In a recession, consumers are less impulsive, so your business needs to find new ways to reach your customers. AdWords offers a simple way to do so that won't empty your wallet.
Bottom line, if you are paying one or more monthly fees to have a listing on somebody else's website, please consider the three powerful alternatives explained here.
If you do pay-per-click campaigns, you probably know that one best practice is to add brackets and quotes to your keyword list - which makes them a phrase match or exact match. It's simple, but repetitive and time-consuming to do that by hand -- especially if you have hundreds of keywords for each ad group as I do. Here's a simple tool my team just created to help me convert my keyword lists on the fly.