Three days is the line in the UK, and Google set it, not you.
Every retailer argues about whether to put delivery in the ad. Free delivery, next day, order by ten. The argument is usually settled by whoever feels strongest about it, because nobody in the room has a number. There is a number, and it is a threshold rather than a return: Google will tell you exactly what counts as fast, and will not tell you what being fast is worth.
The bar Google publishes
Google’s free and fast annotation has a published threshold, and in the UK it is three days of handling plus transit combined. You either clear it or you do not.
The annotation is the small line Google can add to a Shopping ad saying delivery is free and fast. You do not write it and you cannot buy it. You qualify for it, and the qualification is arithmetic: handling time plus transit time, measured in days, against a threshold that Google sets per country.
In the United Kingdom that threshold is three days. In Japan and New Zealand it is one. India is two, Brazil is four. The UK sits on the same bar as the United States, Australia and Canada, which means a British retailer is being measured against a standard set for markets with very different geographies, and the standard does not care.
Delivery debates are settled by taste; this one has a line in it. This one has a line in it, published by the company selling the advertising, and your operation is on one side of it or the other.
What nobody publishes
Google says the annotation “can lead to higher click-through rates” and has never published a number. Meta publishes nothing at all connecting delivery information to ad performance. The platforms will tell you how to qualify and not what qualifying earns.
Having set an exact bar, Google declines to say what clearing it does. Its own guidance says the annotation “can lead to higher click-through rates, increase traffic to product pages, and ultimately boost sales”. There is no figure attached, in that page or anywhere else I could find.
Meta is worse, and the gap runs wider than one page. Meta publishes operational requirements about declaring accurate dispatch windows, and nothing whatsoever connecting delivery information to advertising performance. Not a case study, not a directional claim.
Both platforms will tell you how to qualify. Neither will tell you what it is worth.
What Google publishes
- An exact day threshold, per country.
- Precise eligibility rules for handling and transit.
- A qualitative claim: it "can lead to higher click-through rates".
What Google does not
- Any number attached to that claim.
- Any case study with a measured lift.
- Anything at all, in Meta's case.
So the honest answer to “does putting delivery in the ad work” is that the two companies who could answer it with their own data have chosen not to. Anyone quoting you a conversion uplift for delivery messaging is quoting a vendor, and vendors selling delivery software have an obvious reason to like the answer.
What shoppers say they worry about
Delivery-related abandonment fell to 43.2% in 2023 from 53.3% the year before. The top concerns are the delivery failing (53.8%) and the delivery costing (53.5%). Being slow ranks third, at 31.4%.
IMRG has run a UK consumer delivery survey for over a decade, most recently with a thousand UK adults in October 2023. Two findings matter for what goes in the ad.
The first is that delivery is a shrinking objection. The share of shoppers who had abandoned a purchase over a delivery concern fell to 43.2% in 2023, from 53.3% the year before.
The second is the ranking, and it is not the one the copy assumes.
Shoppers worry about delivery failing and delivery costing. Speed comes third.
Baymard’s checkout research points the same way from a different angle. Setting aside people who were only browsing, the largest single reason for abandoning a basket is extra costs being too high, at 40%. Delivery being too slow accounts for 20%.
Two independent surveys, different methods, same ordering: cost and reliability first, speed after. Agency-commissioned research sometimes reverses that and puts speed on top, and those studies are worth reading with the sponsor in mind.
What to put in the ad
Clear three days and take the badge, because it is free and the platform grants it. Below three days, sell on the thing you actually win: a price, a guarantee, a returns promise. Sell on the thing you win.
Three cases, and only one of them is about speed.
The third case is where most of the money goes wrong. A retailer with five-day delivery who advertises delivery is telling a shopper who cares about speed to go elsewhere, and telling one who does not care that speed is the interesting thing about the offer. The claim disqualifies you with one group and bores the other.
Advertising a delivery time you lose on is paying for the privilege of being compared.
There is a second-order version of this that is easier to miss. Delivery reliability, the thing shoppers rank first, is almost never in the copy, because it is hard to say briefly and impossible for the platform to verify. “It will actually turn up” has no badge.
Where this argument is weakest
No UK study exists on delivery wording in ad copy and click-through. The consumer data is nearly three years old and the series that would refresh it has gone quiet. The threshold is the only hard number here, and it measures qualification rather than value.
The evidence here is thinner than the confidence of most articles on the subject. There is no UK-specific or peer-reviewed study on delivery messaging in ad copy and its effect on click-through; what exists is US or global, and mostly commissioned by companies selling delivery services. The IMRG survey is the best UK consumer source available and its fieldwork is from October 2023, with no newer edition published. Royal Mail’s Delivery Matters series, which used to cover this ground, appears to have stopped after 2018.
So the three-day threshold is doing a lot of work in this essay, and it is worth being clear about what it is: a qualification rule, not a result. That number does exist somewhere inside Google, and it has not been published.
Pull your own handling time before the next planning round. It is the half of the promise you control, it is the difference between qualifying and not for most retailers who miss, and unlike the media it does not have to be bought every quarter.