Ashley Woods runs marketing strategy at Google and YouTube. She also built Primer Libro, a Spanish-language children’s book company, with her own money. When the budget is personal rather than corporate, her approach to paid advertising looks very different.
That contrast is what makes this conversation worth your time. Ashley isn’t commentating on small business from a safe distance. She’s running one, testing channels, watching the results, and making the same hard calls any small operator faces. She can also see what happens at Google scale, and she knows exactly which parts of that playbook are a waste of time when you’re spending your own money.
This episode covers the Amazon ads experience that pushed her to look hard at her unit economics, why in-person events outperformed every paid channel she ran, and what she means when she talks about incrementality. Jo also talks through how she cancelled $850 a month of marketing software and replaced it with AI agents.
What Google does that small businesses should not copy
Google runs brand awareness campaigns at a scale that only makes sense when you have billions of impressions and a dedicated measurement team tracking lift across millions of data points. The logic works when you’re shifting perception across an entire market and can verify the effect through search volume, branded query rates, and long-term conversion lift. Without that infrastructure, the same approach is just spending money on impressions that don’t convert.
Ashley’s point is direct: scale changes what’s measurable, and what’s measurable determines what’s worth doing. A small business running awareness spend without the tools to measure lift is operating blind. That’s a different kind of risk than running the same campaign inside a major corporation, where the measurement infrastructure is already in place and the budget belongs to someone else.
The version that works at small business scale is specific. Know who you’re talking to, have a clear message, and place it somewhere you can track. That isn’t a scaled-down version of the Google playbook. The specificity isn’t a limitation so much as the precondition for making the spend measurable at all.
The Amazon ads wake-up call
Ashley ran paid advertising on Amazon for Primer Libro and found that profitability wasn’t what she’d assumed. The ads were generating sales, but once she separated out the margin, the numbers didn’t hold. She noted it hits differently when the person reviewing those results works in performance marketing for a living.
She stopped the ads and went back to fundamentals: positioning, pricing, and a clear picture of who was buying the book and why. Cost per acquisition has to be measured against lifetime value, not just first-purchase revenue. A channel can look like it’s performing while quietly destroying margin across months of data.
Before you can know whether any paid channel is working, you need to understand your unit economics precisely. Ashley’s Amazon experience pushed her back to that step, and the clarity it produced was worth more than the sales the ads had been generating.
Why events outperformed paid channels
After pulling back from paid advertising, Ashley tested something simpler: she showed up where her customers already were. Bookstore events, community gatherings, anywhere parents of young Spanish-speaking children might be. The results weren’t comparable to what she’d seen from paid campaigns. They were better.
This makes sense when you think about what events give you that digital ads can’t. You get real-time response to your pitch, can see how people react when they pick up the book, and hear the exact words they use to describe why they want it. That language is more valuable than keyword research, because it comes from real buyers at the moment of purchase rather than from a search query made at some other point for some other reason.
Events don’t scale, but what you learn at a table of real buyers about your positioning is often worth more than a paid campaign report. The volume limitation is real, and worth understanding clearly before you dismiss the format entirely.
The data advantage small businesses have over Google
One of the more interesting points in this episode is that small businesses hold a genuine data advantage over large companies in one specific area: proximity to the customer. At Google’s scale, customer insight travels through multiple layers before it reaches anyone making decisions. Research teams, surveys, aggregate data. By the time it arrives, the original texture has been smoothed out.
A business serving 50 customers a month can know each of them personally. You can know why they bought, what almost stopped them, and what they told someone else about you. That’s first-person data at a resolution no brand tracking study can match.
The businesses that use this well don’t file the feedback away. They let it shape the message. If multiple customers describe your product in words you haven’t used in your marketing, update the copy and test whether their language outperforms yours.
Incrementality vs attribution, explained plainly
Attribution tells you which channel got the credit for a sale. Incrementality tells you whether the channel caused it, and those are different questions that lead to very different decisions about where to spend.
If a customer was going to buy from you regardless and clicked your retargeting ad just before checkout, your attribution model gives that ad full credit. The sale gets logged against the spend, but the purchase wasn’t incremental to the campaign. You would have made it without running the ads at all.
Ashley is running a live experiment on exactly this: spending nothing on paid advertising for two months to understand what has been driving results versus what has simply been receiving credit for them. That’s uncomfortable when the results might not confirm what you’ve assumed, but it’s the only honest way to find out.
Where most small businesses stop with AI
Near the end of the conversation, Ashley made a point that fits what Jo has been building in her own business: most small businesses use AI for surface-level tasks. Drafting emails, generating ideas. That’s using a capable tool to automate work that didn’t take long to begin with.
The more useful applications are in workflow and operational overhead: the recurring decisions and repetitive processes that used to require either a person or a subscription to software designed to fill that gap. Jo talked through how she cancelled $850 a month of marketing software and rebuilt the equivalent functionality with AI agents tuned to how her business runs. The result is cheaper and more responsive to her specific processes, rather than requiring her to adapt her workflow to fit a product designed for someone else.
Ashley’s framing: use AI to close the gaps in your own capabilities, not to outsource the decision-making to a tool you’re not interrogating properly. The thinking has to stay yours.
About Ashley Woods
Ashley Woods is a marketing strategist at Google and YouTube. Alongside her corporate role, she founded Primer Libro, a Spanish-language children’s book company, which she runs and funds independently.
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