A Social Proof Campaign is an e-commerce feature that allows you to incorporate social proof style pop-ups on your lead and sales pages. Available to sites on the Plus or Pro plans, you can select an event source from a variety of options, including BDOW! itself, e-commerce platforms such as WooCommerce and Shopify, and even custom applications via Zapier! Once activated, your site will display a data-driven event stream that chronicles genuine examples of customer engagement.

Building a Social Proof Campaign is much like other BDOW! campaign types—start in your site manager, go to the Campaigns tab and click the Create New Campaign button.

Next, select Display Social Proof as your campaign goal.

Like all BDOW! campaigns, it will initialize to a basic title, but you can click it to open the editor and give it a more descriptive name.

The Event Source tab is what makes a Social Proof Campaign unique. Each campaign can pull data from a single event source, and you have a few options.

The Lead Source option retrieves events from BDOW!'s own forms. When you capture a lead (for example, a subscription to a newsletter), BDOW! places the contact in the Master List (i.e., your complete Contact listing). This is the default location from which social proof event data is pulled. However, it might not make sense to select from all of your conversions. You also have the ability to target a specific subset of conversion events via groups.

You can configure typical BDOW! campaign forms to automatically add subscribers to BDOW! groups via the Success tab. Once the groups are created, you can apply them to the Lead Source configuration. Only members of the selected groups will appear in the event stream, so this is an excellent way to filter down to the most relevant data.

One caveat is that social proof does not view group memberships retroactively. The stream will only display contacts added since the creation of the Social Proof Campaign itself. Consequently, older subscription events will not appear.

This feature is coming soon! When it is ready, the E-commerce Integration option will allow you select events from Shopify or WooCommerce. However, in the interim you can still use Zapier, the custom event source option!

The Zapier Source allows you to receive events from any application that integrates with Zapier. This option grants a great deal of flexibility to Social Proof Campaigns and we are excited to see what members of the BDOW! community can do with it!

Note that Social Proof requires at least version 1.3 of the BDOW! Zapier app in order to receive events.

The Event Source ID is unique to this campaign form and it is how you link things up on the Zapier side. We will cover the details later in this guide, but you will be able to select from all published Social Proof Campaigns via the BDOW! integration in Zapier. Once you have finished setting up the campaign you can configure the event source in Zapier.

The next step is actually customizing your event pop-up!

Use these options to establish the pop-up's look and feel. You can tweak its shape, border padding, as well as colors for the border and icon.

The Text area allows you to customize how events are communicated to visitors. There are three fields: Title (which is always displayed in bold), Body, and Footer. Their positions are fixed within the pop-up, they are not limited to a single line, either—the text will actually wrap and continue on a new line. This allows for some creativity and flexibility in messaging, but too many characters may end up overwriting the next field. Fortunately, none of the fields are required, so you can, for example, skip the Footer to support a longer Body, if it makes sense to do so.

We also recommend accounting for a range of text lengths due to the unique values in an event stream. Variables are specified in curly braces and will extract the specific data values from an event. For example, the {Name} variable will select a contact's first name and include it in the pop-up display.

You can use the Add Variable dropdown to insert items from a list of supported variables.

The {TimeSince} variable calculates and displays the amount of time passed since the event occurred, which may be a useful touch depending on the goal of your campaign. The most recent events will be displayed in your stream.

The Settings tab is unique to the Social Proof Campaign type. The main options are

The Yield Tech option is the same as other campaign forms, and it is especially important to note that Yield Tech treats social proof pop-ups just like any other BDOW! pop-up form. See this article for details, but the general takeaway is that you cannot simultaneously display a Social Proof event stream together with regular Pop-ups or Scroll Boxes—Yield Tech will only allow one of those forms to be visible at any given time.

Furthermore, Yield Tech governs the Social Proof event session rather than a stream's individual pop-ups. As a result, once the stream displays it will continue until completion (as configured by the "Max pop-ups per session" setting).

Finally, the Visibility tab governs when a Social Proof stream will appear to visitors and is very similar to other BDOW! campaign forms.

Now that you have completed the Social Proof Campaign, you're all set! Click the Publish button in the bottom-right to activate it.

If you are using Zapier as an event source, you have one more step. Read on to setup the integration and populate your event stream.

Configuring BDOW! to receive custom events from Zapier actually happens outside the BDOW! site manager, in Zapier itself. Log into Zapier and start building a new zap. Select the desired event trigger and then connect to a BDOW! action. If you need help connecting Zapier to your BDOW! account, see this article.

On the Configure step, indicate which fields from the trigger should map to BDOW!'s Social Proof Event fields:

The Event Source field will be populated with valid Social Proof Campaigns from the BDOW! site connected to Zapier. Simply select the source that will you wish to connect the event stream! If you don't see any sources, make sure you have at least one Social Proof form ready to go.

Now just publish your Zap! You've configured a custom event stream!

In many ways, Social Proof Campaign forms are like other BDOW! forms, and so the same troubleshooting steps apply. See this article for a good list of items to check.

If you are using the Lead Source event option, remember that the group memberships are not retroactive. As a result, you can only display subscriptions since publication of the Social Proof Campaign itself. Verify that your other forms are properly adding subscribers to your contact groups, and also confirm that you've received contacts after publishing your Social Proof Campaign.

First, ensure that your Zapier instance is connected to a BDOW! site. If so, verify you have published at least one Social Proof Campaign. The BDOW! Zapier app populates the Event Source dropdown from a list of published Social Proof forms.

If you do not have any published Social Proof campaigns, go back to your BDOW! site manager and complete the design process. Once you publish, return to Zapier to wire up the event stream. If Zapier still cannot find any Social Proof campaigns, you can try deleting and recreating the Zap action.