The Bazaarvoice platform provides businesses
with the ability to collect and publish authentic feedback from their
customers, who can review products and services, ask questions, and post photos
and videos of their experiences with products. The vendor says that leveraging
user-generated content can increase sales and build brand loyalty. Within the platform, the vendor provides seven core modules: Ratings & Reviews Questions & Answers Sampling…
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Google Tag Manager
Score 9.3 out of 10
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From Google, the Google Tag Manager is a tag management application that facilitates creating, embedding, and updating tags across websites and mobile apps. It is a free option, vs. the company's enterprise-tier Google Tag Manager 360.
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Trustpilot
Score 6.2 out of 10
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Trustpilot, headquartered in Copenhagen, offers their customer review platform to help businesses gather more online reviews and merge their online profile with feedback from their top customers and bring customer reviews to other high visibility platforms (e.g. Google).
Trustpilot and PowerReviews are similar products that provide similar functionalities as Bazaarvoice Conversations. Bazaarvoice Conversations has proven customer support teams and capabilities of an easy to use User Interface that can be used by non-technical staff.
Bazaarvoice is overall a quite strong ratings and reviews platform. If you have a national brand and want to integrate ratings and reviews into your website, Bazaarvoice should be in your consideration set. If you have a small business or a tighter budget, you may find Bazaarvoice too robust or expensive of a platform. If your brand gets a lot of organic product reviews, Bazaarvoice will be a helpful tool to increase brand credibility and search engine rankings. If you need help getting consumers to review your products, Bazaarvoice offers sampling programs. These programs can get very pricy depending on how many SKUs you are looking for reviews on. Bazaarvoice also has a proprietary platform where they collect consumer reviews for many brands, and once you have the Bazaarvoice ratings and reviews platform, you may be able to purchase reviews of your products and have them sync to your website without having to run a sampling program.
I have found Google Tag Manager as the go to solution for managing all of your event and conversion tags for your website. Not only does it make it easy to manage all of your tags in the one place, it is fairly intuitive to use and there is plenty of videos and help documentation online to help set up what ever you need. No scenarios come to mind at the moment on where it is less appropriate to use.
Unfortunately, Trustpilot's disingenuous pricing habits and communication methods are the reason we ultimately ended our 3 year relationship with the company. In 2023, we signed a 1 year agreement for their basic plan (product reviews, Q&A, etc) at $3,800/year... Fair enough. In 2024, the price jumps to $5,040/year... Okay, steep - but we're still seeing good use of the tools, sort of justified? For 2025 it skyrockets to $8,976/year (+78% from prior)... But, after a month of haggling and threats to cancel, they 'graciously' drop it to $7,569/year. Now for 2026, Trustpilot is demanding $9,576/year for the EXACT SAME PLAN. That's a 152% increase since we started, with zero added value.
Bazaarvoice Curations makes it incredibly easy to pull in content from multiple social media platforms for us to review.
Once the content is pulled into the Curations dashboard, our marketing team can very easily scroll through all the images and decide which ones we would like to feature on our site.
Curations also makes it very easy to tag any of our products in the images. We are able to do this manually, but Bazaarvoice also offers the option of letting their team tag the products they see in our images.
Selecting elements on a site [object, class, cookie, etc] (to later fire an event, send some data, etc) is very easy with triggers. Want to add an event when someone clicks on a button? Super easy. It was many many DOM selectors and you can even add custom functions if you need to do something more specific
In general, firing events in different circumstances is very easy mixing triggers and tags. You can track almost any element of the DOM and do whatever you want with it.
Testing is a great functionality. Only you can see what's on the site and you can debug it easily by seeing which events or tags were triggered and all the DOM elements involved (and why they matched the trigger).
Working in environments (staging, production) and versioning is easy to do, deploying changes in 2 clicks.
Completing the review for the customer is a simple process which enables us to receive more feedback.
The Trustpilot account management team is a true partner working with each department to help with adoption across the company.
The Trustpilot development team is a trusted partner with our own internal development team, assisting them with implementation as well as integration with their API.
