Yes they have an impact......less of an impact from years ago, but they still have an impact

Heres an article from a test ran on Matt cutts blog.  Somone published an article pointing to mattcutts.com.  Anchor text in the article was "Leasreepressmm"...  A few days later Matt's blog ranked for this keyword.  Proof that article submission still carries a little weight

http://searchengineland.com/matt-cutts-more-proof-google-does-count-links-from-press-releases-158350

1st make sure you are tracking conversions.  You can track leads, sales and revenue amount.

Then look at your impression share % for each campaign & ad group.  This will let you know what share of impressions you are currently receiving, and you can derive what budget you should have to receive 100% impression share. Since you are not increasing your bids, you should receive similar performance as you increase your budget. ...CPC, CPA,CPL metrics.

Next step is to improve your text ads..the higher your CTR, the more clicks you will receive, which will increase budget  ...however this will also increase your quality score, and lower your CPC.   Quality Score takes weeks/months to improve, its not an overnight improvement.  Focus on increasing Click Thru Rate & Quality Score and you will increase spend, while your campaigns perform better.

have you considered a 3rd party video hosting service?  Wistia (recommended by SEOmoz) automatically creates a XML Video sitemap for videos hosted with them.  And Wistia can capture email to play video & integrate email marketing campaign (if you want), heat maps, call to action link at end of video & CNAME codes, etc.  A 3rd party video hosting can also ensure quick playback of videos, and you wont receive any surprise hosting costs from your current website hosing company.

Great blog post about this http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

The correct keyword is +wedding +photographer.  No space between + and keyword.   acquisio has a great broad modified keyword generator tool.   Just paste your list of keywords into a box, and it will export a list with a + before each keyword.

Google analytics will place Ppc traffic in the "direct traffic"  bucket if you do not tag your ppc campaigns correctly.  Google Adwords is easy, just enable auto tagging. In AdCenter, you need to make sure that you use utm codes in all of your keyword destination urls...otherwise google analytics will just place this traffic in the direct traffic category.

There was a good blog post about this last month.  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-google-analytics-tagging-matters-whiteboard-friday