Struggling with Google Ads for a niche product - low search volume, hard to know if it's working

Hi everyone, sorry if this has been asked before, but we're just wondering if someone would be able to assist me a little bit.

Looking for some perspective from people who've dealt with this.

My product sits in a pretty narrow niche. Search volume for the exact thing I sell is only around 40 searches/month.

The broader category it falls under (which covers a bunch of different use cases/industries, not just mine) gets around 1,000 searches/month.

So I'm stuck choosing between:

• Bidding tightly on the 40/month exact-match terms - highly relevant, but barely any volume to actually learn from or scale with.
• Going broader into the ~1,000/month category terms more volume, but a lot of that traffic is people searching for completely different use cases than what I offer, so it's noisy and expensive to filter through.

Current setup:

Brand campaign (my own brand name, two English-speaking markets combined) by far the best performer, low CPA, high CTR

Competitor campaign (exact match on competitor brands) with a low budget of £10/day

Non-brand campaign - targets the narrow "exact product" + broad match for my product too

Has anyone found a good way to approach this? Specifically curious about:

• Whether you'd lean into broad match + heavy negative keywords, or just accept the low volume and focus spend elsewhere
• If there's a point where paid search just isn't the right channel for something this niche

Appreciate any input trying to figure out if I'm missing an obvious lever here.