Domestically, for most Estonian companies, no.
Not because the platform is bad, and not because Estonian buyers do not use Google. They do, almost exclusively. The reason is arithmetic, and it is worth walking through properly because it also tells you the version that does work.
Google’s bidding automation needs a certain amount of data to function. Target CPA wants roughly 30 conversions in the trailing 30 days at campaign level. Target ROAS wants 50 or more. Maximize conversions has no published technical minimum, but around 30 a month is where it starts reliably beating a human setting bids by hand.
Below that the penalty is measurable rather than theoretical. Campaigns producing fewer than 15 conversions a month tend to run somewhere between 35% and 50% higher cost per acquisition than campaigns clearing 30.
Now put a country of 1.3 million people against that number.
Do the arithmetic for your own product
Take 30 conversions a month as the target. If your landing page converts at 3%, which is a fair figure for B2B, you need about 1,000 clicks a month to get there. That is 33 clicks a day, every day, on your set of keywords.
For a niche B2B product in Estonian, that query volume frequently does not exist. Not “is expensive to reach”. Does not exist. There are not 1,000 people a month searching that phrase in a country this size, so no budget produces those clicks.
You cannot buy your way past a volume ceiling, and most domestic Estonian campaigns are sitting under one.
Redo that sum with your own conversion rate before you spend anything. If the clicks you would need exceed the searches that happen, the campaign was never going to work and no amount of optimisation changes it.
The part that makes it worse: you go blind as well
Here is the detail that does not get mentioned, and it is the one I would want to know.
When query volume is low, Google withholds the search terms. Not enough people searched for them to report without exposing individual users, so the search terms report comes back thin or empty even while you are getting clicks and conversions.
Think about what that removes. The search terms report is the primary tool for finding waste, adding negatives and understanding what people actually typed. In a small market you lose it precisely when your budget is smallest and every wasted click hurts most.
So the automation is starving and your main diagnostic is dark, at the same time. That combination is why small-market accounts so often feel like guesswork. They are.
What actually works instead
Four things, and the first two matter far more than the rest.
Widen the market, not the budget. This is the whole answer. Run EU wide or Nordic wide with language targeting rather than country by country. Estonian companies mostly sell outward anyway, so this matches the business rather than compromising it. Suddenly the conversion volume that smart bidding needs is reachable, because you are drawing from a hundred million people instead of 1.3 million.
Consolidate ruthlessly. Below 30 conversions a month, campaign structure is the difference between the automation working and flailing. Eight tidy campaigns split by theme means eight campaigns each learning from nothing. One campaign with everything in it at least accumulates. The instinct to organise neatly is actively harmful at this volume.
Use manual bidding without embarrassment. There is a fashion that treats manual CPC as amateur. Below the data threshold it frequently beats automation, because a person who understands the account can make sensible judgements from twelve conversions and an algorithm cannot.
Build the keyword list from evidence, over months. The structure that works in thin markets is two layers. A broad discovery campaign whose job is to mine the search terms report for anything that converts, then promote those specific queries into a tightly matched core campaign. Run it over 60 to 90 days and you end up with a keyword list built from your own conversion data rather than from a planner tool that has never heard of your product.
And hold broad match back until you clear 30 conversions a month with solid negative lists in place. Before that it is a budget leak with an optimistic name.
One administrative note while you are in there. From June this year Google renamed the strategies, so “Maximize conversions with a Target CPA” is now just “Target CPA” and “Maximize conversion value with a Target ROAS” is “Target ROAS”. Same mechanics, different labels, and worth knowing when older guides do not match your screen.
The argument I would actually make
Everything above is how to run paid search competently in a small market. The larger question is whether you should be running it at all yet.
Paid search is a demand capture channel. It works by intercepting people who are already looking for what you sell. That makes it exceptional when the demand exists and close to useless when it does not, and in a domestic market of 1.3 million the demand for a specialist product often genuinely does not exist in measurable quantities.
Which means the money frequently belongs somewhere else. Outbound to a named list, where you choose who hears from you rather than waiting for them to search. Partnerships and integrations, which borrow someone else’s distribution. Content aimed at the export markets where the searches actually happen, which compounds instead of stopping the day you pause the budget.
None of those need a volume threshold to start working, and all of them suit a company whose addressable market was always going to be outside Estonia.
The version of Google Ads I would defend for an Estonian company is narrow and specific: brand defence, so competitors do not buy your name, plus tightly targeted campaigns in the export markets you have already validated by other means. That is a real use of the channel. Running broad domestic campaigns and waiting for the algorithm to figure it out is paying Google for the privilege of gathering data you will never accumulate enough of.
Check the arithmetic first. If the searches are not there, no amount of clever account structure conjures them, and the honest answer to a client asking about Google Ads is sometimes that the budget belongs elsewhere this quarter.
If you’d like to work through the numbers for your own account, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat. I’m contracted full time so this isn’t a pitch. My notes on performance marketing cover the wider picture.