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MSN’s Commercial Intention Tool Review

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

posted by affilorama

Hi Guys,

I had a couple of people recommend that I test out MSN’s new Online Commercial Intention tool, www.affilorama.com/oci, so I thought I’d check to see if the recommendations that it gives are accurate.

In fact I’ve heard that a large number of you are using this tool, that’s why I thought it was important that someone like me who has a LOT of data to test it with, had a look to see what’s really going on. Here’s my review.

What is this tool, first of all?

The tool is located at: http://www.affilorama.com/oci

When you click on the ‘query’ radio button, you can enter a query in the search box above it.

Then what the tool does is gives you a number between 0 and 1, which shows the probability that the searcher is searching with commercial intent (ie, they are thinking about buying something, rather than just browsing for free information).

Screenshot showing MSN's Commercial Intention Tool

Over the last few years, I’ve collected a LOT of accurate data about which keywords are profitable and which ones aren’t. Here’s a screenshot of one of my google adwords accounts just so you can see the level of spending I’m talking about:

Screenshot of adwords spending

At first I started playing around with a few dog training keywords and then I looked at some others across different markets, time and time again this tool proves to be accurate about 75-80% of the time.

Yes it does some silly things, like the word "free" it ranks as 0.5 (which is very high according to this tool). Then again, I haven’t tested this keyword, but common sense tells me that by itself, the word ‘free’ wouldn’t be selling anything.

So with that in mind, you wouldn’t want to put your house on the data you get from it, but you can get a pretty good idea of where to start when you have a bunch of keywords to kick off with.

Here’s an example of some of the keywords that I punched in. You’ll have to click the smaller image to see the full size image. You’ll see that for the 6 different learn guitar keywords, MSN’s Online Commercial Intent tool (www.affilorama.com/oci) was correct in it’s estimates 5 out of 6 times:

MSN's Commercial Intention test results

Not bad data to get for free. I spent thousands of dollars learning that information from my own tracking.

So anyway, I recommend that if you are serious about pay per click as a method of making money online that you check out this tool.

No I’m not an affiliate of this tool (it’s free), I’m just recommending it via this redirect here because the url for it is quite long and hard to remember: http://www.affilorama.com/oci

What are your thoughts on it? I’m interested in hearing what you have to say about it and the results that it gives you.

Mark


9 Comments »

Comment by Aaron Wakling

May 20, 2008 @ 8:30 pm

Good Blog. I will continue reading it in the future. Nice layout too. Aaron Wakling

Comment by Tavis

May 20, 2008 @ 8:47 pm

Great link Mark… and very interesting indeed. now all they have to do is come up with a bulk keyword analysis tool so you can run a whole bunch of keywords through and then spit out a sorted list ;)

Comment by Sean Morrissy

May 20, 2008 @ 9:01 pm

Nice find Mark, I’ve never heard of it before.

And like you, I spend a bit of cash trying to find the best keywords. I’ll definitely be giving it a go for my next adwords campaign :)

Sean

Comment by Marcus Mendel

May 20, 2008 @ 9:02 pm

Great tool Mark.

Will let you know how it all goes.

Marcus =0)

Comment by Alex

May 20, 2008 @ 9:13 pm

I do not know if the data is accurate or not.However if it is even 60- 70% close that would be awesome…In all probability I would have come to find out about this tool…but I came to know about it here first..Thanks!

Comment by Mike

May 20, 2008 @ 10:26 pm

Mark, 700k for ONLY 2 weeks. Is that correct? Mike

From Mark: It was 3 years, not sure what you mean :)

Comment by Affilorama

May 20, 2008 @ 11:49 pm

Sorry to anyone if your blog post got deleted, I accidentally deleted a few real posts from people when I was deleting spam.

regards,
mark

Comment by 366 FREE Internet Marketing Secrets

May 21, 2008 @ 12:53 am

Hi - I agree. With all of these online tools you need to double check and cross verify. I recently invested around 10 hours work based on the volume of searches and amount of competition for a certain search term. Now I have ‘conquered’(40% of page 1) that particular serach term, I can see from my stats that the number of searchers is going to be no where near what was predicted in the first place.

Still, having said all this, I would always recommend market research as the first step in building any Internet business and I think the Microsoft tool is a valuable addition to the arsenal.

Good post, Mark.

All the best, Allen

Comment by Rich

May 22, 2008 @ 6:05 pm

Hi Mark, I am still new to this, however, I started using another tool you recommended with good success and this is another great tool to use as a comparison. Thanks again, Rich

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