Campaign Success Metrics

I was talking with a friend of mine last week. She told the tale of a project that just wrapped up which allowed placement of a sponsored product on the company's search results page. During the project, there was a debate about measurement from two camps: old school web and what I'll call pragmatists.

The old school web folks argued that knowing clicks & impressions was enough to demonstrate the success of a custome's ad purchase. Afterall, they argued, these are the metrics in the sales contract. The pragmatists argued that those measures are great, but have become nearly irrelevant without a direct link to conversion. They argued that the multivariate analysis needed to demonstrate an ad's success would be much more time-intensive than cost-effective. Moreover, customers wouldn't "buy" such a methodology.

I'm with the pragmatists. I don't find it compelling how many people saw and clicked on my ads. What I really want to know is the whole funnel, down to conversion [read: purchase]. I want my ad dollars tied to as much real data as possible. And if a company, like my friend's, approached me with a pitch for sponsored results, I'd be interested. If they told me that they were not able to measure conversion for previous customers, or for my own campaign, I'd turn them down (unless, of course, they were Google).

I was thinking about this when I read this article in Advertising Age. There are times when I can't/don't expect to measure conversion. Some of my campaigns may be a "success" if we increased brand awareness or improved brand perception. How do you set your goals for campaigns? Is there a component of each one which has a "softer", less measurable component reserved for brand awareness/perception? Is it reasonable to expect more?