Someone told me this week that the market I'm targeting doesn't have enough search volume to run Google ads and I can't stop turning it over

Question

It was a guy at a site I was doing punch list work on, investor type, said he'd tried paid search in a mid-size Ohio city, Youngstown area, and burned through about $2,400 before Google basically told him the same thing through the impression data. He pulled the campaign after six weeks. Said Facebook was the only thing that made sense out there because you're pushing the ad to people rather than waiting for them to search a phrase nobody in that zip code types. I don't have a campaign running yet, I'm still saving toward the duplex, but I have been assuming Google was where I'd start because that felt like the serious option. Now I'm not sure that assumption was doing any real work. Wondering if anyone here has run into a market where the search volume genuinely disqualified Google from the jump, and what the threshold actually looked like before you gave up on it.

harriet_boone · Answer

The Youngstown example tracks. I've watched two of the syndicators I'm in with test paid search in secondary Ohio markets and the numbers weren't pretty. One ran about eight weeks in the Canton area, spent closer to $1,800, and the impression share data was basically telling them the audience ceiling was too low to optimize against. The threshold I've seen discussed seriously is somewhere around 500 to 1,000 monthly searches for your core phrase in the geo before Google has enough signal to do anything useful with a campaign, and most of the mid-size Rust Belt metros don't clear that bar for investor-specific terms. The Facebook point isn't wrong but it's a different mechanism entirely, you're paying to interrupt someone who wasn't looking, which means your message and your offer have to do more work upfront. If I were at the saving stage I'd spend the next few months pulling the actual search volume data for my specific zip codes before assuming anything about which platform made sense, because the answer is genuinely market-dependent and not a general rule.

rbhatia88 · Answer

Burned $1,800 in Dayton metro 2021, same story, impressions were phantom numbers.

Someone told me this week that the market I'm targeting doesn't have enough search volume to run Google ads and I can't stop turning it over

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