Official feedback thread re: the new leveling system

[texvox]

1 hour ago, Alex.M said:

I've heard this in the past but how do you actually do this...  I'd be annoyed if I would receive messages as a buyer with something like '' hey please don't forget to respond to your private feedback thing ' or whatever it's called ... I don't really find it professional to send such follow-ups to my buyers

She gave me some "approved language" to send to buyers reminding them to complete their private surveys. But to be honest I won't be doing this. The last thing I'd want to do is joyfully request a private review from a buyer who appears extremely happy with the project but is going to nuke my account by sharing a feisty private review with concerns they never voiced to me publicly. 

Edited March 7 by texvox

[donnovan86]

1 hour ago, vhskid said:

1 - The buyers' private ratings average is rolled out to be included in the sellers' public stars / rating score:

I think I understood correctly. The private reviews will not be made public. Sure, they will include them in the success score, but you can't see what people are rating you privately. And I doubt that's going to change. Which is what a lot of people have trouble with, how can you improve something you don't know you did wrong. 

[alanletsgo]

Same here. Did everyone get this notification?

[vhskid]

1 hour ago, donnovan86 said:

I think I understood correctly. The private reviews will not be made public. Sure, they will include them in the success score, but you can't see what people are rating you privately. And I doubt that's going to change. Which is what a lot of people have trouble with, how can you improve something you don't know you did wrong. 

 

Private reviews / rating will affect not only the 'Success score' metric but they will be included in the (stars) 'Rating' score as well. Which is public.

 

Edited March 7 by vhskid

[donnovan86]

5 hours ago, vhskid said:

Private reviews / rating will affect not only the 'Success score' metric but they will be included in the (stars) 'Rating' score as well. Which is public.

 

It seems you misunderstand me. YES, they include that in the success score. Can you actually see the negative private reviews and learn from them. No. And that's the problem. They always remain private, and you can't learn anything from them. Even if they are included in the success score, you won't really know it's due to them. The success score can change from many different things. They need to let us know what went wrong and why we have that bad private review, if there is one. But it will always remain private.

It always affected our ranking anyway, now we just see the success score, which was previously the buyer satisfaction rate, and only success managers could see it. I was very adamant on the forum last year that Fiverr should let us see the buyer satisfaction rate, at least a number, so we have an idea where we are and how these private reviews affect us. And you can imagine I was quite happy to see that at least we have such a metric with this new level system. But... it came at a cost, with new rules and AI governing the entire process, which leads to unwanted demotions and other problems, as you can see. 

[priyank_mod]

Yesterday's notification and mail about mass-enablement of promotion feature for ALL gigs seems more like an appeasement step to earn from sellers who got low success scores!! 

We might not show you in search at all but hey, you can pay us and promote.🤐 This kinda answers the million-dollar question - how can I improve my success score?? 🥲

[donnovan86]

10 minutes ago, priyank_mod said:

We might not show you in search at all but hey, you can pay us and promote.🤐 This kinda answers the million-dollar question - how can I improve my success score?? 🥲

I saw a lot of people received that notification/email. I didn't. But I am already promoting a few gigs, not all though.

[priyank_mod]

16 hours ago, cucinavivace said:

My problem with those private ratings is that Fiverr has assured us for years they would not affect our public scores or levels, and they never have. 

Did they really assure us about this in writing anywhere?? Or we just assumed that they will remain segregated forever?? 

I might be wrong here, as I'm relatively new on the platform. Was it announced or mentioned in TOS?

[dereck_s]

1 hour ago, donnovan86 said:

I saw a lot of people received that notification/email. I didn't. But I am already promoting a few gigs, not all though.

Have you been seeing more success with your promoted gigs? I've been promoting mine for awhile but I haven't really seen much success at all.

[donnovan86]

3 minutes ago, dereck_s said:

Have you been seeing more success with your promoted gigs? I've been promoting mine for awhile but I haven't really seen much success at all.

 

I guess there are factors like pricing or how much you allocate per click..

In my case, just for the first week of March, I had a roughly 16x return on what I paid. 

I do have this under all my promoted gigs though.

 

So I guess when you have that Recommended tag, they push your gig more. So I can only assume they use private reviews and other metrics to determine that, maybe they compare with other gigs in your niche. For me, Promoted Gigs seems to work fine, I don't rely on it, but it's definitely a nice addition and it has brought me some new, return clients since its inception. I always left it active, but had a limited CPC cap. Now I have it on Auto, which means it does spend more than it did, but the return is also better. 

 

[dereck_s]

That likely just means that my promotions are pointless because the other people in my field are likely being pushed harder.

[donnovan86]

2 minutes ago, dereck_s said:

That likely just means that my promotions are pointless because the other people in my field are likely being pushed harder.

To be honest.. my main gig sees success. The others barely have an order or so from PG. Even if they have the recommended tag. So it's also buyer preference,  niche being too crowded, etc.

