Microsoft has had several very powerful SEO tools in their adCenter Labs for audience intelligence such as my favorite their Online Commercial Intention tool.

For those not familiar with what the tool does did, it displays the two levels of commercial intent: informational and transactional. If you’re involved in affiliate marketing or selling any product online, this tool is was very useful in identifying the commercial value of keywords.

I used Microsoft’s tool religiously when I oversaw the Radarbusters network, here are just a few examples;

The keyword “radar detectors” has had an OCI value of only 28%, which showed that the people using this term were more interested in going to websites that were informational about radar detectors than buying one.

In comparison the keyword “Escort 8500” has had an OCI value of 99%, signifying that the people who used this search term were buyers, as they were going to websites that sold this device.

Now to be honest with everyone, when keyword tools such as Market Samurai were developed, which basically mined all the data from Google and MSN into one CSV file, there was really was no need to go to Microsoft’s adCenter anymore.

However since mid March, I’ve noticed that Market Samurai had not been populating the data in the OCI column of their spreadsheets and during their last update they removed the OCI option from their program entirely.

So I decided to take a trip back to Microsoft’s adCenter’s Labs to find out what was happening on their end.

I clicked on their link for their OCI tool and got a 404 page

I clicked on their Demographics Predation link and got another 404 page

I clicked on their contact page last week asking what happened and I’m still waiting for a response.

Does anyone know what happened?
I want my OCI back!!!