Completeness
Completeness measures whether each product has every value its category needs, such as a capacity on a fridge freezer, counted one category at a time.
- Data completeness
What it means
Completeness is the share of products that carry every value their category needs. It is one of three measures of product data quality, alongside consistency and confidence, which is how much of the data is traced to a source.
Measure it per category, not across the whole file. A blank energy rating matters on a fridge freezer and means nothing on a door seal. The filters on your own category pages make the best first list of key values, because shoppers use exactly those to narrow a range.
Count placeholders as missing. Values such as N/A, TBC or absent look filled in to a spreadsheet’s blank count and empty to a shopper.
Think of it like this
Packing for a trip works the same way. Sun cream matters for a beach week and not for a ski weekend, so each case gets its own list.
For example
A fridge freezer has a title, a price, an image and a description, but no capacity. It clears a channel’s basic requirements and still fails completeness, because capacity is what shoppers compare fridge freezers on. A door seal with no capacity is complete.
Why it matters
Channels only set a floor: Google Merchant Center requires seven attributes of every product, including a title, an image link and a price. Without them, a product cannot be served in ads or free listings.1 A product can clear that floor and still lack the one value a shopper filters on, so it never shows up when they filter.
Not to be confused with
Sources
- Google Merchant Center Help. Product data specification.
- Akeneo Help Center. Follow your product’s completeness.