WHAT, you say! Have you gone out of your mind? My answer: No…I may not be out of my mind, but I AM thinking out of the box on this one.

There is a tool called the “Commercial Intention” tool. It is made available by Microsoft adCenter Labs. Now the purpose of this tool is help you decide the commercial intent of a searcher’s input into a search engine.

You can use this tool by placing a query into the box and hitting “Go”. The tool will return a calculation that measures the searcher’s commercial intent – in other words…what are the chances that the searcher who enters this query will be a searcher who has the intent of spending any money.

Some examples:
If someone types in “bass lures” the tool returns an estimated commercial intention probability of 0.81. This means that the tool “thinks” that there is an 81% chance that the one who searches for “bass lures” has an interest in buying something.

If someone types in “trouble catching fish” the tool returns an estimated NON-commercial intention probability of 0.84. The tool thinks that there is an 84% chance that this particular searcher has NO intention of buying anything.

Now, here is the problem: There are many gurus instructing their students to use this tool to help them decide the value of keywords – teaching that if there is little commercial intent, then don’t bid on that keyword — but they are leaving out one HUGE important piece to the puzzle…and that is the estimated CPC (cost per click).

The value of a keyword is NOT measured in commercial intent. It is measured in cost per conversions of that keyword…period!

I went to Google’s external keyword tool and found the following information:

“bass fishing lures” – estimated $0.89 cost per click – estimated ad position 1-3
“trouble catching fish” – estimated $0.05 cost per click – estimated ad position 1-3

So now the question becomes…do I want to bid on the keyword “trouble catching fish”. Of course, I do. I am going to at least try it and see whether I can get any conversions. In fact, I know that I can afford to fail a LOT more with this keyword than the other one.

How can I afford to fail more? Let’s assume I have a decent conversion ratio on my website and can somehow make the $0.89 great-commercial-intent keyword work for me from a profitability standpoint. That being the case, I can afford to fail 18 times as much with the “trouble catching fish” keyword! I get that with an easy formula: CPC (cost per click) that I can afford to spend / CPC of non-commercial keyword

In this example: So $0.89 (assuming this is the amount I can afford to bid and still make money) / $0.05 = ~18.

So what have we learned? Many PPC management companies don’t even bother with “non-commercial-intent” keywords. That means there is less competition on these words. Since there is less competition, the cost to bid on them and get top position (1-3) ranking is lower as well. And I don’t care that my sales conversion percentage on these keywords is lower — as long as the overall cost per conversion is near what I can afford, I am happy.

Now the only thing I need is MORE of these keywords that I can pick up for little or nothing. Let my competitors duke it out over more competitive keywords that have higher volumes of searches, but I will make up my volume by having LOTS of low-converting, but much cheaper keywords.

Now, I am not saying this strategy works all the time. There are times when you definitely should NOT use it…and you should definitely structure your search campaign in a fashion so that these lower-converting keywords do not bring your higher-converting keywords’ CTRs down. (There is a certain way to do this.)

In conclusion, give me customers who are not necessarily looking to buy…just give me LOTS of them. And if I can get them cheap enough…I can afford to fail more, so long as I can still make a profit. Yes, sometimes PPC management can be counter-intuitive and downright complicated, but the best PPC managers love this game and thrive on making their customer’s PPC campaigns profitable.