How Canadian search industry is different than the American? According to Yahoo’s SEM National Director, , Canadian companies might be missing the boat. We are way behind the States in SEM expenses. Byrne made for online banking services. While they are about 10 PPC ads in yahoo.com, there are about 5 sponsor results in yahoo.ca and even less when searching in French. These results show that Canadian companies don’t take all the opportunity available.

Eric Morris, points out 3 main differences:
1- Canadians are very loyal to Google in comparison of other countries
2- We are facing a bilingual reality
3- the industry is much more developed in the States

According to Morris, US companies have already shifted budgets from traditional channels to internet marketing. While Canadian begin to use and understand all the possibilities of analytics, US companies focus on the next steps of search such as contextual targeting for mobile.

Last on the panel, Guillaume Bouchard from NVI presented a look a the landscape of the SEM in Province of Qubec. Guillaume said that online sales would probably be higher if debit payment was widely accepted because Quebecers use more debit than credit card payment which is not the case in the States. It seems that Quebec users trust their banks before 3rd party websites such as PayPal. Also good to know that Quebec online market is mainly owned by 3 actors: PowerCorp, Transcontinental and Quebecor.