I recently came across a fella that was managing a local mattress store. He was running a Google Ad campaign and was wondering how to get cheaper clicks. He was struggling to compete with the bigger 'direct to consumer' mattress brands that have more money to spend on advertising.

After learning more about the situation, it turns out he wasn't tracking anything as a conversion on the campaign. He was simply focusing on the cost per click metric with the ultimate goal of driving more foot traffic to his store.

He had no clue which keywords were driving the most sales for his business or even what the return on ad spend for the campaign was.

He simply wanted to know how to get cheaper clicks because he believed this would lead to increased foot traffic and increased return on ad spend.

Unfortunately, cost per click for a given keyword and location just is what it is for the most part. You could pay less per click for a lower ad position but that might lead to better results.

Cost per click for a given keyword will also differ based on age, gender, household income, demographics, time of day and day of week but there's a reason why some keyword clicks cost more than others. It's because some keywords make more money for advertisers than other keywords.

When your goal is simply to pay as little per click as possible, you're most likely going to end up getting clicks from the least profitable keywords. Or you'll be getting clicks from keywords that receive such low search volume that it barely moves the sales needle.

So what did I recommend he do?

There are a couple possible solutions here depending on the budget:

Idea #1: Create an Ecommerce Website and leverage Google Shopping Local Inventory Ads

He could start selling his mattresses via his website using Shopify and play up his advantage over bigger ecommerce mattress brands; Buy Online & Pick Up Today!

With Google Shopping Local Inventory Ads, it's possible to run Google Shopping Ads that highlight the fact that they can pick up the product today since your shop is near the customer.

This is a huge advantage over your typical e-commerce competitors because the customer doesn't have to pay for shipping and they don't have to wait for the mattress to arrive days later. They can be sleeping on the mattress they buy from you tonight!

This will also give your Google Ad Campaign sales conversion data, which would allow you to actually optimize the campaign to increase return on ad spend.

It would also spur in store foot traffic because some people would see that you're local from the Google Shopping Ad and will come check out the mattress before buying it online.

When in person customers want to purchase, consider having them still purchase from your website on their phone so you can track sales conversions in the Google Ad Campaign. You could have a QR code next to each mattress in the store that when scanned sends users to the product on your website so they can buy.

Idea #2: Create a Google Ads only special offer; "X% off any mattress, sign up with your email"

If they can't afford to create a spiffy new Shopify site and add their inventory, this way would be much more low effort but still would be a huge improvement over this guys existing campaign.

In some ways, it has an advantage over Idea #1. I'll explain more in a bit.

The idea involves creating a special Google Ads landing page with a special offer or coupon code that is ONLY available via that Google Ads landing page; maybe something like "Sign up for 15% of your mattress today and come visit our store to feel how comfortable our mattresses are!"

This way you can track email sign ups as a Google Ad conversion to improve performance AND you can calculate return on ad spend by seeing how many people came in to redeem the website only coupon.

This also gives the distinct advantage of building an email list which is great for promoting special offers throughout the year. It would allow you to build up a bigger email list than idea #1.