From Stephen Semple, director of Wizard of Ads CANADA:

I came across this study from WordStream.
WordStream is a huge PPC company that works with over 1,000,000 advertisers.

They recently did a study of a particular PPC campaign that had a 300% increase in conversion rates over a short period of time (9 months).

These results puzzled them because they had changed nothing in the campaign.  They did not change the landing page, the bid strategy or the ads.  Nothing had been done to the campaign at all. So, what pushed the needle?  What they determined was that there was another campaign being run on another media (in this case Facebook) that created a halo effect.

Here was their conclusion in their words:
“What we are seeing here is that people with strong brand affinity have higher conversion rates than people without any, because people tend to buy from the companies they already heard of and begun to trust.” – Larry Kim, WordStream

From Craig Arthur, director of Wizard of Ads AUSTRALIA:

Hey Roy,

Please find attached a 55-page PDF of just-released research by SEMrush that examines website ranking factors.

My takeaway – Directing listeners to a website via good advertising appears to be the most powerful way to get your website to rank higher.

Key takeaways

▪  After adding 5 new factors, we can still see that direct website traffic is the most influential ranking factor. That is, when many users go to a website directly it is a good sign to Google that the domain has high authority and value. – Page 9 of 55

One of the main indicators of a website’s popularity is its number of visits. There are a lot of ways for visitors to find your website: organic search, paid ads, social networks, direct visits, referring domains, emails, etc. In our research, we checked how traffic influences page rankings and whether organic search traffic has the greatest influence.  – page 39 of 55

What it means to you as a marketer

After excluding organic search and other traffic data, we can see that there is a strong connection between the number of direct visits and the page position on the SERP. This could indicate that Google prioritizes domains with more authority and consequently more direct traffic when ranking the high-volume keyword group. This also means that organic ranking is not the only thing you should be concentrating on. Direct visits are fueled by your brand awareness, so building a strong brand image should be an essential part of your promotion strategy. Building brand awareness is as important as putting efforts into SEO. – page 42 of 55