Comments on: Does Your Niche Have Commercial Intent?

By: Isobel

Isobel — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:45:06 +0000

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?

By: ArticleFoundationPro

ArticleFoundationPro — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:03:53 +0000

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 . . . .

By: kim

kim — Thu, 22 May 2008 04:22:39 +0000

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

By: Chuck

Chuck — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:19:19 +0000

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.

By: Dave Starr

Dave Starr — Mon, 19 May 2008 12:00:34 +0000

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

By: links for 2008-05-18 | Cosmos

links for 2008-05-18 | Cosmos — Sun, 18 May 2008 01:32:58 +0000

[...] 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) [...]

By: Eric Giguere

Eric Giguere — Thu, 15 May 2008 13:57:19 +0000

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!

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 15 May 2008 13:37:25 +0000

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.