At day one of Marketing Week, presented by the Canadian Marketing Association and Marketing magazine, Google Canada country manager Jonathan Lister talked the web and where Canadian businesses need to step up.

In his talk, entitled “New rules of online engagement...I get it. Now what?” he left no doubt as to the importance of an online presence to business. Throwing out statistics to the crowd such as the fact that there are now 2.67 billion searches done online daily and 600 million registered domain names he said simply showing up is only half the battle.

He stressed the importance of placement, saying 71 percent of users expect leading brands to be at the top of search results pages and that users who have the top spot on organic and paid search results get 23 percent more users to their sites. He also said that consumers who see advertising on niche sites rather than a portal are twice as likely to look at the ad and spend up to four times as much time on the sites once they are there.

The time is now for getting onto the mobile and video online advertising bandwagon, said Lister while there is lower competition and pricing is relatively low. He said 32 percent of Canadians own a smart phone and 65 percent say they will buy one as their next mobile device. While the emphasis is still on web searching for the time being, he said Google sees searches on phones overtaking the Internet by 2011. “Start early and start strong,” he said. “Experiment and develop best practices and scale investments now before mobile search and video advertising explodes.”

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