Skip to main content
Canada Blog

Helping 600,000 Canadian businesses transform during the pandemic



For over 20 years, Google has helped Canadian businesses of all sizes use our digital tools to grow and reach customers across the globe. But 2020 wasn’t business-as-usual. We spent the year helping Canadian businesses adapt to the biggest challenge of a generation – making a decade’s worth of technology innovation happen in a matter of months. 

Before COVID-19, making the transition to digital was aspirational for most business owners. When the pandemic upended all of our lives, it became essential. And now, for companies, it is existential. To explore how Google products helped Canadian workers and businesses in 2020, Google commissioned independent consultancy Public First to take a look. 

public first

How Public First calculates Google’s economic impact: 

Leveraging methodology from previous Google impact reports from markets including Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, independent consultancy Public First used traditional economic modelling built upon third-party estimates of Google Canada’s market size and standard returns on investment (ROI) to measure the economic activity driven by Google’s core products, including Google Search, Google Ads, AdSense, Android and YouTube. You can see a fuller explanation of this methodology at https://googleimpactcanada.publicfirst.co/canada/#appendix