We have great success with Adwords. If you have time to teach yourself then you will save a fortune on PPC advertising spend by tweaking 'everything'. There is so much to learn it would be impossible to discuss it all here. I'd contact Google and they will appoint someone to talk through what you want and help you set up your initial campaign, then work through their online help files to teach yourself the finer points to improve quality score, advert position, A/B testing, cheap long tail keywords etc
As has been said it's easy to burn money if you get it wrong, so just keep an eye on it initially and go from there. Google do offer "Engage for Agency" and "Reseller" training. These are two courses they have where they teach you every last little detail so you are qualified (after taking an exam if you wish) to use their reseller badge. I've done the training but didn't bother with the exam because I'm just going to do my own.
The biggest tip I'd give (and Google won't tell you this) is try to be number 2 or 3 on the list, you do not want to be top. Then you will not suffer from what was described to me as "1st click bounce" IE the list of companies comes up and many people instinctively click the top one quite quickly, then as they land on the page they think "Ah, I didn't look at them all" and just hit their back button. Then they decide properly who's ad to click on based on content and click through. Now it may be they click through to yours again (which is brilliant as it means your ad content is working) but they may click someone else's without ever returning to your site, but you have already paid for the "1st click bounce".
Hope that helps.
Al.
