3 reasons why brands fail to successfully implement UGC on their website

Willing to display UGC (User-Generated Content) on your website, your product pages, or to create a community page? Great! UGC galleries boost conversion, engagement, and traffic to PDP, reduce exit rates, and increase time spent… if properly implemented!

🤫 Be careful about… 

Few & Fake UGC displayed 

The number and the authenticity of the visual UGC displayed on a website impact the performances they generate.

Like written reviews, the number of visual UGCs matters. A larger number resonates with a larger audience and provides the “social” (group of individuals) proof. 

By authentic, we mean spontaneously created by real consumers. Nowadays, audiences see the difference between Influencer-Generated Content, IGC, content created within a commercial collaboration, and User-Generated Content, UGC. The authenticity, and therefore the level of trust is not the same. As our dear Mark Zuckerberg says “a trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising”. 😇

For example, only one or two UGC on a product page, a photo from @super_beauty_influenceur, who has 1M followers, displayed in an “our consumers” gallery will boost our potential customer’s trust.

Poor technical integration 

Visual UGC galleries are integrated using a widget or an API on home pages, category pages, product pages… Each UGC can be tagged with one or several products: leading audiences to the right product pages when they want to create a similar look and show a product in use by several consumers on product pages. Quite impactful and inspiring when your audiences are in front of a screen and not in a store! 

For all these reasons, displaying visual UGCs on your website boosts conversion, engagement, cart, and time spent… But when the technical integration is not correctly done, the opposite happens! 😱😱😱

For example, UGC increases the website load time, the wrong products are tagged in the UGC, the tagged products lead to 404 error pages, poor UI/UX of the UGC display…

Lack of or poor performance tracking 

Performance tracking is essential to estimate the conversion and engagement of UGCs, but also to value the time spent by the teams operating them and define the adjustment needed to maximize the benefits of UGCs.

When there is no tracking or the wrong events are tracked, teams are in the dark.  It’s impossible to calculate an ROI on the UGC deployment… 😫🤯😥

For example, no UGC tagging plan integrated into Google Analytics, no segmentation of the visitors/sessions, no significant sample of visitors/sessions, and no right events measured.

Looking for advice on how to successfully implement UGC on your website?  Or are you just willing to know the 7 other reasons? 😉 Don’t hesitate to reach out!