Can you track recruitment advertising performance?

I am still amazed at the volume of offline recruitment advertising that has no obvious attempt of measurement.  I also hear recruitment advertising agencies 'blaming' the ATS vendor for not being able to track online advertising yet they (ad agencies) don't appear to be any better with offline.

But maybe in the same way the oil companies do not want electric cars, ad agencies don't really want to be able to measure advertising performance!

There are of course a number of methods to track both offline and online yet very few organisations are doing this.  But what would employers do if they found out that some recruiting channels were proving more expensive than using a recruitment agency?  What would the ad agency do if this was the case?

I can't really see how employers can continue to spend money on recruitment advertising without really knowing what is working and what kind of ROI they are getting.  I do realise that the internal customer will see their competitors advertising for e.g. buyers so put HR under pressure to do the same if they cannot fill similar vacancies.  But if they have no real statistics to prove that placing the same advert is no different to burning a pile of cash, and it may not even be their budget, they have little choice.  And of course, the ad agency will be delighted to help them spend some of someone else's budget!

The ad goes in and HR are off the hook for a few weeks; but then the customer is on their case again asking why there are still no applicants to interview.

In time, some of the smaller/niche online ad agencies will start to prove their case for their online focus and we should start to see direct competition within client accounts of offline versus online.  This may be via one agency with separate departments that compete against each other or, separate agencies in the same account proving their worth.  Either way, it is only a matter of time before we start to see better measurement from source-to-hire. 

And when we do, the traditional ad agencies will need to demonstrate hard value as they will otherwise see a big slice of their revenue going elsewhere.