Mike,
I've been running adwords campaigns for over a decade both for myself and clients. They can be very effective if you do them right. Read all that you can from Google on it. They actually have some decent training. A few important things they will not tell you though.
1) Don't forget Bing/Yahoo - they still account for about 30% of searches and in fact some of my most profitable campaigns come from there. Reason is that's default on most new computers and a LOT of older people and others never bother going to Google and the ad rates are a lot better. Depending on the demographic you're going after it's a very viable addition.
2) Make sure you always have 2 ads for each keyword. Make sure you click the button when setting up your campaign to show the ads equally. That way when you review regularly you can see which ad is performing the best. Once you get about a few hundred clicks then take the best one, that becomes your base, and then write another. It's amazing that sometimes just changing by reorganizing the same words in an ad can have huge effects.
3) Do NOT believe google when you're setting your budget. They'll often say, the price you're willing to pay will not get you on the first page. For example, you may have set a budget of $1 per click and they'll tell you it's going to take $4 to get shown. It's not true.
4) DO NOT worry about being at the top of a listing. I usually shoot for being like 3-6 position. Web pages have 2 main hotspots, top left and the top 1/2 of right side. Ever wonder why most ads you see are on the right side. A 4th position ad might cost you $.85 whereas being #1 may cost you $5. Most people know the top few are ads and just kind of glance over them. An ad in the top 1/2 of the right column can be just as effective if written correctly
5) Try to get your KW in the ad content - that will bold it
6) Do a lot of KW research - Look for longtail KWs - there are free tools that will help - One of the easiest things to do is start typing in a KW and see what Google suggests as you're typing, use some of those. Good free tool -
http://ubersuggest.org/ Long tail KWs will be cheaper too
An example - Roof cleaning - every yahoo in the world will be pushing something from chemical manf. to Home Depot - will cost you a lot to get towards the top - Now say your KW is 'dark stains on roof' Just did a local search here and 'roof cleaning' was loaded with ads. 'Dark Stains on roof' had 1 ad total. You could have bid a dime and been #2.
7) Make sure you group your KWs. if you're just starting out. For example have all your roofing KWs together and all your concrete KWs together. That way you can just run 2 ads for each group, the tighter they are the better. People like me will run 2 separate ads for every single KW. Even a small campaign might have 1000 ads. I would advise setting your longtail kw's together in a separate group so you can bid a lot cheaper for them. Say .50 versus a $1 on the main ones
8) Make sure the ad goes to it's respective landing page. This is the #1 mistake that most people make, they'll have all their ads going to their Home page. Once a prospect hits your site you've got 4 seconds to keep their attention. So have you concrete cleaning ads going to your concrete cleaning page. Google likes this and will reward you with cheaper clicks and better position.
9) Link your adwords campaign to your Google analytics - will give you more detailed info.
!0) Don't do it unless you're willing to spend a couple of hours/month reviewing it. It can easily be very good for you but you have to experiment with it for a few months to start fine tuning it. Pay attention to your bounce rates. If high, then you may need to adjust your ads or your web page it's going to.
11) Start off relatively small. You're going to have pretty serious learning curve and if you're not careful can piss away a lot of money quickly for not a lot of results. I would suggest something like $10/day for your whole campaign until you get the hang of it.
12) Make sure you use Negative KWs too, ie free. machinery, installation. etc. When you look at your reports they will tell you what people were searching for that clicked on your ads, if you see something that's not pertinent, add to your negative kw list.
Hope all this helps