Digital marketing has quickly become a key strategy for reaching customers. The world of digital marketing is constantly changing as trends change and technologies develop. It is important to keep up to date with the new trends and adapt marketing tactics accordingly. If you don’t, you risk falling behind while your competitors stay ahead.
What is the key to keeping up with the new trends in digital marketing? It is knowing the latest marketing statistics. In this article, we have collated information on digital marketing in Canada to help you stay up to date with the latest developments and to use them to connect with your target audience.
Digital Marketing Statistics for Canadians
- The average Canadian spends 6 hours and 5 minutes per day on digital media.
- 95.2% of the population is now using the internet in Canada.
- Around $18.9 billion is spent on digital marketing in 2025.
- The share of digital marketing is around 76.7% of the total spent on advertising.
- The revenue from digital marketing is around $18.2 billion.
- Most of the revenue, 46.4% comes from searches, followed by social media at 31.0%.
- Audio, including podcasts and streaming, grew its revenue the most by 15.7%.
- Advertising on Facebook yielded the most revenue at 24.8% of the social media market share. However, Instagram grew its traffic to external websites the most (30% increase in interactions for videos).
- 94% of small businesses in Canada use social media for marketing at least once a month and 52% do so daily.
- Majority of people do not think they can trust online advertising.
- Around 81% of Canadians shop online and spend $84.4 billion.
Time spent on digital media per day and number of users in Canada
The time Canadians spend using digital media has been on the rise. The average daily screen time among Canadians is about 6 hours and 5 minutes. On average, approximately 2.0 hours are spent on social media platforms, up from 1.46 hours in 2021. They also watch around 3.4 hours of TV per day on average.
In 2025, there were approximately 38.0 million internet users in Canada. This means that about 95.2% of Canadians are using the internet. They use it to engage with others via social platforms, online shopping, and entertainment.
The growing business of digital marketing
The amount companies spend on digital marketing has been growing year on year, as has the revenue from online advertising. In 2020, about $8.45 billion was spent on digital advertising. By 2022, the spending had increased to $12.29 billion. In 2025, the expected spending on digital advertising in Canada is approximately $18.9 billion, reflecting continued growth as businesses allocate more of their budgets to online channels.
In Canada, digital advertising accounted for 68.3% of the total spent on advertising in 2022. By 2025, digital channels are now expected to represent around 76.7% of total advertising budgets.
The year-on-year revenue from digital marketing continued to grow strongly. While earlier data showed a 28.1 % increase from 2020 to 2021 and revenue of $12,323 million in 2021, more recent industry reports show that Canada’s digital advertising revenue climbed to approximately $18.2 billion in 2024, up from around $15.9 billion in 2023.
How is the revenue split between different forms of digital marketing?
The largest share of the revenue in 2023 came from internet searches, $7,388 million, which represents 46.4% of the total revenue ($13,800 million). It was followed by social media with a 31.0% share of the total. Both forms were up from the previous year. The revenue from searches went up 22.8% and from social media 20.0% compared with 2022.
Compared to the previous year, the revenue went up in all forms of digital marketing except for classifieds, which was down 8.5%. Despite representing only 1.3% of the revenue, audio also grew — with audio revenue up 15.7% from the previous year.
With a 50% share, Google is the dominating force in the digital advertising market, followed by Facebook with 33%.
Search engine market share in Canada
According to Statista and recent market data, Google remains the clear leader among search engines in Canada and worldwide, though its dominance has slightly declined from earlier years. In 2025, Google has around 87–89% of the search engine market in Canada, while Bing holds about 6–8%, Yahoo about 2–2.3%, and DuckDuckGo roughly 1.4–1.5% of the market.
For an advertiser, it is important to optimize their content for search engines since revenue from them represents nearly half of the revenue from digital marketing. It is also important to note that only a small percentage of people click on paid advertisements — in many markets this is around 2–3% — meaning much of the value comes from organic search terms such as “the best deals” or “the best laptops in 2025”.
Which social media platforms bring in the most revenue through website clicks?
Despite the growing popularity of platforms including Instagram and Twitter, Facebook still holds the majority of referrals to a website from social media. In recent data for 2025, referrals from Facebook represent around 24.8 % of website clicks from social media. Instagram and TikTok follow with approximately 18.2 % and 15.6 % respectively, while X and Pinterest each generate smaller shares of traffic.
However, Facebook’s year-on-year growth in referral traffic has been modest compared with faster-growing platforms. Instagram and TikTok, for example, have shown significantly higher increases in clicks compared to Facebook in recent periods.
YouTube and LinkedIn also contribute to referral traffic, with YouTube’s share at about 6.7 % and LinkedIn around 9.8 % of social referrers in 2025; both platforms have seen continued growth in click-through rates.
While Twitter’s referral traffic share has remained lower (around 12.1 %) and other platforms such as Reddit contribute only modestly, Instagram’s share of digital marketing-related referral traffic is likely to grow even more when more companies get into the habit of using external links from Instagram, for example via Instagram Stories.
