Of course it does. Advertisements, as a general concept, have an effect of driving customers to sales (simply because it creates awareness about the product, when there was none) - I'm not arguing it doesn't.

But Google's approach is questionable. Yes, they make money, but that's not the only effect the have. They pushed this story about targeted ads, it literally became a heroic myth blown (stories of what's really some cost-shaving statistic optimizations got blown out of proportions and became preached like all this crazy Big Data hoarding is the only way to go), and that had quite severe negative effects on the whole world - so I'm not sure those revenue increases were worth it.

I think, I need to think it more through.