Their login to their portal is awful. They are working on creating a single sign on experience but right now there are different usernames and passwords depending on what dashboard you are attempting to access.
They could probably spend more time optimizing the cost of their initialization script. The size of the JavaScript concerns me.
They could work on their deployment and preview tools. The time for our staged changes to show on the live site doesn't seem to be as quick as it should be and the preview tools don't take into account the site's CSS files for display.
There are several good integrations, but there can always be more. Native tracking for call tracking solutions, analytics providers, non-Google advertisers would be top of my list.
Documentation is just dreadful. Luckily there are some awesome folks out there doing crowdsourced tutorials (shout out to Simo Ahava) but by and large the Google Tag Manager instructions are worth what you pay for them.
We are happy with the product and really just need to optimise our deployment of it on an ongoing basis. There is a lot of functionality prebuilt within Bazaarvoice which we want to have on our site, and to recreate this in our platform would take significant effort which is not practical for us.
I haven't found another option for us to use especially one that is free. Down the road we may go a different route but for now GTM is a good option and does what we need it to do. It'd be nice to get more support or more integrations but with the free version there's only so much one can expect to get I suppose.
I'm sure all processes and program can improve, however Bazaarvoice has reached a very easy usability level and hope this continues as the product improves over time.
No difficult obstacle to overcome but Google Tag Manager can still be difficult for many users to deploy. Sure the basic HTML script can be deployed quite easily, but when you start to require triggers, variables, etc, it can be a little daunting.
Simple user interface - easy to understand with high level overviews, but also getting into the detail with questions for those who want it. The only issue I have is the connection with LinkedIn - sometimes it fails and makes you re-enter details again which can be a bit frustrating!
The Bazaarvoice team is always available via call, email, or any other platform to provide help, guidance, or to push or ask for the task we set earlier. They are talkative and easy to share information and discuss issues if there are any. Thay may have more out of box solutions for easy implementation, but as a whole, and regarding support I am satisfied.
GTM does not provide support. This is one of GTM's biggest issues but it's due to the level of customization for each website. If your team thinks they would heavily rely on the need for a support staff it is probably better to invest in a paid service with a team that can support your needs.
I've rarely had issues and needed support. During the implementation phase we relied on their support heavily and they were very knowledgeable, responsive and helpful. Any questions I've had have been answered promptly by my account manager. They also have a great knowledgebase for self-service support.
Planning and communication will help greatly with an in-house implementation. If there are large teams, try to limit the number of people involved to 1-2 developers (back-end dev may be necessary depending on your platform), one analytics marketer and one project manager.
Even though both PowerReviews and Bazaar Voice are capable of fulfilling the aforementioned needs, PowerReviews also provides free trials. PowerReview's style options aren't always user-friendly, but the app is worth checking out if aesthetic concerns aren't top of mind. Bazaar Voice, on the other hand, sounds really professional and is remarkably simple to use.
We moved to GTM from a standard Google Analytics implementation. GTM is much more flexible and easier to make changes, especially as the changes relate to multiple sites and environments. While there is a learning curve when figuring out how to use GTM, I believe the change has been worth it because it helps us understand at a more fundamental level how our tracking works and gives us a lot more control over what we track and how.
Selected Trustpilot because of superior integration with the website and Google SERPS. Again, my only complaint would be Trustpilot was relatively more expensive than the other technologies.
This has had a positive impact on the way the company identifies user issues and complaints more easily/readily.
The negative impact is that departments seem to put a lot more expectations on our customers than this tool can provide (e.g., replies and follow-up), meaning that we aren't as able to provide additional information when requested.
It's uncertain whether responding to reviews adds a lot of value when all is said and done. Reviewers rarely adjust their ratings, even if/when we sufficiently address their concerns or resolve issues.
GTM is very useful to determine if a particular element on the site is useful (i.e. is it being watched, is it being clicked, does it help customers navigate through more pages). As an SEO person, I can use this information to decide what to optimize for but also to track progress and see improvements in engagement.
With the use of Google Tag Manager, I was able to easily inject an A/B testing tool which lead to several improvements in lead generation.
