Yuan Yuan

Yuan Yuan

Yuan is an Engineering Partner at GV. Prior to joining GV, Yuan worked on the quantitative marketing team at Google from 2009 to 2013, and on the data science team at Dropbox from 2013 to 2015. He worked on a variety of data analysis projects, spanning sales, marketing, security, and multiple product and operational areas. Yuan focuses on statistical modeling, variable selection, machine learning, and data visualization. Yuan received his Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University, and his master’s and bachelor’s of Engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.
Authored Publications
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    Preview abstract Advertisers often wonder whether search ads cannibalize their organic traffic. In other words, if search ads were paused, would clicks on organic results increase, and make up for the loss in paid traffic? Google statisticians recently ran over 400 studies on paused accounts to answer this question. In what we call “Search Ads Pause Studies”, our group of researchers observed organic click volume in the absence of search ads. Then they built a statistical model to predict the click volume for given levels of ad spend using spend and organic impression volume as predictors. These models generated estimates for the incremental clicks attributable to search ads (IAC), or in other words, the percentage of paid clicks that are not made up for by organic clicks when search ads are paused. The results were surprising. On average, the incremental ad clicks percentage across verticals is 89%. This means that a full 89% of the traffic generated by search ads is not replaced by organic clicks when ads are paused. This number was consistently high across verticals. View details
    Incremental Clicks: The Impact of Search Advertising
    Jim Koehler
    Deepak Kumar
    Journal of Advertising Research, 51, no. 4 (2011), pp. 643-647
    Preview abstract In this research, the authors examined how the number of organic clicks changed when search ads were present and when search ad campaigns were turned off. The authors developed a statistical model to estimate the fraction of total clicks that could be attributed to search advertising. A meta-analysis of several hundred of these studies revealed that more than 89 percent of the ads clicks were incremental, in the sense that those visits to the advertiser's site would not have occurred without the ad campaigns. View details