Hi,

I'm looking for a maths genius - or perhaps there is already a program out there that will achieve what I need to know.

Currently people are prepared to keep outbidding me on the keywords I would like to be featured for, however there has to come a time when I will have to increase my prices if I want to stay top in the PPC standings.

An example would be - If I am prepared to pay £0.50 per click for a term like FISHING TACKLE and I get 100 clicks that obviously costs me £50. My average transaction value is £40 and average margin for example is 20% so out of the 100 people that came to my site I would need to convert at least 7% of those visitors to orders which I think is unrealistic. And if I put my prices up then my conversion rates will drop by an unquantifiable percentage.

OK, so I know what the first comment is going to be... that I should target more specific keywords than FISHING TACKLE, which is fair comment, and also then deep link to the individual product. So for example I should create a PPC term for TUBERTINI 808 HOOK and link it to that page - however this still only produced 5 - 7% conversion rate.

I don't want to increase my prices as I strongly believe that this will hurt my conversion rates even more - I just want to be able to easily calculate the maximum affordable bid on each Keyword without having to work it out every single time - i.e. I specify my margin, the estimated conversion rate (ok I will have to guess this from historic performance), and my average transaction value and my target keyword - then I need a tool to run through the search engines and find the PPC costs that others are paying for that keyword and tell me what is the maximum I can afford to pay without risking losing money on my PPC campaign - bearing in mind I might want to specify 1000+ keywords and phrases you can see why a tool to do this would be needed. The tool would also need to run, create and update my PPC campaign.... is this something that exists?

Does this theory in turn lead to the death eventually of PPC or the fact that the search engines will have to manipulate their results to favour those paying for advertising? I would liken this to the highstreet versus back street argument - the high street being those at the top of the PPC listings - they have massive overheads for advertising, ok they have big turnover but there are too many companies competing on this worldwide high street and all clamering to be at the top and get the people though their doors into the shop - and with big overheads comes the need for high prices. Imagine if you click on the top PPC listing and you see a price of say £40000 for BMW car, so you go and do some research and click on a few more listings... well you will eventually find a cheaper price in the back street so to speak - search engines have forgotten the human factor again - so this will mean higher prices and lower conversion rates for those prepared to be at the top of PPC and the cheaper prices sitting in the natural search engine listings - or will it eventually mean that those prepared to pay in the PPC listings will also be favoured in the natural listings (or am I being a synic!) Either that or the PPC model just doesnt work because the internet high street is just too big a place to justify paying a fortune to be there!

Is there a maximum PPC affordability tool out there based on the maths I described above?

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Fishing Mondo
http://www.polefloats.com online fishing tackle shop in the UK

I think quite a few people are seeing this with PPC. Running ads for generic terms is simply unprofitable. Honestly the only solution is to significantly lower your cost of goods sold (jam up your margin), if that isn't possible I am afraid you are getting priced out.

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