Your search statistics: which ones to watch

Zero-result rate, first

This is the only indicator that directly measures lost money. Every search returning nothing is a customer who wanted to buy and left.

There's no universal ideal figure, but there is an order of magnitude: above 15%, something is wrong with your vocabulary or your catalog. Below 5%, your engine is doing its job.

Above all, watch the trend rather than the absolute value. A sudden rise almost always signals an event: an import that went wrong, a range withdrawn, or a campaign bringing in an audience with different vocabulary.

Most frequent searches, next

This list tells you what your customers come looking for — not what you think they're looking for. The gap between the two is often instructive.

Two concrete uses. The top rows deserve a manual check: type them yourself and see whether the right products come up. And if a term recurs without matching your vocabulary, that's a synonym to create.

Errors to handle

This one isn't about search but about integration: malformed requests, invalid keys, exceeded quotas. It should stay at zero.

If it doesn't, the detail tells you which call is failing. It's usually a misconfigured module, or a change on your site that wasn't carried through.

What these numbers don't say

Search volume is a measure of quantity, not quality. It rises when your traffic rises, and also when your customers have to try several times — which is a bad sign.

Always read it alongside the zero-result rate. Many searches with few failures means a search bar that works. Many searches with many failures means the opposite.

A reading rhythm

Once a week is enough, and five minutes is enough: the zero-result rate and its trend, the top unanswered searches, a glance at errors.

The rest — segmentation, products, period comparisons — is for when you have a specific question. It isn't routine reading, and trying to watch everything weekly is the surest way to watch nothing at all.