Buyers come to TrustRadius to get real-deal user feedback about their business software purchases. They know that vendors have a vested interest in marketing their product’s strengths, and often aren’t upfront about their product’s weaknesses. User feedback can help bridge that gap, as well as provide use-case-specific insights.

A big part of the research process is creating a shortlist of products that check all of a buyer’s boxes. But how are technology buyers supposed to know which 2-3 products are the best candidates for them when every vendor wants to be at the top of the list, and some review sites will let them pay to do just that? 

From features to pricing to security information, there’s a huge number of factors that go into a business software purchase decision. Gathering all of this information takes valuable time, which is why TrustRadius implemented a methodology on our category pages to highlight products that have the information that buyers need to make a confident purchase decision.

Why Create a Category Sort Algorithm?

TrustRadius is no stranger to experimentation. Over time, we’ve experimented with several methods of surfacing relevant software products to buyers.

Previously, we sorted products based on the total number of reviews and ratings. After all, why not promote the pages that have the most information available for software buyers? It turns out that reviews are only part of what buyers are looking for when consulting a review site.

Buyers are looking for review content, but also self-service information (like pricing and demos), and information about features.

When looking for reviews, buyers want to find reviews that are relevant to their use case and reviews that are recent. Simply having a high review count doesn’t mean these reviews are recent.

In order to address some of the challenges above, we started highlighting products that attained Top Rated status each year. Earning a Top Rated badge means that a product has recent reviews, a high trScore, and is frequently researched by technology buyers on TrustRadius. Typically, the products that earn a Top Rated badge have fairly complete profiles that make it easy for buyers to self-serve with the information they need.

That said, Top Rated is measured at one particular point in time on an annual basis. This means that any vendor who sources new reviews, updates their profile with pricing or demos, etc. wouldn’t see the benefits of that until the next Top Rated deadline. The technology space doesn’t stand still and we would be doing a disservice to buyers if we only evaluated our product rankings on an annual basis.

We leveraged our 12 years of experience, including 8 years of extensive buyer research published in our B2B Disconnect Report to develop an algorithm that will help buyers create a high-quality shortlist of the products most relevant to them.

How are products sorted on TrustRadius category pages now?

Products are sorted based on several factors, including:

• Profile completeness
• trScore
• Top Rated status
• Optimization to ensure quick responses to buyer inquiries

These 4 factors are intended to highlight high-quality products (based on their trScore and Top Rated status), with profiles that contain both recent reviews and essential self-service information (profile completeness, Top Rated status, and optimization to ensure quick responses to buyer inquiries).

We believe that our new sort algorithm will help software buyers make more confident purchase decisions, and allow them to more easily access self-service information for products on their shortlists.