If you run on batteries you will find it works best, as with anything mains, you will want a good ground.
What I did find was that if you use peizo's back to back you can effect a balanced signal and that in itself helps immensely in eliminating much of the noise. You can also use a contact material sandwich in-between the piezo discs and effect how it works tone wise as well as become more zoned in the pick-up area.
But impedance matching is, as with guitars, very much key for pre-amps.
As for input levels and clipping - the rise of 32bit float has made a huge difference and means you can not worry about mic input levels at the ADC stage as much and normalise everything in post, sorting the levels out then without any fear of clipping at all.
Some nice low-noise preamp designs to check out here: http://www.richardmudhar.com/piezo-contact-microphone-hi-z-a...
Though those just unbalanced input designs, alas I'm not aware of any balanced contact mic's on the market - but can easily make them yourself using the above approach.