If you weren't paying for a search for your company name, your competitors would be paying to have their ads displayed on a search for your company name. All t

If you weren't paying for a search for your company name, your competitors would be paying to have their ads displayed on a search for your company name. All the major ad networks let you run all sorts of comparisons and experiments for ad ROI. If ROI was routinely negative, the billion-dollar budgets would have long been pulled back by beancounters and cost-cutters in the buying firms, especially when they have the excuse of a recession to do so. Yes, occasionally you get 'I run a boutique business and I find that <X advertising system has horrible ROI>' blog posts on HN. Maybe they are structuring their ad campaigns wrong. Maybe their business shouldn't be advertised at all. Maybe they are using the wrong channel (Search, display, social) to advertise with. It's a pain in the ass to figure this out if you're a small business. But larger businesses with serious ad devote a lot of effort to figuring this out - and will reshuffle their marketing budgets to the high ROI channels.