I work for a boutique digital marketing firm and manage Adword accounts for several clients. Due to one client's overbearing internal bureaucracy it is impossible for my firm to get access to their conversion data. This adds a challenge to all aspects of our Adwords management but it is making managing their display network campaigns quite difficult. If you were tasked with optimizing and improving a display network campaign without access to conversion data (basically stuck with just impressions and clicks) how would you go about it?
Just make it clear to them what the restrictions are and why, and agree with them conversion goals that you can see - such as increase in traffic to specified pages - that's all you can do.
You can optimize the campaign by targeting mainly with impression statistics. Since without conversion data there's no way for you to figure out the exact ROI from CPC. Then generates more impressions for branding is the only thing you can focus on.