What Etsy Marketplace Insights Shows

Marketplace Insights is Etsy’s own search report, inside your shop. It is the place Etsy will show you buyer search terms. It is not a column a third-party app can fetch and relabel as “Etsy volume.”

What Etsy says it shows

Smarter Selling Starts With Marketplace Insights says the tool uses real Etsy search data to show what buyers are looking for, how often they are searching, and how many items are available for a search term. The same article tells you to start with 15 free weekly searches, or unlimited searches on Etsy Plus.

The 2025 holiday checklist repeats the allowance in one sentence: every seller gets 15 free keyword searches per week, and Etsy Plus subscribers get unlimited access. The path it gives is Shop Manager, then Stats, then Marketplace Insights.

That “how many items are available” line is a competition count Etsy is willing to show you. It is still not a difficulty score, and it is still not something NicheKite receives on the API.

What to do with a number you actually have

If you run one of those 15 searches, you have a figure you can cite. Paste it on the keyword screen and leave it labelled as your Marketplace Insights export. How our data works says the cell stays a dash when you do not paste one. Does Etsy show search volume? is the longer version of why other tools print a number there anyway.

I would spend the free searches on phrases you are about to put in a title or a tag, not on a brainstorm of fifty ideas. Fifteen a week is a small budget. The keyword research workflow is the order I use around that budget: listing count first, your own Insights number only when you have it, difficulty marked as an estimate.