BirdEye Best Business Awards Scoring Methodologies

Introduction

The following document outlines BirdEye’s scoring methodology for the annual BirdEye Best Business Awards, that scores products and vendors based on reviews gathered from our user community, as well as data aggregated from online sources and social networks. We apply a unique proprietary algorithm to this data to calculate customer satisfaction scores in real-time. The review data is aggregated from publically-available review sites like Google, Facebook, BirdEye, and others.

Results Scoring Methodology

BirdEye ranks businesses based on reviews posted across the Internet applying a proprietary algorithm to this data to calculate the business’ score while taking a variety of different factors into account. The information shown reflects scores calculated using the BirdEye results algorithm v1.0 (beta).

The factors taken into account include:

• Star Rating: The business’s overall star rating across different review sites on a scale from 1-5.
• Review Recency: The more recent the review, the higher it will be weighted.
• Review Depth: The more in-depth the review, the more insight it provides into business quality. Longer reviews are weighted higher.
• Source Authority: Reviews on more well-known sites like Google hold more weight than smaller, more niche sites.
• Reviewer Authenticity: Reviews that are directly associated with a platform account like Google and Facebook are weighted higher than those not associated with a user account or posted anonymously.

In order to avoid manipulation from competitors, BirdEye takes steps to identify reviews that may be spam or slander. BirdEye’s Natural Language Processing engine Athena identifies these reviews so that they will not be taken into account when determining award placement.

In order to qualify, businesses need to maintain the following:

• At least 30 customer reviews across all platforms
• A 4.0 or better overall star rating

The data gathered is a snapshot of the time period June 20, 2018 - June 20, 2019. Reviews posted after June 20, 2019 are not being taken into account for the rating.

Review Decay

The BirdEye algorithm applies a decay to reviews based on the date of their last update. Reviews contribute less towards a business’s overall score as they age. This is done so that more recent reviews that may better represent the current state of the business are given more weight. This decay is compounded on a monthly basis. The rate roughly equates to -4% per month.

Relative Ranking

BirdEye’s ranking for top businesses is a combination of different metrics including, but not limited to, user ratings, user reviews, recency and volume of reviews. All rankings are relative to other businesses in the same city.