Microsoft Adcenter Labs Tools – Why Bother?

07 June 2007 Written By: Jim KukralComments: Comments

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Have you tried the Microsoft Adcenter Labs tools yet? I just played around with them after reading this blog post ‘Microsoft is really trying‘. Want to know what I learned?

kukral_adcenter.png

First I tried a tool that is so sexily named Detecting Online Commercial Intention. In other words?

Microsoft adCenter can detect your customers’ intention to purchase products or acquire information.

For example, if a customer searches for LCD monitor, it is likely that he or she wants to purchase an LCD monitor; therefore, the online commercial intention is strong, with a confidence level greater than 0.5.

Webpage searches display two levels of commercial intention: informational and transactional.

The Online Commercial Intent (OCI) demo calculates commercial intent on a scale of 0 to 1. Any site whose score is greater than 0.5 is considered to have commercial intent.

However, some websites that have commercial intent might produce a score of less than 0.5. If you feel that this is the case with your website, we encourage you to contact us to help improve our scoring mechanism.

So, does JimKukral.com have “commercial intent”? I guess not.

kukral_adcenter_intent.png

The next tool I tried was one called demographic prediction.

You can use adCenter technology to predict a customer’s age, gender, and other demographic information according to his or her online behavior-that is, from search queries and webpage views. General Distribution is the breakdown by age of MSN Search users-based on a one-month MSN Search log-regardless of search query used. Predicted Distribution is the predicted breakdown by age of MSN Search users for a single search query, based on the adLabs predictive model.

Result for JimKukral.com?

kukral_adcenterdemo.png

The keyword group detection tool seemed worthless to me. Why would I use this over other tools?

There are plenty of other tools on the page you might find useful. However, until MS makes a serious push at giving Google a run for their money, I ask you, does it matter what we think of Microsoft search?

Right now, it doesn’t.

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  • Wow, I haven't seen these tools yet but will go over and check them out after I finish adding this comment. ;)

    The demographic data is going to be very very helpful, as I've got a few sites where it great: adding that data to media kits and info I distribute to potential advertisers will help convince them to advertise on the site.

    What's really interesting is the fact that there's a lot of 25-34 year olds visiting your site--and apparently it's primarily male (where are all the female web geeks?)
  • I guess I do not fill in with the average demographic of your site :-) Something I find very interesting is the thought of being able to advertise at people in certain jobs and incomes - I think that will create real opportunities for advertisers, and further cement the web as a million times better for advertising than offline.
  • Mar
    I used their mispelling tool and generated some greate words for an adcenter campaign. They performed very well - until the "yahoos" at msn rejected them! The thing is, very similar sites are still running under those keywords. I'm not a happy adcenter camper.
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