Is Tracking Always Necessary?

I have read that it's mandatory to track your results from online advertising in order to see if it's worth doing again, but that raises a couple of questions for me.

First, is ALL your advertising designed to get an immediate action, or do you sometimes advertise just to brand yourself or your product? If you are just branding, it's not as easy to track.

Another question is how can you tell what's just around the corner? You can track a particular campaign and prematurely decide it's not working, but you just happened to hit the wrong part of the curve that period. Let's say it takes 1,000 exposures to get one desired response, so after 3,000 exposures you decide it didn't work. Who can say you won't get several positives in a short time to balance out the statistics as expected in the first place?

All I'm saying, is if it's simple and free, why not keep doing it even if you don't get much back? You never can tell when the one result you get will be one that ends up making your day. Even a simple article like this can bring someone to look over your profile and find just what they were looking for, how can you ever tell?

See you online!