Well planned and properly executed AdWords campaigns can translate into more sales, subscribers, customers, etc. This is a tool that should be considered by all those who have an internet project with low visibility, a very low percentage of sales, or who cannot get new people to subscribe to their newsletter.
Although Google Adwords could bring us incredible benefits for our website or business, the truth is that you have to know how to use it or you risk losing your valuable investment. The biggest mistake is to believe that because Google Adwords is technically easy to use, it can be used without knowing anything to increase Internet sales.
To capture conversions with Google Adwords, you need to know how to work with this tool, and this is not as easy as it might seem. Remember also that your conversions will depend not only on Adwords but also on your product, service, price, landing page, the trust your website generates, etc.
4 tips to use Google Adwords properly
1.- Do not use Adwords until you know how it works
If you are looking to increase your conversion rate and want to use Adwords for this purpose, then you should worry about learning how it works, what functionality it has, and how you can get the most out of it. On the Internet, you'll find lots of information and tutorials to help you get the right education.
2.- Do not use the Search campaigns with display selection
When you open your account, Google creates a campaign like this by default, but these are the ones that work the worst.
In Google, we have search campaigns: display campaigns, video campaigns, and shopping campaigns. And finally, there is the search campaign with display selection. Each of the first four has a clear objective, while the search with display selection does not.
This means that search campaigns are more oriented towards direct results and therefore should be used more than the search campaign with display selection. Our ads will appear just when a user who is interested in our product or service does a Google search, which is much more profitable and will help us achieve our goal.
3.- Use keyword matches correctly
When you learn more about Google Adwords, you will know that there are 4 types of keyword matching.
It is recommended that you never use the wide match because with this type of match your investment will be lost very quickly. What happens is that the wide match doesn't have any word modifiers; that is, your keyword must be set as you say it.
Before you start working with the other concordances, keep the following in mind:
- The modified wide match has the + sign in front of the keyword so you would add the words as +word +key.
- The phrase concordance is enclosed in quotation marks: "keyword".
- The exact match is in square brackets:[keyword].
4.- Use segmentation
The more segmented you have your audience, the better. If you are advertising with Adwords and only offer your products or services to people in New York, you need to segment so that your ads only appear to people in New York. However, if you are only interested in the people of Brooklyn inside New York, segment to reach only those citizens.
This is very important that you do this so that you can achieve better results. If not, your budget will be spread over areas where you are not interested in having a presence.
Google Ads in 2026: what changed since this was written, and what clicks cost
On 27 June 2018 Google announced that AdWords was becoming Google Ads, and several of the mechanics in the tips above have changed since then. Here is what applies today.
Three match types, not four
Google merged broad match modifier (the +word syntax) into phrase match between February and July 2021. You can no longer create new modified-broad keywords, and old ones now behave as phrase match. The current match types are:
| Match type | How you write it | When the ad can show | Good for a classifieds site? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broad | used cars | Searches related to the keyword, even without its words | Only with conversion tracking and Smart Bidding set up, otherwise it spends fast |
| Phrase | "used cars" | Searches that include the meaning of the keyword | Yes. The safest starting point |
| Exact | [used cars] | Searches with the same meaning or intent | Yes, for your best-converting terms |
Tip 3 above described broad match backwards: it is the loosest match type, not the strictest.
New campaign types and location settings
Besides Search, Display, Video and Shopping, Google now pushes Performance Max. A single campaign runs across Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps, and Google's AI chooses where to show your ads and how to combine your text, images and video. It needs conversion goals to work well. For a new site with little data, a tightly focused Search campaign is still easier to control.
Tip 4 also needs a correction. Google's default location option is "Presence or interest", which also reaches people outside your area who have shown interest in it. If your marketplace only serves Brooklyn, change the setting to "Presence" so you only reach people who are in or regularly in the area.
What a click and a lead cost in 2026
The 2026 search advertising benchmarks from LocaliQ and WordStream (updated June 2026, based on thousands of Google Ads and Microsoft Ads campaigns) give these averages:
| Industry | Avg. cost per click | Avg. cost per lead |
|---|---|---|
| All industries | $5.42 | $66.69 |
| Real estate | $3.22 | $102.51 |
| Automotive, for sale | $2.27 | $44.26 |
A local classifieds site that pays $2 to $5 per visitor needs that visitor to post an ad, sign up or buy a featured listing. Otherwise the traffic will not pay for itself. So decide what counts as a conversion before you spend anything. On a Yclas site you can paste your Google tag (the gtag.js snippet, which can carry both your Analytics and Google Ads IDs) under Integrations > Google Analytics, and it will load on every public page. That lets you see which keywords bring in sellers rather than just clicks.