MSN's Commercial Intention Tool Review

Hi Guys,

I had a couple of people recommend that I test out MSN's Online Commercial Intention tool, so I thought I'd check to see if the recommendations that it gives are accurate.

In fact I've heard that a large number of you are using this tool, that's why I thought it was important that someone like me who has a LOT of data to test it with, had a look to see what's really going on. Here's my review.

What is this tool, first of all?

The tool is located at: http://adlab.msn.com/online-commercial-intention/

When you click on the 'query' radio button, you can enter a query in the search box above it.

Then what the tool does is gives you a number between 0 and 1, which shows the probability that the searcher is searching with commercial intent (ie, they are thinking about buying something, rather than just browsing for free information).

Over the last few years, I've collected a LOT of accurate data about which keywords are profitable and which ones aren't. Here's a screenshot of one of my google adwords accounts just so you can see the level of spending I'm talking about:

At first I started playing around with a few dog training keywords and then I looked at some others across different markets, time and time again this tool proves to be accurate about 75-80% of the time.

Yes it does some silly things, like the word "free" it ranks as 0.5 (which is very high according to this tool). Then again, I haven't tested this keyword, but common sense tells me that by itself, the word 'free' wouldn't be selling anything.

So with that in mind, you wouldn't want to put your house on the data you get from it, but you can get a pretty good idea of where to start when you have a bunch of keywords to kick off with.

Here's an example of some of the keywords that I punched in. You'll have to click the smaller image to see the full size image. You'll see that for the 6 different learn guitar keywords, MSN's Online Commercial Intent tool was correct in it's estimates 5 out of 6 times:

Not bad data to get for free. I spent thousands of dollars learning that information from my own tracking.

So anyway, I recommend that if you are serious about pay per click as a method of making money online that you check out this tool.

What are your thoughts on it? I'm interested in hearing what you have to say about it and the results that it gives you.

Mark