links. At least in the products and services realm, the five-star rating should not–and will not–disappear.

Sam Decker is chief marketing officer of Bazaarvoice, the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales. Bazaarvoice’s SaaS social commerce solutions have served more than 60 billion pieces of customer-generated content on more than 600 websites from brands including BestBuy, Costco, Dell, Macy’s, P&G, Panasonic and QVC.