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Words of advice. Words of experience. Heed them, or you will strangle your lovely PPC flower before it ever has a chance to bloom.

Your campaign is doomed from the start if...

1. Your daily budget is carved up into too many $8/day or $10/day campaigns. For the love of all that is holy, allocate more funds to fewer campaigns
2. You've loaded your geographically and budget-constrained campaign with hundreds of broad match negatives.
3. Your daily budget is too low relative to your daily bids. Are you in a competitive space where minimum bids are as high as $4, $5 or $6 even for your high quality terms? Then $25/day budgets are not high enough. Bid up, raise your budgets and prepare to spend more - or get out of the game because you're going nowhere.
4. You turn away from display targeting because "it hasn't worked in the past." It's true that display doesn't work for ALL advertisers, but it works for most. This isn't 2008 anymore - there is no "content" network - it's called DISPLAY these days. That means you can use banners and everything! Welcome to 2012.
5. You limit your geographic targeting to the extent that you are invisible to 99.9% of the people that exist in any given country. You know who you are. Live a little and widen your reach.
6. You have one landing page that looks like everyone else's in your space, and doesn't clearly compete with any of those people in any intelligible way. Spend time differentiating yourself. Stop using stock photos. Humanize your landing page and make it look like actual PEOPLE exist behind the curtain or your conversion rate will suck. It isn't Google's fault that you've bored, confused or otherwise not inspired people, it's yours. Fix it.
7. You avoid mobile because it frightens you. Get over it. Mobile is here to stay. Create a mobile-friendly landing page experience. Embrace phone numbers and call tracking. Separate your campaigns into cell phone and tablet only campaigns. There's so much you can do to at least TRY to make it work. Ignoring it, however, will ensure it doesn't.
8. You think there's a magic formula that all of us experts are keeping to ourselves. I have news for you - YOU are the expert in YOUR industry. I am the expert in mine. If you don't try the things I recommend, then don't be surprised if search fails you. Take ownership, it's not hard.