What's a Word Worth?

Once Curio City's bread and butter, Panther Vision caps went stale sometime last year. There are too many competitors selling them now, including Walmart and Lowes. I obviously can't touch their prices, although I do trounce their selection. Keywords have been bid up to the $1 range and beyond -- way too rich for me. I top out at $0.65 for most products and try to stay under $0.50...preferably way under, whenever possible. Caps sold nicely last Christmas, and I hope they'll do it again this year, but I no longer expect any action from them outside of November and December. 

Why, then, did I sell four on Monday? Did a competitor drop out and boost my pay-per-click positions? Was it one of those random Google blips where my keywords organically bob to the top for a few hours? One customer answered "How did you find us?" with "Searching for something on Google", another declined to answer, another said "Referred by a friend," and the last said "You were linked in an online article or blog." OK, no pattern there. Two customers were in California, one in Maryland, and one in New Jersey -- again, no pattern. AdWords didn't take credit for any conversions (and Bing is worthless, as usual*). Yet, I sold a fifth cap on Wednesday.  

Incidentally, speaking of overpriced keywords...I can't advertise bicycle accessories at all because the relevant keywords sell for up to $4.25 per click. If you convert 2% of your clicks at the most common $2.25 price point then each sale costs $112.50. That's obviously just plain nuts.

*...so worthless is Bing, in fact, that I finally pulled the plug on it this week. In the past 30 days I spent $71.64 on 250 clicks that led, by Bing's own reckoning, to 0 conversions. Statistically, 250 clicks should have brought five to 10 sales. How on earth can they assign a quality score of 3/10 to a keyword like "lighted caps" or 2/10 to "Jackite kites"? I shouldn't have to spam keywords everywhere when I clearly have the relevant products at the proper URLs. Screw you, Microsoft. I'm done trying to game your algorithm.