About Insights searches

You have two different search options in Insights. You can use a quick search to get a snapshot of how people are talking about your topic at a given point in time. Or, use a saved search to see how people talk about your topic over time, and discover important trends in your search data.

You can run an unlimited number of quick searches, but no one else can see them. Your organization has a fixed number of saved searches, but all your team members can see them. Saved searches give you more data on your results, such as benchmarking, and the ability to customize some metrics.

The following table compares what you get with quick searches and saved searches.

Insights quick search versus saved search

Feature	Quick search	Saved search
Number of searches allowed	Unlimited	Limit per organization
Historical data	30 days	12 months
Custom date range
Filters
Benchmarking
Customizable metrics
Mention tagging
Reports
Alerts

When to use a quick search or a saved search

Think of a quick search as a preview. You can run a quick search to get an idea of how people are talking about your topic, or to figure out which search terms will give you the data you need.

If your quick search returns mentions that aren’t relevant, refine your search terms and operators, then run it again. When you're satisfied that your search query is returning the kind of mentions you want, save it.

Saved searches let you track online conversations over time. Insights updates the results with the most recent data and shows you historical trends whenever you go back to it. You can also export your search results and share them with team members, set up alerts for significant changes in your results, and much more.

Search limits

Quick search mentions go back 30 days. Saved search mentions go back 12 months, so you can see right away how your search query results have trended over the past year. Each Hootsuite organization has an allotted number of saved searches, and the limit applies across all teams with access to Insights.

Searches don’t have a hard limit on mentions. But Insights automatically applies a fixed sample rate to extremely high-volume searches, where the 85th percentile for daily volume is more than 5,000 mentions.

For example, if the 85th percentile for daily query volume is 10,000, Insights applies a 50% sampling rate to the entire query. Days with a true volume of 60,000 will have a sample of 30,000 mentions, and days with a true volume of 10,000 will have a sample of 5,000 mentions.

Regardless of the fixed sample rate, Insights never stores more than 100,000 mentions for a single day. The metrics and data for your searches always show the actual full volume of conversation.