Other marketing channels will likely experience increased conv. rate & other positive indicators when you run & grow a Google Ad account. This happens because of several reasons... As the Google Ads account grows: It's able to increase conversion rate in other PPC channels as well as direct traffic because of the awareness-building that occurs from remarketing campaigns, outbound campaigns, brand campaigns, and just being present in search & shopping. (Remarketing especially is a seriously underrated ninja campaign because it follows people around the internet & reminds them to come back & buy, but there's no way to track it's impact. To know that it's working the only thing we can see is performance boosted on other channels. Try turning it off for a month or two and you will see it's impact.) It's able to increase conversion rate of direct traffic because much of that traffic interacted with an ad at some point (after all, that's how they found the website). So the website's "direct" traffic has been warmed up by ad interactions & then the tracking was dropped (for a myriad of reasons) which causes them to be labeled as "direct." It's able to find cold, brand new leads by competing for the competitive, expensive placements & clicks with standard shopping (a powerful workhorse to win bids & gain clicks from users who know nothing about you but who happen to be shopping at the time) and also outbound display/video (brand-building to cold, unknown users who have relevant interests). These cold users have a super low conversion rate because they often don't buy on that first click. And then tracking often gets dropped later when they finally do buy. When those cold users do finally buy, FB will try to say it was their ads who got the sale, because FB includes "1-day view-throughs" in their conversions in order to pump their numbers. So FB will just remarket the crap out of all the cold leads Google found and then claim the sale even if there was never a click on a FB ad. It's insane. And it's also likely that Analytics & Shopify will say those folks were "direct" because those platforms are not focused on using deep tracking that can trace back to the first ad click (since they are just website tracker tools that rely mostly on UTM parameters only). And the first click could have happened days or weeks before, often on a different device, different browser profile, etc. Those first time cold leads that were finally converted turn into returning customers, boosting email performance, direct traffic numbers, and conv. rates even higher. The channels work together holistically.