[Antiventurecapital]

Back in 2003, I read the manual by the Adwords guru in Toronto from cover to cover and spent hours a day tweaking my campaigns, ads, search terms, and bids. I helped others set up their programs as well. I'm like that when I get into something new: I devour every bit of info I can find on the subject.

However, the performance of Adwords has steadily declined since then. I belong to a community of people who run websites and most agree that it's gone down the crapper.

This is one of the reasons that I now log into my admin panel only about once a month. Adwords has simply dropped in relevancy.

I have a long love/hate relationship with Google. Three years ago it mysteriously dropped one of my best-positioned sites from its index. It just ceased to exist. *Poof!* It took months for it to get back into the index and more than a year to recover its SERP position for the most important key words.

The problem with Adwords is that it's a "black box" which Google can fine tune to force advertisers to pay ever higher prices. Moreover there are the bozos who spoil it for everyone else by having to be the top bidder. This drives the prices up for everyone. These bozos then burn up their budgets within a month or two only to be replaced by another bozo. The advertisers who have staying power don't feel a need to have the top ad slot.

One more piece of advise: never allow your ads to be run through Goog's "Content Network" as you will get tons of worthless lookie-lou clicks.