Does Your Niche Have Commercial Intent?
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!
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8 Responses to “Does Your Niche Have Commercial Intent?”
So, if you run the tool for a key phrase, get a high result (0.86104) but your AdSense clickthrough rate is terrible, do you begin to suspect poor ad targeting? It’s a very long tail term.
My first approach would be to determine my primary sources of traffic. The OCI tool is for search engine traffic — i.e., whether someone typing a keyword into a search engine is likely to have commercial intent or not. If your traffic isn’t coming from the SERPS then the commercial intent figure could definitely be lower. The “Digg effect” follows this model, for example — getting a top story on Digg gives you large spikes in traffic but rarely corresponds to a large spike in earnings.
Apart from that, there are the usual tips and techniques for optimizing your AdSense placement and such. But you should also try to see where your visitors are going…. are they visiting other pages on your site? Are they clicking other non-AdSense links? Use a free tool like Google Analytics to figure out why those visitors aren’t converting. It’s surprising what you discover, sometimes!
[...] Does Your Niche Have Commercial Intent? 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. (tags: marketing) [...]
A useful tool indeed, eric, and thanks for writing about it. I just made good use of it for a niche site I am launching. I had what amounted to a suprlus of keywords, virtually all paying well and with relatively good search volume. So which ones to focus on? Quite a difference in the Commercial Intent scores so that should help whittle the task down to size
Interesting tool, Eric. Somewhat predictable, I suspect…it appears to be based largely around the specificity of the query, which makes sense. Still, fun to play around with.
Now if I could just find a good tool for identifying profitable niches worth pursuing, I’d really have something. Then again, if I did, everyone else would use it to beat me to the punch.
Back to the drawing board.
Eric, got your latest email, wanted to check out your adsense templates, clicked on the link, but not found! can you point me in the right direction? Thanks
Interesting tool to have in the bag — but it seems that the results are somewhat predictable. I suppose putting an index value to the result might make this useful for integration into a larger process. Hmmmm . . . .
I’ve been trying to sign up to your newsletter (already subscribed to the blog) but all the links in your email and on the site turn out to be Page Not Found. Where is the sign-up form please?