Petco’s Spotted sampling program drives 48% revenue increase on sampled products

Since 2005, Petco’s dedication to supporting the overall health and wellness of pets has been supported by a suite of Bazaarvoice solutions, including Ratings & Reviews and Questions & Answers. These services have allowed pet parents to learn about Petco’s products and how they fit each pets’ unique needs. They’ve also helped the pet health and wellness company increase conversions and customer loyalty.

Recently, Petco set out to further increase awareness of, and SEO traffic and conversions for its owned Wholehearted and Reddy brands, leveraging user-generated content (UGC). These products weren’t generating the number of reviews Petco aspired to, so the pet giant activated its Bazaarvoice team to develop the new Spotted Sampling Program to generate UGC that inspires confidence, drives discovery, engages shoppers, and increases conversions.

“The idea of getting not only reviews, but higher quality reviews with images for our own brand products was really enticing,” said Hannah Kredich, Category Specialist at Petco. “We were looking to boost conversions and visits, and we’ve now seen that happen across sampled products.”

The campaign did just that. In fact, looking at the period prior to sampling, compared to the sampling period, the health and wellness company saw the following SEO impact:

• 67% increase in number of pages ranked organically
• 140% increase in impressions from organic search
• 80% increase in clicks from organic search
• 48% increase in revenue per visit for sampled products (driven by a 28% increase in conversion rate and 15% increase in average order value)

Spotted leads to more discoverability, visits, and conversions

The Spotted Sampling Program kicked off in early 2021. This sampling program puts products in the hands of Petco shoppers in exchange for honest reviews on Petco.com. While the sampling shipments mainly contain Petco’s private label products, like food, treats, crates, kennels, bowls, and collars, national brands work with the Bazaarvoice team to get space in the Spotted boxes as well.

“Brand awareness for both national brands and private brands has been a huge part of why we like doing Spotted,” said Logan Steele, from the e-commerce team at Petco.

There’s also themed Spotted boxes around holidays, like Halloween, because seasonal products are only on the shelves for a short time. Sampling seasonal products allows brands like those owned by Petco to maximize sales during peak shopping seasons by having valuable UGC at the beginning of the season.

“A lot of times, we get really fun photos of dogs wearing taco costumes or lounging in novelty beds,” said Steele. “It’s really fun to be able to sample seasonal collections to get a few reviews on the products since they have a much shorter life on-site than most items.”

Petco launches several new products per year. Before the Spotted program, those products had very few reviews and had very low discoverability.

“Being able to get the products into more reviewers’ hands has given us higher quality reviews with images for new products,” said Kredich. “We’ve really seen a positive impact on visits, conversions, and improving the discoverability of new products. From a results standpoint, it’s been a positive experience to see that we can get 10-15 reviews for new products quickly.”

Along with Ratings & Reviews, Questions & Answers, Galleries, and Syndication, the Spotted Sampling Program completes a full-funnel UGC solution for Petco. The program generates better reviews and images that can be used in Galleries across category pages and social media.

Spotted achieves a 90% response rate

Spotted has been extremely successful in generating fresh, new reviews for products. In fact, the response rate for reviews has been over 90%, and the company has seen a 405% lift in review volume and a 9% lift in average ratings. Plus, the quality of reviews on Petco’s site has improved.
“When you’re on one of our pages, and you compare a Spotted sampler review to a non-Spotted review, 99% of the time, the Spotted reviews are longer,” said Kredich. “These reviews are more specific and talk about things they like, and a lot of times, we get more images. There’s nothing better for a customer than seeing an actual photo of a product.”

Bazaarvoice has also helped Petco’s e-commerce team interact with vendors more efficiently.

“It’s definitely beneficial to have that partner that we can send vendors to and work with on a day-to-day basis,” said Steele. “We’re looking forward to getting more and more national brands connected with Spotted because we had such great success with private brands last year. We’re excited to keep leveraging the team to offer more training and more opportunities for brands to participate.”

The Petco team has discussed using UGC from Spotted on in-store displays for private label products in the next few years and using in-store space to incentivize future reviews.

“We want to leverage reviews wherever we can because we know customers are reading reviews before they buy something,” said Kredich.

Learn more about how a managed sampling program can help you get higher quality reviews and images, which leads to more conversions.

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