[emmaki]

There's no mystery here (p.9, Q4'24 Shareholder Letter):

[kingpirux]

1 hour ago, emmaki said:

There's no mystery here (p.9, Q4'24 Shareholder Letter):

exactly what i thougt. They give a sht about clients and freelancers, they just want to push everybody to spend more in promotion and to force everyone to get seller plus, thats not a growth strategy, is milking to dead the cows, they dont care because new freelancers will always do it, will always fall in the fake promotion and in the shitty investment for the seller plus trying to make their gigs "more visible"...

[cucinavivace]

4 hours ago, emmaki said:

There's no mystery here (p.9, Q4'24 Shareholder Letter):

Well, if it's any consolation, the market has not responded well to the turmoil surrounding all this and all the conjecture about why they're so focused on alternative revenue streams instead of core sales volume. There's talk in some places they're pricing themselves out of the market by forcing sellers to raise prices, and with all the competition that's matured in the last few years as alternatives for freelancers could lose market share because of it.

Losing 20%+ of your stock value in one swoop with a change announcement or earnings issues isn't a huge deal. No rally in a month because of follow up good news could be.



And no, this isn't a "the market goes up and the market goes down" kind of thing. They're running contrary to both the tech sector and the market overall. (For those who don't know me, I'm a finance guy and one of my gigs was investment evaluation and guidance - I was following this anyway.)

Edited March 8 by cucinavivace

[cucinavivace]

6 hours ago, priyank_mod said:

Did they really assure us about this in writing anywhere?? Or we just assumed that they will remain segregated forever?? 

I might be wrong here, as I'm relatively new on the platform. Was it announced or mentioned in TOS?

 

I've been on Fiverr since 2015 (only seriously for the past couple years). It's not something that would be in the TOS, but it has always been this way and has been stated as such in Fiverr help documentation and over and over and over by support all that time.

Please note I did not say "guaranteed." I said they assured us for years. But frankly "we never promised in writing not to pull the rug out from under you" wouldn't make me feel any better about it. 🙂

Edited March 8 by cucinavivace

[ceilingeyes]

I've noticed today my rating has dropped from 5 to 4.9. Not a big deal I know but what I'm confused about is that I havent had any new orders for about a week, meaning no new clients have given me a lower than 5 star rating. I havent had a lower than 5 star rating for quite a long time, so why has my rating dropped? Can someone explain?

[vhskid]

8 hours ago, donnovan86 said:

13 hours ago, vhskid said:

Private reviews / rating will affect not only the 'Success score' metric but they will be included in the (stars) 'Rating' score as well. Which is public.

 

It seems you misunderstand me. YES, they include that in the success score. Can you actually see the negative private reviews and learn from them. No. And that's the problem. They always remain private, and you can't learn anything from them. Even if they are included in the success score, you won't really know it's due to them. The success score can change from many different things. They need to let us know what went wrong and why we have that bad private review, if there is one. But it will always remain private.

It always affected our ranking anyway, now we just see the success score, which was previously the buyer satisfaction rate, and only success managers could see it. I was very adamant on the forum last year that Fiverr should let us see the buyer satisfaction rate, at least a number, so we have an idea where we are and how these private reviews affect us. And you can imagine I was quite happy to see that at least we have such a metric with this new level system. But... it came at a cost, with new rules and AI governing the entire process, which leads to unwanted demotions and other problems, as you can see. 

 

I wrote that private reviews are NOT ONLY in the 'Success score' but ALSO in the (stars) 'Rating' score and marked that on the image. So we have 2 separate scores affected by private feedback.

That's the whole point of my yesterday replies -  that the private reviews will be now in the 'Rating' metric affecting the seller's public stars score.

 

 

Edited March 8 by vhskid

[cucinavivace]

Just as a point of clarity since many don't seem to know much about the private ratings and some never knew they existed: private ratings have always impacted your gig performance. They've been in the algorithm for marketplace visibility for a long time. At least since 2016. So, it's not that they never mattered at all and now do. They've just never affected public facing stats or your level, which I think is fair since we can't respond to them and they're not always necessarily about you.

If you're not performing well on one gig or you have one gig where there's bound to be more discontent (like SEO buyers who don't get results right away and have a tantrum, though they won't say so publicly because they just told you they were happy, or because the way the private rating questions were worded maybe the buyer actually was happy with you but didn't like their "overall experience" because the results weren't as fast as they'd like), then maybe that one gig lost some visibility. It's not perfect, but it's reasonable. If buyers aren't happy for whatever reason, maybe that gig doesn't belong at the top of the search results. That was the impact then.

Now with the success score and ratings impact, you could have five gigs where private ratings don't impact you at all and still lose rank over one, even if that gig is now inactive. That's the difference. It's one gig's visibility impacted because of potential customer dissatisfaction with that one gig, whether with you or the product/service in general, vs a judgment of your performance on the platform overall and keeping you out of the big leagues on levels and resulting higher visibility in general.

