We Checked the Tracking on 640 European Webshops. Here Is What We Found

In November 2026 we checked the public tracking setup of 640 webshops in Slovenia, the Netherlands and Belgium. We wanted to know how many shops measure their sales at all, how many still carry old code, and how many advertise without proper measurement behind it.

The short version

• 31 percent of the shops (200 of 640) have no GA4. 120 have no Google Analytics at all, and 80 still run only the old Universal Analytics, which stopped collecting data in July 2023.
• Of the 440 shops that do run GA4, 151 (34 percent) still have old Universal Analytics code or tags active next to it.
• 59 shops run ad tags from Google Ads, Meta or other platforms but have no GA4, so they pay for traffic without measuring in Google Analytics what it does on the website.
• The Meta pixel is installed on 56 percent of the shops. In the Slovenian part of the sample, where we verified it by hand, at least 23 of 179 shops (13 percent) load it before the visitor has made any choice in the cookie banner.
• 25 shops (4 percent) load more than one Google Tag Manager container, a common source of duplicate data.

How we checked

We took the webshop lists that Store Leads publishes for each country and platform (WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop and OpenCart), including the lists by region and city. That gave us 640 different shops: 179 in Slovenia, 234 in the Netherlands and 227 in Belgium. The lists show the larger and better-known shops in each region first, so the sample leans towards established shops rather than hobby projects.

For every shop we loaded the home page and the Google Tag Manager containers it uses, and recorded which tags are present: GA4, Universal Analytics, Google Ads, the Meta pixel and others. We only looked at what any visitor can see. We had no access to anyone’s accounts.

We left out Shopify. Shopify runs many tracking apps in a sandbox that a page check cannot see reliably, so including it would have made the numbers less accurate.

Automated checks make mistakes, so we checked samples by hand. All shops in a random sample of those marked “only Universal Analytics” were confirmed. GA4 that a shop loads in an unusual way, for example from inside a JavaScript bundle, can be missed, so the “no GA4” figure may be slightly too high. For the Meta pixel and consent, automated detection was not reliable enough across different cookie tools, so we report only the cases we verified by hand.

1. Almost a third have no GA4

200 of 640 shops have no GA4. For 120 of them we found no Google Analytics at all. Some may use another analytics tool, but most simply do not measure what visitors do.

The other 80 still run only Universal Analytics. Google stopped processing data for standard Universal Analytics properties in July 2023. These shops have been collecting nothing for more than three years, and the code on the website gives the impression that measurement is in place.

2. Old code stays behind

Of the 440 shops with GA4, 151 still load Universal Analytics code or have active UA tags in Google Tag Manager. In most cases this does not break anything, but it adds requests to every page and makes the setup harder to maintain. It is also a sign that nobody has reviewed the tracking since the move to GA4. One Belgian shop we looked at more closely still had 45 active UA tags in its container.

3. Advertising without measurement

415 shops run at least one advertising tag. 59 of them have no GA4. They may see conversions inside the ad platform, but they have no independent view of what the paid traffic does on the website: which products people look at, where they leave, how paid visitors compare with other channels.

4. The Meta pixel and consent

The Meta pixel is the most common advertising tag in the sample: 361 shops have it. Where it loads before the visitor makes a choice in the cookie banner, data goes to Meta without consent.

We verified this by hand for the Slovenian shops. At least 23 of 179 load the pixel straight away, usually because it was added directly to the theme or by a shop module, outside the cookie tool. Google Consent Mode does not help here, because it controls only Google tags.

Differences by country

The Dutch shops advertise the most and measure the best. Slovenian shops have the largest share without GA4: 4 in 10.

Differences by platform

Magento shops, which tend to be larger, are in the best shape. On PrestaShop almost half of the shops have no GA4. The OpenCart group is small, so its numbers are less reliable.

What you can check yourself in ten minutes

1. Open your website in a private window and open the browser’s developer tools on the Network tab.
2. Reload the page and filter for collect?v=2. If nothing appears, GA4 is not sending data.
3. Search the page source for UA-. An ID like UA-12345678-1 means old code is still there.
4. Before clicking the cookie banner, filter for facebook.com/tr. Anything that appears was sent to Meta before consent.
5. Search the source for gtm.js. More than one container ID needs a closer look.

If you would rather have someone go through the whole setup, including GTM, GA4, ad platforms and consent, a tracking audit does exactly that and gives you a list of what to fix.