buckworks - 4:14 pm on Feb 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

More thoughts after a night's sleep:

You'd need to beware of the effects of bid wars on the PPC bids and come up with a way to screen out the bids that were seriously out of line before taking your averages. I've seen cases where the top few bids were several dollars higher than those that followed, because people got into a bidding war. Inexperience? Ego trip? Trying to play games to harm competitors? It's hard to say why it happens, but sometimes the top bids have little to do with sound business judgement and ROI calculations.

Example: if the top two bids were 1.91 and 1.90, and the next dozen that followed were in the range of 40¢ or 50¢, I'd say to leave the top two out of your calculations, and take an average of the next ten that follow.

On the other hand, if the progression went something like #1 - 53¢, #2 - 52¢, #3 - 48¢, #4 - 46¢ and so on, you could be more confident that the complete range of bids was based on ROI and not something else.