Does Paid Search Really Cannibalize Your Organic Traffic?

Though I’ve never met him personally, I admit to being a big Hal Varian fan. For those who don’t recognize the name, Dr. Varian is the Chief Economist at Google and like me, one of the oldest guys in his company.

Over the past few years, he and his team of researchers have made my life simpler by providing pithy answers to some of search’s mythically difficult questions, like “How do search auctions work?” and “Does ad position effect conversion rates?”

Last week, his team at Google released the results of their research that answers a question that paid search managers across the world get asked on a regular basis: “Why the [bleep] are we advertising on our own [bleeping] brand terms when we are ranked #1 for those [bleepety-bleep-bleeping] terms already?  [Bleep]!”

Though the Google research team posed the question in a