Every search on your site is a visitor telling you, in their own words, what they came for. The Tracksies > Fetchie > Insights tab collects those words into something you can act on — most usefully, the list of things people looked for and couldn’t find.
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Picking a Period
Three buttons at the top switch the trailing window: Last 7 days, Last 30 days, Last 90 days. The 30-day view is the default. Everything on the tab reflects the chosen window.
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Total Searches
The headline number: how many searches visitors ran in the period. A steady rise here usually just means more traffic; a sudden spike is worth a glance at the top searches to see what everyone suddenly wants.
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Top Searches
The most-searched queries, each with two numbers:
- Searches — how many times it was searched
- Avg results — how many results it found, on average
The combination is the useful part. A popular search with healthy results is your content working. A popular search averaging one or two results is a topic your visitors care about more than your site currently does — a strong hint about what to write, stock, or link more prominently.
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Searches That Found Nothing
What people looked for and couldn’t find — your content gap list.
This is the most valuable table on the page. Every row is demand you already have and content you don’t. Common patterns and what they suggest:
- A product or topic you genuinely don’t cover — the clearest possible “should we?” signal, straight from visitors
- A synonym you don’t use — visitors say “returns”, your page says “refund policy”. The content exists; the words don’t match. Adding the visitor’s word to the page fixes it
- Typos of popular terms — the Broad strictness mode in Search settings is forgiving of half-typed words and plurals, and often shrinks this list on its own
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What’s Counted (and What Isn’t)
A few deliberate choices keep the numbers honest:
- Your own searches aren’t logged. Searches by logged-in administrators are excluded, so testing and day-to-day admin work never pollute the data
- Paging isn’t searching. A visitor clicking through to page two of the same results counts as one search, not two
- Only real queries are logged. A search that’s empty once cleaned up (only filler words, single characters) isn’t recorded
If the tab says “No searches logged yet”, that’s the quiet truth: data appears once visitors start searching.
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What’s Stored, and For How Long
Each logged search stores the cleaned-up search words, how many results it found, which strictness mode was active, and the date. Nothing about the visitor — no account, no address, no browser details. Ever.
Visitors may type personal information into a search box, so the log is also retention-capped: entries older than your chosen period (30, 90 or 365 days, set under Keep entries for further down this same tab) are deleted automatically each day. We don’t know what your local laws and regulations require, but we hope to give you the tools to make it easier. The full detail lives on the Privacy page.
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The Same Numbers, Delivered to You
You don’t have to remember to visit the tab:
- The weekly digest email sends the trailing week’s volume, top searches and content gaps to your inbox
- The Fetchie this week widget on your WordPress dashboard shows the same week-at-a-glance numbers every time you log in
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Related
- Privacy — the search log in full detail
- The weekly digest — insights by email
- Search settings — strictness and results per page