We’ve spent the last couple of blog posts discussing the MSN AdCenter Labs beta tools and how you might use them for marketing purposes. Today we are going to finalize that discussion by looking at one more of the tools, the Online Commercial Intention Director. This tool gives a value for a search query or a web site from 0 to 1 that is an indication of the degree of the visitor’s intention to purchase products or acquire information. For queries, it returns a single value. For URL’s, it returns three values for three different OCI (Online Commercial Intent) types: NonCommercial, Commercial-Informational, and Commercial-Transactional.
There is little information about how this tool works, but it’s an interesting idea that could be a valuable research tool. For instance, you could type in different search terms and use the result (the Probability for Commercial Query) to get an indication of how strong each search term is in terms of intent to make a purchase.
For example, let’s say you sell wool clothing on your web site, such as sweaters. Typing in “wool” returns a Probability for Commercial Query of .65227. Buy typing in “wool sweaters” returns a Probability for Commercial Query of .79378. So the wool sweaters search indicates a greater chance that the person performing the search will engage in a transaction.
In testing the tool for URL’s, I tried my own web site: https://workmedia.net, and got the following results:
Probabilities for Each OCI Type:
NonCommercial: 0.82111
Commercial-Informational: 0.1572
Commercial-Transactional: 2.1683e-002
Our site is a commercial site since we use it to represent our business and services, but it is also very information-heavy, which perhaps is why it ranks so high for “NonCommercial”. When I ran the test with the URL “walmart.com”, it still only showed a Commercial-Transactional value of 0.32238. So the tool doesn’t seem to be all that accurate yet at guaging the commercial intent of web sites, as opposed to search queries.
For help implementing a state-of-the-art search engine marketing campaign for your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or info@workmedia.net.