Site Search Reporting is a handy feature within Raptor's Search Configurator, designed to provide you with valuable feedback about how many potential customers are using your website's search feature, and what they're searching for.
To access Site Search Reporting, simply navigate to the Site Search Configurator to get an overview of your Search Indexes. At the bottom of each Index, you will find the Reporting button.
API Calls Graph
Click on this button to open the Site Search Report for that index. This will provide you with three specific pieces of data, starting with the central API Calls bar-graph.
🔍NOTE: The API Call display is site-wide, and not limited to a single Search Index. You will thus get the same statistics here regardless of which Search Index you clicked Reporting on. The remaining features, however, are specific to the selected Search Index.
This bar-graph will simply show how much use your site's search-feature is seeing. It can be configured to display a variety of intervals and units, depending on your needs, from day-by-day to boiling it all down to monthly numbers. A simple but useful, datapoint concerning the way customers interact with your website.
An API call does not equal an actual search performed by a user. Depending on the implementation, one key-stroke will equal one API call, and navigation to product list pages and product details pages might also generate API calls. Follow the graph over time to get an idea of the general search trend - is the use of your site search increasing or decreasing?
Numbers are collected from the day the first search index was generated on your account.
Top Results
To the right of this is the Top Result display, with two tabs - Top Zero Results and Top Searches - both displaying the top 100 results since the day the index was created or since the lists were last reset. The former will display the most popular searches on your site that currently return zero results - and the utility of this datapoint should be obvious. If there's a demand, you want to make sure it finds a supply, after all! Often, however, this may simply be an issue of terminology and phrasing - people searching for something using a common vernacular and failing to find what they're looking for because its 'actual' name is more technical. Thus, this list can be useful for updating tags or synonyms on relevant products, to make sure they're actually found by those looking for them.
Top Searches, meanwhile, does exactly what it says on the tin - showing you the most commonly-searched terms on your site, which naturally also has great utility. Does the popularity of a search correspond with the sales of that item? If not, there may be some issue with that product, or its price, that's driving customers to keep searching elsewhere. If a certain search-term is suddenly spiking in popularity, there may be a trend there that can be exploited with a well-timed sale.
For both Top Zero Results and Top Searches, you have the option of removing results that are considered irrelevant, by clicking on the X next to each - as well as resetting the stats altogether with the Reset button. This might be a good idea if you've recently overhauled tagging or otherwise made changes to likely search-results, since this will invalidate much of the prior data.
Data for the Top Searches lists
The Site Search Reporting view is, as you can see, a small but potentially invaluable corner of Raptor's Site Search - make the most of it, and you will only find success.