Canadians continue to be the world’s most engaged online audience, according to ComScore’s 2010 Canadian Digital Year in Review.
Canada ranked #1 among the top markets measured by ComScore in both average hours per visitor and average visits per visitor in the fourth quarter of 2010.
Boomers are driving much of the growth in Canadians’ online usage, with users 55+ making the most gains in total unique visitors by age, gaining 12% in Q4 of 2010 over 2009. This age group is also driving growth in social media: people between 55 and 64 drove a 48% increase in total visits between Q4 of 2009 and Q4 of 2010 and people over 65 drove a 45% growth in the same category. Young people, however, between two and 17, dropped 18% over the same quarter last year.
Email, on the other hand, continues to decline, albeit modestly. Email sites demonstrated a 79.5% reach in Q4 of 2010, down from 82% over the same time last year. Average daily unique visitors to such sites, however, declined 28% since December 2009.
The good news for advertisers is that total display ad impressions grew 3% in 2010. The top display advertisers in Canada were Procter & Gamble in #1 and GMAC/Ally in #2, accounting for almost 17 billion ad impressions in 2010. Social networking delivered the biggest gains, racking up 58 billion impressions in the last quarter of 2010, a gain ComScore attributes to the rise in social networking sites able to deliver ad impressions and declines in other categories, such as email.
What’s next? Mobile. ComScore says 2011 is the year consumers will start accessing content habitually via their mobile devices. ‘Advertisers have the opportunity to steer the path of the mobile frontier and engage the game changers,’ the report says.
Social networking and video will continue to grow, as will digital display advertising, although measuring pre and post ad effectiveness will be the trend of 2011, the report says. ‘Measurement, good creative and using the right measures is instrumental in this area.’
To access the whole report, click here.
