Hi Marshall and Gary here,

Here at Small Business Internet Marketing, we love using free tools and software to help small businesses, their owners and advisors as well. Well here is a great tool that is provided free by Microsoft (yes, Microsoft!). It is not new (been around since 2007) but we find most business owners and advisors are not aware of it.

We know that businesses need to determine what keywords and phrases they should be targeting to get visibility in their online marketing via SEO, but the inevitable question is “Is the searcher using these words or phrases because they are looking to buy or are they just seeking information?” If it is the latter, why bother trying to optimise for this (which is a question worthy of its own post- more to come). Well Microsoft has a free tool that is designed to try to address this issue.

It is called “Online Commercial Intention” and can be found at what Microsoft call their “adlab” site at: http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx.  We will use “OCI” for ease of reference (plus that is what everyone online calls it).

When you go to the Microsoft site, you will see a screen that looks like this (well part of it anyway).

We have typed in “paintbrush” as the keyword we want to find out what the OCI is as an example. When you use this tool, make sure you set the button to Query rather than URL (because we are querying what the keyword is, not the site name – but use this URL function if you are thinking of different options for your website). Then hit Go.

So what it shows here is that searches for the word “paintbrush” are likely to be non-commercial in OCI as it shows, and pretty strongly non-commercial (0.76 or 76% likelihood). This stands up to rational logic test we like to apply at Small Business Internet Marketing - the searcher is likely to want to find something out about paintbrushes, not to buy them.

Well let’s try to make it commercial and see what we get:

You will see we added the word “sale” to “paintbrush”. Obviously adding “sale” clearly makes it commercial in intent – the searcher is looking for a sale so therefore they are likely buyers. The result shows an overwhelming OCI of 99%. So it passes the rational logic test here.

So far so good.

The obvious question is how reliable or predictive is the Microsoft OCI. Well, that is for you to form your own opinion. We have certainly found that it keeps passing the rational logic test. The best strategy is to plug in some keywords that relate to your business and see what the result is – by and large you should have a gut feel as to whether it is right or wrong.

Microsoft has done testing in the outcomes from the algorithm that they use in calculating the OCI against real people views. If you want to see a summary of the study, go to the Learn More hyperlink at the bottom of the left hand side of the Microsoft adlab site. Basically, their results show around 90% correlation between the algorithm and real people. Sounds good – but it is not the only secret to online marketing success.

Good luck with using OCI – it really is a useful guide to a searcher’s intention. We will talk about OCI more in future posts from Small Business Internet Marketing.

Your business buddies
Marshall and Gary