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Those ad agencies aren't stupid; they have metrics for their metrics and have tracking that can tell you to the second when your gut bacteria burps ...Stupid they aren't, but I don't think they're smart in the way they are.
Ad attribution is a hard problem. Or, in other words, it's hard to estimate which $ spent on which advertising activities generated how many $ of profit where. That gap is a huge opportunity to scam the product vendor out of their money.
So the ad agency has a metric for their metric, and their reports overflow with numbers and various charts shaped like food or aquatic mammals. But does that mean anything at all? It might not. Statistics is hard, and as long as the vendor isn't better at it than the agency, money can be made. I used to work next desk to a group of content marketers who had no fucking clue about what their numbers mean, but their customers didn't have a clue either, so they happily paid money in exchange for reports that showed the Facebook campaigns "worked".
Now advertising industry is large, and by definition filled with companies that aren't a paragon of virtue and honesty. These companies specialize, providing building blocks and platforms for each other, and they compete internally. It's not like people building tools for lies and manipulation are suddenly honest when dealing with their in-industry customers and competitors. After all, convincing advertisers that your A/B testing package is worth the money requires... well, advertising.
So my personal view on the industry is that it's mostly self-reinforcing bullshit. Doesn't change the fact that it generates stupid amounts of money, though.