Choosing a global performance marketing agency means finding one partner who owns paid media, conversion work, and tracking across markets. You do not want a vendor that runs ads and calls it done. Instead, the right agency ties every dollar of spend to a revenue number you can track. Then you report real lift to leadership, not vanity metrics.
- TCT Digital just won the global mandate for StumpMike, and it signals that mid-market brands now hand paid, SEO, and CRO to one partner.
- One mandate closes the gaps that form when three agencies each claim the same conversion.
- Before you sign any agency, audit your own funnel, because traffic landing on a broken site is the fastest way to burn a budget.
- The right brief forces an agency to show you a measurement framework before they show you a media plan.
- A free UX audit gives you leverage, since you get hard data to test any agency’s advice before you commit.
What Does TCT Digital Winning the StumpMike Mandate Actually Mean for You?
TCT Digital is now StumpMike’s performance marketing agency of record. So one partner owns paid buying, conversion strategy, and measurement in every market StumpMike sells in. More growth-stage brands work this way, because splitting the job across three or four vendors creates chaos over who gets credit.
Adgully reported the news in July 2026, and it points to a wider shift. The World Federation of Advertisers finds that one-agency models cut media waste, because they strip out duplicate overhead and close the gaps that split setups leave behind [World Federation of Advertisers]. So when one team owns the full funnel, from first paid click to post-purchase email, no one points fingers if conversion stalls.
If you run marketing at a $2M–$15M e-commerce brand, the lesson is direct. Has your paid agency ever spoken to your CRO consultant? If not, you are losing revenue in the handoff between them.
“The brands that scale fastest in 2026 are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones where every dollar of paid spend lands on a page built to convert it.”
Why Does a Leaky Funnel Make Any Performance Mandate Worthless?
A performance marketing agency only delivers ROI when the destination converts, and that destination is your website. If your UX is broken, even a world-class media plan will disappoint. Paid spend simply magnifies what your site already does, good or bad.
The Baymard Institute puts the average documented cart abandonment rate at 70.19% across e-commerce. So roughly seven of every ten shoppers who add an item leave without buying. No amount of media tuning wins that revenue back if the real problem is checkout flow, page speed, or mobile.
This gap kills your credibility with founders and CEOs. You report strong click-through rates and healthy traffic. Still, the revenue line does not move. Then leadership questions the whole budget, not because the buying was wrong, but because no one checked the funnel before spending on it.
So get the order right, and audit the UX before you scale paid spend, not after.
How Do You Brief a Performance Marketing Agency to Get Real Results?
A strong brief makes a performance marketing agency show you how it will measure, before it shows you a media plan. Here is a sequence you can run before any pitch:
- Define your single north-star metric. For most e-commerce brands that is revenue per session, not ROAS. After all, ROAS can be gamed by cutting low-funnel spend, while revenue per session cannot.
- Share your funnel data, not just your traffic numbers. Give them your add-to-cart rate, checkout initiation rate, and purchase completion rate by device. If they do not ask for these in the first conversation, treat it as a red flag.
- Ask for a 90-day measurement plan before a 90-day media plan. How will they credit conversions across paid, organic, and email? Also, where do they stand on GA4 versus third-party attribution tools?
- Request a cross-market reporting structure. If you sell in more than one country or currency, ask how they normalize the data so you compare like for like.
- Agree on a baseline before launch. Put your current conversion rate, average order value, and cost per sale in writing. An agency that will not sign off on a baseline plans to dodge accountability.
“I am a marketing manager at a [revenue range] e-commerce brand selling [product category] in [markets]. My current conversion rate is [X%], cart abandonment rate is [Y%], and my primary paid channels are [channels]. I am evaluating performance marketing agencies for a consolidated mandate. Generate a 10-question RFP that tests each agency’s measurement framework, attribution methodology, cross-channel reporting approach, and UX audit process. Prioritize questions that expose whether the agency will own revenue outcomes or just media metrics.”
What Should You Do Right Now If Your Paid Traffic Is Not Converting?
Before you brief a single agency, run a check on your own funnel. You need evidence, not guesses, when you walk into a pitch or a leadership meeting. A structured UX audit gives you that, because it ranks friction points by what they cost you, instead of listing generic best practices. You can start with a free website analysis, or see how we handle web design and development.
Forrester Research reports that every dollar put into UX returns $100 on average, an ROI of 9,900% [Forrester Research]. The reason is simple, because fixing friction helps every traffic source at once. So a fix that lifts checkout completion by 2 points helps organic, email, and paid together.
A Three-Step Funnel Diagnostic
Here is a three-step check you can start today:
- Session recording review (30 minutes): Pull your last 50 session recordings from Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity. Then filter for sessions that reached the cart but did not buy. Look for rage clicks, form abandonment, and scroll depth on product pages.
- Mobile checkout audit (15 minutes): Run your own checkout on a mid-range Android phone over 4G, and time each step. If any step takes more than 3 seconds to load, you have found a conversion killer.
- Email abandonment check (10 minutes): Confirm your cart abandonment emails are live and fire within 60 minutes. Per Klaviyo’s 2025 benchmark data, emails sent in the first hour win back 3x more revenue than those sent after 24 hours [Klaviyo].
“Here is data from my e-commerce funnel: [paste your add-to-cart rate, checkout initiation rate, purchase completion rate, top exit pages, and device split]. Identify the three highest-leverage UX fixes I should prioritize to improve conversion rate, and for each fix estimate the revenue impact if I lift that step by 5 percentage points. Show your calculation.”
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a global performance marketing mandate?
It is a formal appointment. One performance marketing agency takes full charge of paid buying, conversion work, and tracking in every market a brand sells in. So it replaces a split, multi-agency setup with a single accountable partner. That partner owns the paid funnel from first click to purchase, which closes the gaps over who gets credit.
How do I know if my website UX is hurting my paid marketing ROI?
The clearest signal is a high add-to-cart rate next to a low purchase completion rate. The Baymard benchmark sits at 70.19%, so if more than 65% of your cart adds walk away, your UX is the constraint rather than your media buying. A UX audit will name the exact friction points costing you revenue. Run it before you scale any paid spend.
How long does it take to see results from a new performance marketing agency?
Most deals need 60 to 90 days to set a clean baseline, rebuild campaigns, and ship the first UX fixes. Real conversion lift usually shows up in months two through four. Be wary of any agency promising big revenue results in the first 30 days, because they are usually tuning metrics they control, like impressions or clicks, instead of the revenue you report to leadership.
