Microsoft adCenter Labs have an interesting tool to evaluate whether there is commercial intent implicit in certain keyword phrases. The idea behind the tool is that certain phrases imply that the person using them has an intention to make a purchase. For example, the phrase ‘Nikon prices’ is evaluated as having a 77% chance of being a commercial query, i.e. the person typing the phrase is interested in prices because he wants to find out how much a camera costs in order to buy it. Of course, the person searching for ‘Nikon prices’ might be interested because he recently bought a camera and wanted to see if prices had gone down, or he might be writing a magazine article, in which case he would not have commercial intent. The phrase ‘buy Nikon camera’ has a 96% chance that the search has commercial intent behind it. By adding the ‘buy’ to the phrase makes the searcher’s intentions pretty clear.

The phrase ‘better portrait photography’ is determined to be non-commercial. The searcher may be looking for equipment to improve their portrait photography, but the chances are, they are just looking for tips, tricks or tutorials.

A powerful use of this tool is to determine the commercial intent behind phrases used in pay-per-click advertising campaigns. Assuming that you are selling something on your site and the objective of your PPC advertising campaign is to generate revenue. If you are bidding on a phrase that is not rated as having a ‘commercial intent,’ if someone clicks on your advertisement, the chances are that they do not have commercial intent to buy anything when they get to your site and hence the amount you paid for the click is wasted. So a good technique is to go through your list of PPC phrases to screen out any that do not have commercial intent implicit in them. By doing so, you should be able to significantly improve the ROI of your PPC advertising campaigns.

The adCenter link included above also includes other useful tools including:

• Demographics prediction (the demographics of someone making a query or visiting a certain site)
• Keyword forecast (the number of searches of certain keywords and a prediction of the demographics for the person searching)
• Search volume seasonality forecast

Filed under: Internet advertising, SEO by Martyn Whittaker