How do companies use social media for digital marketing?
Using social media is vital for finding your target audience, especially for small businesses looking to grow their client base. 94% of small businesses in Canada post on social media monthly and 79% weekly. Only just over half of the small businesses post daily and 6% does it less often than once per month.
Companies are most likely to use Instagram and Facebook with both platforms used by around 80% of businesses. Twitter and YouTube are used by around 60% of companies.
Many Canadian companies are planning to increase their spending on social media advertising with 84% saying they will spend more on Facebook adverts, nearly 60% investing more on YouTube, and 48% on LinkedIn.
Social media demographics for digital marketers
When deciding how to spend their time and money on social media advertising, it is important to know the demographics of the people who use the different social media platforms.
- Facebook has over 3.0 billion users worldwide. Around 70% of Facebook users say they are college graduates. All genders are active on Facebook, with a small majority being men (approximately 57%). Stories on Facebook get around 500 million viewers and about 69% of Facebook users log in every day. Roughly 18–19% of the users shop on the platform.
- In 2024, around 65% of Instagram’s approximately 2.4 billion users were under 35 years old, so it is the ideal platform for companies to connect with younger audiences. Videos now get around 30% more interactions than pictures on Instagram and engagement with brands is around 6 times higher than on Facebook. About 20% of the users shop through Instagram.
- YouTube has around 2.9 billion active monthly users as of 2025, and about 60% of those are men. The most popular content among men is soccer and strategy games, while women prefer to watch lifestyle videos. Approximately 74% of people have watched nostalgic content on YouTube.
- X does not have the same number of users as Facebook or Instagram, with around 450 million active users. The key to engaging with customers on X is responding to them. About 80% of the users who message a company said they were more likely to do business with companies that replied to them. Approximately 50% of X users have made a purchase of products they first saw on X.
- LinkedIn is a social network where professionals can connect and has around 950 million active users. It has more affluent users than the other platforms, with about 46% of the users earning over 75,000 USD per year. Since LinkedIn is a platform for professionals, it is a useful tool for business-to-business sales and is around 280% more effective than Facebook.
- The idea of Pinterest is to share inspirational ideas, for example, for events, homes, or fashion. In 2025, the platform has around 495 million active monthly users, and people earning a high income are more likely to use it than those on lower incomes. Over 4/5 of Pinterest users say they use the platform when planning life events such as weddings, christenings, and graduations.
Email marketing
Engaging with your audience via email is another important tool for digital marketers. 31% of people aged 25-34 say they open all the emails they receive. Only 12% of people aged 35-44 open all their emails.
A quarter of Canadians check their email first thing in the morning and almost as many, 23.7% said they check their email whenever they pick up their phone. 17.4% say they will check a new email as soon as they receive it and over half of the population checks their email over fifteen times per day. A tenth check their email only 1-5 times per day.
A most important question for email marketers is whether people make spontaneous purchases based on emails. Four out of five people aged 25-34 have made a spontaneous purchase after receiving a marketing email. However, the figure for all age groups is lower at around 50%.
Do consumers find digital advertising trustworthy?
The majority of people do not see digital advertising as trustworthy, which probably explains why most of the revenue comes from internet searches for products or from social media platforms where consumers have the chance to engage with a company’s feed before buying.
People aged 35 or younger were the most likely to trust online advertising, with 40% perceiving them as trustworthy. People over 65 are the least likely to trust adverts they see online. The main reason for the distrust is that consumers see them as false or leading to phishing.
Online shopping in Canada
Finally, let’s have a look at Canada’s online shopping habits. According to Statistics Canada, in August of 2024, retail e-commerce sales decreased 2.5% to $3.9 billion. Companies and individuals who use digital marketing techniques are more likely to gain sales through online shopping.
The biggest age group for online shopping is the 25-44-year-olds where 95% said they shopped online in a Statistics Canada survey on online shopping. People aged 15-25 group were the second biggest consumers, with 90% shopping online in 2020. 83% of 45-64-year-olds said they had shopped online. The group that was least engaged with online shopping was the over-65 group where only 55% said they had shopped online.
In 2024, around 81% of the people who answered the survey said they had bought physical goods online and about 72% had bought digital goods and services. Only 12% had bought accommodation services.
The survey also asked those who had not shopped online to state why they didn’t make online purchases. Out of the 18% who had not bought online, 73% said they had not shopped online because they had no need or interest to do so. 23% said they had concerns over the security of online shopping and 18% said they wanted to see the product in person before parting with their money. 16% also said they found online shopping too difficult.
Summary
With 95.2% of Canadians using the internet in some capacity and about 6 hours and 5 minutes of daily internet use, companies cannot underestimate the power of digital marketing. While paid advertising doesn’t create many sales, the emphasis is more on sales via audience engagement.
Companies and individuals looking to increase their revenue from digital marketing will benefit more from creating website content that performs well on search engines as well as engaging with their target audience on social media platforms.
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