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What happened to Microsoft's commercial intention tool?

by Ian Varnava
7 replies
Hey Warriors,

Anyone else having this issue, or is it just my computer? (I highly doubt it).

Microsoft's commercial intent tool has been giving a 404 for at least a good two weeks now. It doesn't make or break my decision to enter a niche but it was definitely a nice 'reassurance' tool to have around when doing keyword research and buying tens of domains at once.

It used to go down here and there before, but seems like now it's down for good.

Anyone know what gives? :confused:
#commercial #happened #intention #microsoft #tool
  • Profile picture of the author Joe Motion
    Was there really any weight behind that commercial intention tool? How did they get there ratings?

    I always thought it was the sort of thing you could work out in your head.. just common sense... ?
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    • Profile picture of the author Ian Varnava
      Originally Posted by Joe Motion View Post

      Was there really any weight behind that commercial intention tool? How did they get there ratings?

      I always thought it was the sort of thing you could work out in your head.. just common sense... ?
      Yes, like I said, it didn't make or break my decision to go after keywords. I've bought plenty of domains and gone after keywords based on my head, against what the tool said. However, majority of the time it was fairly accurate (in my experience). If it said a keyword wasn't a buying keyword, it usually wasn't as heavily geared towards buying. If it said it was, it did convert higher.

      As far as how they got their data was (don't know this for fact, but this is what I always understood) via different calculations amongst different applications on the Microsoft enterprise... such as user behavior on Bing or MSN AdCenter, etc.

      I freak out if there's a little 404 error on a small website of mine and it's just weird that a company like Microsoft doesn't seem to be paying attention to it, is what I'm more concerned about. All of their audience intelligence tools are down. I think they probably got sick of IM'ers hogging their resources and software like Market Samurai repeatedly doing queries to it. Lol
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  • Profile picture of the author Blogacious
    I just called someone at the AdCenter at Microsoft and she had never even heard of the Online Commercial Intent tool--or the adlabs website! And it was like instructing a little child to get her to understand and to report it to her higher-ups, that AT LEAST Microsoft should take this website down, if they are no longer going to provide the tool(s).

    Even the Contact Us form doesn't work... how unprofessional of MICROSOFT to leave this up!! Audience Intelligence: Microsoft adCenter Labs
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    • Profile picture of the author Newman8r
      Originally Posted by Blogacious View Post

      I just called someone at the AdCenter at Microsoft and she had never even heard of the Online Commercial Intent tool--or the adlabs website! And it was like instructing a little child to get her to understand and to report it to her higher-ups, that AT LEAST Microsoft should take this website down, if they are no longer going to provide the tool(s).

      Even the Contact Us form doesn't work... how unprofessional of MICROSOFT to leave this up!! Audience Intelligence: Microsoft adCenter Labs
      wow... that's crazy!! what a joke.

      I've always had better results just semi-manually checking keywords (analyzing the top 20 results and feeding it into an excel formula I have). But yeah... weird stuff.
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  • Profile picture of the author webapex
    Sadly with the passing of the Commercial Intent tool and Google's Wonder wheel, I'm worthless days when I feel no creative.

    The closest thing I know of for gauging commercial intent is the competition column in google's keyword tool (this assumes the other guys know better than you)

    Have you seen the resources directory SEOmoz has compiled, looks pretty good, it might be a good place to check for new tools, I never heard of Ontology Finder before.

    The Internet Marketing Handbook | SEOmoz
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  • Profile picture of the author tpw
    I went in about 6 months ago and found Bing's API was written to completely take away the ability of marketers to use the tool for keyword research.

    You can do a lot with that API, but nothing that is important to marketers in regards to keyword research.

    I decided then that Microsoft/Bing definitely wanted to close their resources to IM/SEO types.

    So I am not surprised if the Commercial Intent Tool is gone. And I am certain that Microsoft doesn't want to share information with people like us.
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  • Profile picture of the author AndyT
    The commercial intent tool functionality is now inside an Excel add-in that can be downloaded from this page:

    Microsoft Advertising Intelligence

    Once installed, Excel has a new tab that looks like this:


    I have yet to use it, so I can't say if it's better or worse than the old tool.
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