Edited March 8 by cucinavivace

[nickkold]

56 minutes ago, cucinavivace said:

Just as a point of clarity since many don't seem to know much about the private ratings and some never knew they existed: private ratings have always impacted your gig performance. They've been in the algorithm for marketplace visibility for a long time. At least since 2016. So, it's not that they never mattered at all and now do. They've just never affected public facing stats or your level, which I think is fair since we can't respond to them and they're not always necessarily about you.

If you're not performing well on one gig or you have one gig where there's bound to be more discontent (like SEO buyers who don't get results right away and have a tantrum, though they won't say so publicly because they just told you they were happy, or because the way the private rating questions were worded maybe the buyer actually was happy with you but didn't like their "overall experience" because the results weren't as fast as they'd like), then maybe that one gig lost some visibility. It's not perfect, but it's reasonable. If buyers aren't happy for whatever reason, maybe that gig doesn't belong at the top of the search results. That was the impact then.

Now with the success score and ratings impact, you could have five gigs where private ratings don't impact you at all and still lose rank over one, even if that gig is now inactive. That's the difference. It's one gig's visibility impacted because of potential customer dissatisfaction with that one gig, whether with you or the product/service in general, vs a judgment of your performance on the platform overall and keeping you out of the big leagues on levels and resulting higher visibility in general.

Does anyone know if deleting that badly performing gig (badly performing in private ratings) would make up for the rankings overall? With this scenario above in mind. I was in a roundtable meeting with Fiverr and someone asked this question and they told us it would delete that success score metric and not count towards the overall score anymore - but this was some 2-3 months ago and a lot has happened since. Does anyone know? Probably not.

[nickkold]

1 minute ago, cucinavivace said:

Nope. That's what I meant by "even if the gig is now inactive." A number of people have said right in this thread they've already tried to delete low performing gigs and it didn't change anything. Maybe they just didn't wait long enough, but as I understand it once your score is fried the only thing that will bring it back up is more positive markers.

Oh, my bad - I thought that meant "Paused" status. Thanks for clarifying for me. 
So deleting it could be worse, because if you at least keep it you could try to improve it and get it back up to normal/good? Or are my maths bad here?

[texvox]

Regarding private reviews - a peer sent me this screenshot of the private review options buyers are given after she completed a purchase. This is my first time seeing this, but I noticed that for the question "How would you rate the overall quality of this delivery?" the options are:

1 - Very poor

2 - Below Average

3 - Average

4 - Above Average

5 - Perfect

For those familiar with the private review system has it always taken a rating of "perfect" to net a 5/5 on Quality of Delivery? Or is this part of the new system rollout? 

When I think back to every product or service I've ever purchased in my life there may be one or two I would call perfect, and even then after some time even those perfect products/services left something to be desired. Seems like an unreasonable bar to set. 

Edited March 8 by texvox

[cucinavivace]

5 minutes ago, texvox said:

For those familiar with the private review system has it always taken a rating of "perfect" to net a 5/5 on Quality of Delivery? Or is this part of the new system rollout? 

No. It's always been five, but if I remember correctly five used to be "excellent" (or at one point in the way back machine near the beginning I think it was "awesome"), and the question was "How was your overall experience with this seller?" then a text box asking what you could do better. It evolved to multiple questions later and those question have changed over time, of course, but nobody was ever expected to be "perfect" 100% of the time to earn five stars. "Excellent" was the longest running for five.

Edited March 8 by cucinavivace

[vhskid]

37 minutes ago, nickkold said:

Does anyone know if deleting that badly performing gig (badly performing in private ratings) would make up for the rankings overall?

I've seen several responses from Fiverr representatives on the forum that deleting a gig will affect the 'Success score'. Meaning - the score of the deleted gig will be removed from the overall 'Success score'. And that was confirmed in at least one of the webinars. 
However, I didn't pay attention to what people shared about their "experiments" with this. 

As for the 'Rating' metric - I would assume that since the public reviews were not removed along with the gigs in the "old system", then the impact of private reviews on the overall stars' score will be unchanged with gig deletion as well.

 

 

 

Edited March 8 by vhskid

[cucinavivace]

10 minutes ago, vhskid said:

I've seen several responses from Fiverr representatives on the forum that deleting a gig will affect the 'Success score'. Meaning - the score of the deleted gig will be removed from the overall 'Success score'. And that was confirmed in at least one of the webinars. 
I didn't pay attention to what people shared about their "experiments" with this. 

As for the 'Rating' metric - I would assume that since the public reviews were not removed along with the gigs in the "old system", then the impact of private reviews on the overall stars' score will be unchanged with gig deletion as well.

 

 

Thank you for that. I hope that's right (and stays true) because I think the new success score is really the biggest concern, since it's the thing that keeps you from leveling.