The past few months have been very busy and interesting at Dinkum. Not only have we continued to grow very quickly (another 50% this year seems likely), but the Internet has become more complicated as well. The compounding effect is that all of our clients (large and small) are looking to deploy more impactful campaigns using a broader set of tools whose complexity has increased. It’s clear also that results (ROI) matter more than ever.

Today, as I worked with Seth (social media) and Kerri (PPC) on one of our campaigns, I delighted in the fact that I was unconsciously pitting two of Google’s products against each other: Adwords and Google+. It’s an Internet marketing throwdown! Here is how the two competitors stack up:

PPC/Adwords
Kerri has done a great job building a PPC campaign for this client. Not only did she corral hundreds of potential keywords and ad variations, but she worked to extend her reach through a potent mixture of display advertising channels that seem poised to deliver both solid brand recognition as well as money-making conversions.

Cost? About $1000 per day.

Google+
Seth is a self-described Google+ fanatic with 17,000 followers, so I wasn’t surprised when during a team meeting he brought up the potential of the outlet for this particular client. “Sure,” I thought. “It has potential. But it’s gonna be a long term, nurture-your-community type thing.” A nice thing to invest in, but the rewards would be months and months down the road. Funny thing was, after the campaign got rolling I was compiling data and noticed that for a recent offer, referrals from our nascent social efforts were paying dividends (in terms of visitor traffic) that rivaled our PPC efforts. Whoa! With the numbers in front of me, I started to take it more seriously.

Cost? About $200 per day in staff time and content creation + $1000 per month in brand ambassador sponsorships.

While we are pursuing all the outlets for this client that make sense, including email marketing and PR, pitting these two options against each other is too tempting to pass up. With Google’s money-making engine on one side of the scales, and one of its major bets on the future on the other, I’m excited to see which efforts pays off the most, and fastest, for our client. The results might just be indicative of the future of Internet marketing.

I’ll keep you posted.