Shipping Confidence Values (CVs) are scores that Google calculates to represent the accuracy of the shipping speeds and costs that Google serves to users versus the shipping 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 shipping 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 shipping speed or cost data being removed from your product listings or replaced with other available data that have higher CVs. This is to protect shoppers from viewing drastically different shipping speeds and costs on Google compared to your website.
How it works
To generate shipping CVs, Google first gathers an understanding of your shipping promises and performance. We do that primarily through crawling the speeds and costs available on your website such as on your checkout, product detail pages, and policy pages. For select 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 shipping speeds and costs that we could show from your account and offer-level configurations, crawled data, and modeled estimates to the understanding we have developed about your shipping 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 a CV is to 100%, the “higher” shipping CV Google generates.
Granularity
Your shipping speeds and costs, however, may not be the same across a given country, across their catalog of items, or across their shipping service levels. So, as Google gathers more data about your shipping promises and performance, we create more granular CVs by region, by shipping cost and speed.
As an example, imagine that you ship their items from Irvine, CA using UPS Ground. Further, their Google configuration claims a specific item will reach a user in Utah in 2 days. From the perspective of the whole country, only 40% of orders are delivered in 2 days or less. So, Google would assign that speed a low CV.
However, if Google can gather enough data about your shipping performance, we can split the country into regions. Within the southwest region that contains both Irvine and Utah, over 90% of packages are delivered in 2 days. So, that same promise would have a high CV.
Improving your shipping CVs
You can take the following steps to improve your shipping CVs:
- Provide detailed shipping configurations on Google, including speeds and costs that vary by region.
- Periodically compare your shipping speeds and costs on Google to those on your site, ensure 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 Shipping Confidence Values and the Store Quality program?
Shipping Confidence Values focuses on the consistency of your configured shipping speeds and costs with those shown on your website or from order tracking history, or both. The Store Quality program assesses the experience you provide as a retailer across several dimensions, of which shipping is one. It focuses on how competitive your offered shopping experience compares to similar retailers. Learn more about Store Quality Program.
How can I check my own confidence value?
At this time, you cannot check your own confidence values.
Is the CV only used for Free listings or Shopping ads?
What happens if I have low CVs?
Low CVs mean that users are viewing different information on Google than they are 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 shipping speeds and costs.