Coming off a fourth quarter that saw total revenue grow 17% year-on-year to $6.67 billion, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is placing its bet on local advertising and the mobile Web to continue its momentum on the wireless front. 
Local, in particular, is hugely important to Google, according to Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s senior vice president of product management. On its earnings conference call, he told investors that local is going to be much more important in the “not too distant future,” because Google is seeing more people shopping offline starting online and many still don’t have access to the inventory information of the local stores. He said that when phone numbers and coupons are included on mobile ads, people are much more likely to click them.
“Well imagine if the inventory information is there so they can actually consummate a transaction locally,” Rosenberg said on the call, according to a . “As that information becomes available local is going to be much, much more powerful.”
He used AT&T as an example of an advertiser that already uses Google’s local products to help people find local stores, but said that Google is just getting started in terms of the capabilities needed for local to take off. Rosenberg also told investors that he believes Google has the potential to make the mobile Web better than the PC Web as advertisers discover the value of click-throughs, targeting and analytics tools improve monetization and mobile search takes off.
“The whole mobile strategy is built on building and accelerating an ecosystem,” added Patrick Pichette , Google’s Chief Financial Officer, referring to Google’s Android strategy. He said that while Google has its own teams developing cool mobile apps, it is all about promoting innovation. By being open source, Pichette said Google gets better apps to users at a faster speed, and consumers end up using Android devices 30 times more than a typical handset.
“In consequence they do a lot more searching and there is a lot more advertising opportunities,” he said. “So pushing that ecosystem is so critical because that is where the world is going.”