Top digital marketing and SEO agency: Why brands choose Convert Cake
Forget the followers, toss the traffic graphs. If your digital marketing agency can’t connect the dots between ad spend and actual sales, what’s the point?
A strong digital presence is a must for any business chasing market share and growth in this day and age. But turning that ambition into tangible results? That takes the right partner. And if you’ve been looking for a top digital marketing agency that can actually execute, you’ve probably experienced how overwhelming it can get.
Suddenly, everyone’s promising big wins, with flashy decks and slick pitches coming at you from all sides. This is where the question gets harder to answer: who can actually deliver growth, and who’s just good at selling the dream?
Since you don’t get a test drive when hiring a digital marketing agency, it’s important that you choose the one who actually delivers real value, measurable results, and sustainable business growth.
We created this guide together with Convert Cake, a Bangkok-based performance marketing agency, to break down what to look for (and what to avoid), so you can work with a partner who won’t waste your time or budget.
What’s in this article
| Jump to section | Summary |
| The digital agency trap | Many agencies sell busywork metrics (likes, clicks, and impressions) that don’t convert into revenue. |
| What to measure instead | Track real business KPIs like ROAS, CAC, and conversion rates to know if your marketing works. |
| Paid media: Performance first | Choose agencies that offer real-time dashboards, shared-risk guarantees, and measurable returns. |
| Performance SEO: Playing the long game | SEO should focus on commercial keywords, topical authority, and turning traffic into buyers. |
| Vetting agencies like a pro | Ask strategic questions to spot red flags and find a partner that delivers outcomes, not just content. |
| How Convert Cake does it | ROI-obsessed, radically transparent, and full-service, Convert Cake ties everything to your revenue. |
The common trap: How digital agencies sell activity instead of outcomes
The term data-driven is widely used in the digital marketing world, but a significant portion of the marketing budget is still spent on activities that don’t truly drive business growth. Some agencies know how to look busy. They present reports with colourful graphs and technical buzzwords, but little of it relates to real revenue. This is a classic trap that every business owner should be aware of before choosing a digital marketing agency.
The social media mirage: Likes aren’t currency
The bait: Agencies often wave around engagement stats (likes, comments, shares, or follower growth) and dress them up as signs that your brand is gaining traction. Yes, these metrics are easy to understand and seem promising at first glance, but more often than not, they’re just tools to create the illusion of success.
The trap: Charts, metrics, and technical jargon in a report don’t automatically translate to sales or quality leads.
A report might show 10,000 likes or three million impressions, but if those numbers don’t lead to conversions, then they’re just vanity metrics. Many agencies focus on top-of-funnel stats like reach or awareness, while ignoring bottom-line results like sales or ROI.
Take this: a company spends 100,000 baht a month on ads and gains 50,000 page likes. However, they only make three sales, all from a giveaway. That’s not growth, that’s wasted spend. If your agency can’t connect the numbers to real revenue, it’s time to walk away.
The SEO Illusion: Traffic without buyers
The bait: Some agencies still pitch SEO as a bulk content deal, for example, ‘20 articles a month for x baht’ or promises of fast traffic spikes. It sounds like value for money, but can that value be converted into actual consumers and revenue?
The trap: Traffic that looks good on paper but doesn’t drive sales.
Agencies often chase low-intent keywords, skip content research, and pump out AI-generated articles that miss the mark. As a result, the pages don’t rank or if they do, they attract the wrong audience and fail to convert.
Sure, you get traffic, but not the kind that buys. Remember, great SEO isn’t about publishing loads of content. It’s about targeting the right search terms, matching user intent, and building pages that bring in customers.
So, what should you measure instead?
If your reports are full of metrics like reach, clicks, or impressions, but you’re still guessing how much money you’re actually making from them, it’s time to flip the approach. Go with a performance-only mindset. Stop tracking surface-level numbers and start looking at the stuff that actually moves your business forward.
Although this mindset applies across all marketing channels, the way performance is measured can be different between paid media (advertising) and long-term SEO.
Paid media: The heart of performance marketing
For platforms like Google, Meta, and TikTok, you can track every click, lead, and sale in real time. Here’s how a digital marketing agency with a real performance mindset operates:
- Radical accountability
Good agencies don’t just talk big games. They put their money where their mouth is. Some will link their pay to your results, and may even promise things like “No growth in 90 days? You don’t pay for the final month.” This may seem like a gimmick, but it actually means that they’re ruthless about what works. It forces them to focus on what matters: outcomes.
- Total transparency
You should never have to wait for a monthly report to see where your budget’s gone. A good agency gives you a real-time dashboard, so you can check performance any time, without asking.
- Measuring what matters
Agencies with a performance mindset know that the only numbers that matter are the ones that move your revenue. These include:
- ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): How much revenue are you generating for every 1 baht spent on ads?
- CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): How much does it cost to acquire one paying customer?
- Conversion Rate: What percentage of ad viewers take your desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or starting a chat?
Performance SEO: Playing the long game properly
SEO works differently from paid media. It takes longer as it requires a strong, strategic foundation. But when done right, it becomes a low-cost channel that delivers for years.
