One of the "benefits" they cited was that they submit your information to local search/citation sites once a month, to keep it up-to-date.

I was on the phone with them recently and they started offering this... and I am thinking... "OMG... Please!  NOOO!    Then they told me the price and I was relieved that they were not going to do it for my site.

Does anyone still do this, or is NS just trying to make their product sound good?

Now I wonder how much they know about domain registration and hosting. 

One thing that come with the PLA ads, in my opinion, is an even high level of price competition.  So the same forces that make it difficult to succeed with Adwords are still in play.

I have not tried remarketing/retargeting.

My approach at present it to compete in the organic SERPs as an MSRP seller.  I have great organic visibility (especially long tail), a lot of traffic and sell a few items that my competitors ignore.  My site also gives great service to the visitor through content and video - no competitor is even close to matching.   So, we are still making lots of sales at MSRP.  This yields good profits on every sale.

I am also running Adsense across the site.  I don't think that it damages sales very much and it produces income with zero work.  So, I am happy not to be doing PPC and actually glad that my competitors are staying busy making lots of sales at very low profit margins.

Buy the easy books and tinker around.   Be ready to lose money.  But if you keep at it and keep doing your  math and eventually you will get better.

But, bottom line... Can you compete with the big boys on costs and expenses?  You can be a small biz genius but if you don't have the numbers you are not going to make money.

100% honesty here.  I love math. I know my numbers.  I have done LOTS of adwords training and even more self study.   I get killed at Adwords for most products.  Why?  I am up against people who have a 20% merchandise cost advantage and a 15% shipping cost advantage.

I could have Mahalanobis doing my math and would still get killed.  Because my competitors have a huge advantage on costs and expenses.