Delivery confidence values (CVs) are scores that Google calculates to represent the accuracy of the delivery speeds and costs that Google serves to users versus the delivery speeds and costs available on your website, order-tracking history and other sources.
How CVs affect your product listings
Ranking: CVs can affect your placement on Google Search and Ads by influencing ranking models. If you make fast delivery promises that have high CVs to shoppers, your products may be shown more prominently than products with slower speeds, with lower CVs or without a delivery speed.
User experience triggering: High CVs help you to trigger certain user-facing annotations like 'Free X-day' and the Top Quality Store badge, and to participate in speed-driven user experiences like 'Get it fast'.
Data suppression: Low CVs might lead to delivery speed or cost data being removed from your product listings or replaced with other available data that has higher CVs. This is to protect shoppers from viewing drastically different delivery speeds and costs on Google compared to your website.
How it works
To generate delivery CVs, Google first gathers an understanding of your delivery promises and performance. We do that primarily through crawling the speeds and costs available on your website, such as on your checkout, product details pages and policy pages. For selected merchants, we also collect order-tracking signals data, either directly through the Shopping Content API or through partners like ShipStation, Manhattan Associates, Simprosys and CedCommerce. We may also gather data from other sources.
Then, when deciding what to show to our users, Google compares the various delivery speeds and costs that we could show from your account and offer-level configurations, crawled data and modelled estimates to the understanding that we have developed about your delivery promises and performance. For each speed value and each cost value, we assign a CV between 0% and 100%, where 0% means that the speed or cost is totally inconsistent with that developed understanding and 100% means it is totally consistent. For clarity, the closer that a CV is to 100%, the 'higher' the delivery CV that Google generates.
Granularity
Your delivery speeds and costs, however, may not be the same across a given country, across the applicable catalogue of items or across the delivery service levels available there. So, as Google gathers more data about your delivery promises and performance, we create more granular CVs by region, by delivery cost and speed.
As an example, imagine that you dispatch items from Irvine, CA, using UPS Ground. Further, a user's Google configuration claims that a specific item will reach them in Utah in two days. From the perspective of the whole country, only 40% of orders are delivered in two days or less. So, Google would assign that speed a low CV.
However, if Google can gather enough data about your delivery performance, we can split the country into regions. Within the south-west region that contains both Irvine and Utah, over 90% of packages are delivered within two days. So, that same promise would have a high CV.
Improving your delivery CVs
You can take the following steps to improve your delivery CVs:
- Provide detailed delivery configurations on Google, including speeds and costs that vary by region.
- Periodically compare your delivery speeds and costs on Google to those on your site, and ensure that they are as close as possible. Allow Google to crawl your website by enabling StoreBot crawling and removing as many traffic restrictions for the StoreBot user agent as you're comfortable doing. You can find instructions for unblocking StoreBot here.
- Provide order-tracking signals, either by linking a supported partner account or directly through the Content API for Shopping.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between delivery CVs and the Shop Quality programme?
Delivery confidence values focus on the consistency of your configured delivery speeds and costs with those shown on your website or from order-tracking history, or both. The Shop Quality programme assesses the experience that you provide as a retailer across several dimensions, only one of which is delivery. It focuses on how your offered shopping experience compares competitively to similar retailers. Learn more about the Shop Quality programme.
How can I check my own CV?
At this time, you cannot check your own CVs.
Are CVs only used for free listings or Shopping ads?
What happens if I have low CVs?
Low CVs mean that users are viewing information on Google that's different to what they are seeing on your website or what they experience in real life, or both. If you have low CVs, you're not likely to trigger performance-driving user experiences or to receive any ranking benefits. Also, with low CVs, Google may even actively suppress your delivery speeds and costs.