[jeffnappi]

We were Urchin users prior to the acquisition and were also Google AdWords customers...

I remember being shocked at the idea of putting Google's JavaScript in our secure e-commerce site. We wanted to pay as little as possible for traffic and were mining the long tail of keywords. We certainly did not want AdWords to know what our economics were.

Ultimately AdWords evolved into a very efficient system that groups similar keywords and takes as much margin as the advertisers can handle. The golden days of a level playing field in ppc advertising were over and Google won the game :)