Wondering whether your website is set up to sell? Here is a handy tool that can help you to measure its sales orientation. You can access it at MSN’s adLabs.

Websites tend to fall into three categories. Social, informational and transactional. The intention of this tool is detect the customer intention to either acquire information or purchase online. It is based upon their search queries or recently visited URLs.

MSN built its algorithm by reviewing the accuracy of the tool using human evaluators. The results demonstrate a 90% accuracy rate in determining both commercial and non-commercial intent for a given list of query terms.

How to use the Online Commercial Intention Tool.

By entering a query, it can be used to find keywords that are commercial but have low ad coverage. From a search engine marketing point of view, it is useful to find these keywords as they have low bid density (low price), but high commercial value. Similarly, for an advertizing engine, this can help increase ad relevancy by displaying fewer ads if a keyword has low online commercial intent.

To illustrate the tool in action, I enter after shave as a query. Common sense tells us that after shave is most likely a product someone would be looking to purchase. Here is what the tool returns:

Conversely, I entered a news query. Chances are high that someone entering news as a search query is looking for information, right? Here is what the tool says:

Finally, I can enter a website’s URL and the tool will indicate whether it thinks that the website is informational or transactional. This could be important if you’re hoping to sell online but your visitors don’t perceive your website to be transactional. This is what the tool says when I query News.

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