> What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? This is about incrementality. Goo

> What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? This is about incrementality. Google/advertisers are well aware of this fact and have been doing lots of ablation studies to understand advertisement's effectiveness. Don't underestimate the industry; you may spend millions of dollars but not billions of dollars without good justifications. I don't know the exact numbers (and I wouldn't be able to tell it even if I know it) and it heavily depends on the type of particular ads (e.g. brand ads will show much less incrementality), but the general consensus is that more than half of those ads can take the credit for conversions. Given that conversion tracking and attribution is not perfect, it's fair to take the money.