Our policy ensures that consumers are confident that they can trust the authenticity of ratings, reviews, answers, and other UGC. Refer to the Bazaarvoice Authenticity Policy
for more information about content authenticity guidelines.
Authenticity
At Bazaarvoice, we believe that UGC should represent the genuine, unbiased, and transparent opinion about the author’s experience with a product or service. These are the three main characteristics of authentic UGC:
- Free from fraud and spam, including disruptive or trolling behavior, commercial messages, automated submissions (bots and scripts), content from a client’s competitor, and undisclosed self-promotion.
- Free from edits, classification, and alteration by anyone other than the original author, including corrections for spelling or grammar.
- Free from inappropriate influence. We do not allow companies to directly ask for positive reviews. If consumers are offered money or promotional material (such as discounts or coupons) in exchange for providing an unbiased review, then the review must note this fact. Further, employees and vendors of the organization may not submit content without disclosing their relationship to the product or service.
Author IP address and device fingerprint
Mass advertising campaigns, trolling, and attempts at automated content submission are all sources of inauthentic content. To combat them, Bazaarvoice has partnered with iovation, an industry leader in device reputation technology. Their technology enables the collection of information about the author's device, which can then be used in conjunction with sophisticated algorithms that allow Bazaarvoice to identify, flag, and report suspicious content.
Content must have the following data to comply with the Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews API Terms of Use. Content must comply to be eligible to syndicate across the Bazaarvoice Network.
- Author IP address - Must be the IP address for the author of the review.
- Device fingerprint - Passed as a parameter in the review submission request.
Follow these steps to generate the device fingerprint:
- Configure and load the iovation JavaScript library in your web app.
- Wait for the script to analyze the user agent and create a device fingerprint black box string.
- Submit the user-submitted review with the Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews API including the `fp` parameter with the device fingerprint black box string.
Read iovation - web for more information about generating and sending the device fingerprint.
Badging incentives (incentivized reviews)
The Bazaarvoice Authenticity Policy requires that reviews display a notification (either as a graphic badge or plain text) any time the consumer has received or been offered material compensation for writing a review. This includes, but is not limited to, any of the following being provided to the consumer in exchange for writing a review:
- Entry into a sweepstakes
- Coupons or discounts
- Loyalty reward points
- Free products, either before as in a sampling program or after, as a "thank you" gift
Bazaarvoice uses a universal value with each incentivized submission to properly display a disclosure to end consumers. For more information on how to include this value with all submissions, refer to the submission form details in Incentivized Reviews.