Here’s what a good performance SEO looks like:
- Focusing on commercial intent: Success should be defined by conversions and quality leads from organic search rather than rising traffic graphs or the number of articles delivered per package. Great SEO should drive the right traffic at the right time.
- Building topical authority: Forget article quotas. A strong SEO strategy positions your site as a go-to source in your niche. When Google sees you as an expert, you rank across whole topic clusters, not just one-off keywords.
- Turning search into sales: The ultimate goal of performance SEO is to turn organic traffic into sales. This can be achieved with the right keywords and content built to convert.
How to vet the best digital marketing agency
Too many digital marketing agencies act like vendors. They deliver content, send the surface-level KPI reports, and collect the fee. What you need is a partner, an agency that understands your business, challenges conventional plans, thinks strategically with vision, takes action with accountability, and drives your business forward with shared goals.
But how do you differentiate between agencies that focus on activities and partners who focus on outcomes? Well, you need to ask the right questions. Below, we’ve compiled some killer question examples you can use, along with the green flags and red flags to watch for in their answers.
Vetting for paid media performance
Test #1: The business acumen test
- Question: “Given our customer lifetime value, we aim for a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) of X. How would you craft a media strategy across platforms such as Meta and Google to reach this goal?”
- Green flag: They jump into numbers, channel mix, budget distribution, and campaign structure to achieve the specified CPA or target ROAS.
- Red flag: They start talking about ambiguous concepts like brand awareness.
Test #2: The transparency test
- Question: “What methods do you employ to track advertising expenditure and campaign effectiveness? Will we have round-the-clock access to a live dashboard displaying our ROAS, or must we await monthly reports?”
- Green flag: They provide a demonstration of their real-time dashboard and verify that you will have immediate visibility into performance metrics. Plus, their fees are clearly separated from ad spend.
- Red flag: They only send PDFs at the end of each month and won’t explain their fee structure.
Vetting for SEO performance
Test #1: The strategy and quality test
- Question: “What is your approach to keyword selection and evaluating content quality? How do you ensure that the chosen keywords have commercial intent and can convert traffic into actual conversions, rather than just attracting passive readers?”
- Green flag: They focus on funnel stages, intent, and long-term ranking power.
- Red flag: They pitch you a number, like “we’ll give you 50 keywords and 20 articles a month.”
Test #2: The accountability & guarantee test
- Question: SEO represents a long-term investment strategy. To safeguard your investment and guarantee measurable outcomes, such as first-page rankings for our target keywords?”
- Green flag: They’re confident, show you terms, and offer shared-risk options.
- Red flag: They dodge with “no one can guarantee SEO,” and leave it at that.
How Convert Cake does it
Most marketing agencies promise the world and give you… a monthly report full of fluff. Metrics that sound impressive, but don’t mean a thing for your bottom line. Convert Cake isn’t one of them.
Positioning themselves as a performance partner, they’re here to help you grow your revenue. Everything they do, from SEO and paid media to content and conversion design, is focused on one thing: driving real results. But what makes them so different?
Revenue-first, ROI-obsessed
Every campaign that Convert Cake handles is tied to business KPIs like ROAS, CAC, and LTV. Performance is baked into everything they do, from planning to execution.
Case in point: An eCommerce brand came to Convert Cake with a familiar problem. Their ad campaigns were popular on the surface, but sales were flat. Despite heavy spending, there was no clear understanding of how those campaigns contributed to actual revenue. They were tracking top-line metrics like GMV (gross merchandise value), but had no attribution model to connect ad spend to real customer actions.
Convert Cake overhauled the strategy. Instead of measuring engagement, they built full-funnel tracking, from the first and impression to final purchase. The team replaced vanity metrics with business-critical ones like add-to-carts, checkout starts, and completed purchases. With this visibility, they could pinpoint which campaigns were actually driving sales.
Transparency, structure, and foundational strategy
Convert Cake works in full view. They give clients a real-time dashboard to track performance, with monthly reviews that show what’s working, what isn’t and where to go next. They offer a 90-day SEO performance guarantee, too. If the agreed results don’t show up, your final month is free.
Moreover, they have a different structure compared to most digital agencies. Convert Cake offers everything under one roof. SEO, paid media, content, analytics, and conversion design are all handled by in-house experts who work in sync. This means you won’t get shuffled between departments or passed off to third parties. Plus, their service is flexible, so you can opt for a full campaign or support in a specific area.
They also put foundational strategy at the centre of everything. Before any ad spend or content push, they dig into what your business actually needs to grow. That might mean fixing your site structure, rewriting pages that aren’t converting, or building out content that answers what your customers are really searching for.
Example: A leading aesthetic clinic saw organic clicks jump 112% and impressions spike 960% in 90 days, plus 18 top-3 rankings and 74 first-page positions. All thanks to Convert Cake’s property audit, smart keyword targeting, and high-performing content.
Choose a growth engine, not a gamble
Hiring a digital agency isn’t like buying a product you can try before you buy. It’s a big decision, often based on marketing materials that look great but don’t show the full picture. So our last advice is to look for an agency with proof, not one that sells hope. Find one that focuses on revenue, works transparently, and ties their success to yours.
That’s exactly how a top digital marketing agency like Convert Cake works. If you’re ready to turn your marketing into a reliable growth engine, get in touch today and see what performance really looks like.
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