I have had it for 10 years. If you sign up Google assigns you an account manager and they are great help. From working with mine (they switch every quarter) I have been able to fine tune the Ad Words Campaign to give me many great clients.

The trick to using ad-words is to find someone knowledgeable in setting up a campaign.  Than it can be very useful and pay for itself.

Not as much.

I haven't used it.  I'm already at or near the top of organic search for my keywords.  Not sure that paying for the ads will increase sales.  I might do a trial run.

I am book marking this as I want to try this next year.  My business is good, but can I take it to the next level?

Adwords is the cornerstone of my marketing.  Combining a domain name that matches the search terms is the secret.

I have not used it .

I agree with Noah and Evelyn.  I use them but to be honest, haven't gauged their success, but study after study I've seen shows they are successful.  The account manager would be a huge benefit to really target the proper keywords.

My husband has for his online continuing education website.  He was making maybe $500.00 a month.  Then he did the google adwords and he is averaging $2500 a month since using google.

One of the MOST IMPORTANT actors of success with Adwords (and Bing Ads too) is the page you are using for all of this traffic.

You asked about bounce rate and time on site.  The biggest factor for these 2 is what kind of page did the website visitor see.

If you are sending highly targeted traffic to a page that is designed specifically for the keywords then you will see a much better conversion and bounce rate then simply sending this traffic to your home page.

EXAMPLE:

Keywords for people searching for a Realtor or "How To Find Realtor" type searches. Instead of sending them to a home page doesn't it make more sense to send them to a page that targets this specific niche.

See this page: http://find.prophosting.com/how.html

This is a real estate squeeze page designed specifically for people looking for a Realtor. Using a highly tagreted site like this with keywords that match will result in:

• Better lead quality
• Higher conversion rate - visitors to leads
• Lower PPC cost on Google & Bing

Setting up a number of highly tageted real estate squeeze pages will help your entire business while lowering your marketing costs.

postAprop.com - Setup unlimited real estate pages for $20/month.  Very easy to setup. The page in the example is one of them. You'll find other live examples on postAprop.

Guess I'm the odd duck again.  I used them a lot and when I stopped using them my leads fell by 99%.  Be careful however you can get caught up in the moment and spend a a lot of money.  Get a budget and stick to it.  

Yes they are a complete waste of time in my experience and I have spent a lot of money to give it a fair shot so unless youa re the price/loss leader I would advise other methods of marketing