There’s a neat tool available from Microsoft (of all places!) called Detecting Online Commercial Intention (OCI for short) that is useful to AdSense publishers (or affiliate marketers) looking to choose the right kind of niche to target.

OCI is very simple to use. You give it either a query (a keyword or phrase) or a URL. It then analyzes your input and gives you its verdict as to whether or not someone searching for that keyword/phrase or visiting that page is likely to have “commercial intent” — i.e., they want to purchase something. The tool returns the commercial intent as a probability between 0 and 1 — the closer to 1 the value, the higher the commercial intent. Let’s try a few examples. Click on the links below to open a new window and see the live OCI results:

• adsense: Not surprisingly (to me), “adsense” scores really low on the scale at 0.13579, i.e. a 13.6% commercial intent.
• binoculars: High commercial intent of 0.95517. Makes sense… if you’re searching for binoculars you’re probably thinking of buying a set.
• learn spanish: If you’re an affiliate looking to promote something like Rocket Spanish, you’ll be disappointed to learn that people looking to learn spanish are probably looking for free information given the CI of only 0.19171. Consider targeting a different phrase.

Of course, OCI is just a tool and it’s not perfect. Don’t base your decisions solely on OCI scores. Common sense comes into play, too, and where your traffic comes from. It’s fun to play with, anyhow!