Is anyone measuring anything? Analytics counters on 99 Ukrainian sites

Advertising without measurement is not an investment — it is spending and hoping. While measuring Ukrainian sites across 19 niches, we looked separately at the simplest question: is there any counter at all on the homepage. The measurement was made on 7–8 August 2026 and repeated on 17 September 2026, and the figures below are from the repeat, in which 99 sites answered.

The results were more modest than expected.

Three numbers

Meta Pixel is present on 40 of 99 sites — 40%. This is the Facebook and Instagram pixel, without which the Meta ad account cannot see what happened after the click: whether the person left, viewed three pages or placed an order.

The Google Ads tag is present on 15 of 99 sites — 15%. In other words, 84 of the 99 sites pass no conversion data at all to Google Ads.

No counter at all on the homepage — 8 of 99 sites: 8%. No analytics, no pixel, no tag manager. The site works, receives visitors, and nothing about them is kept.

Why “no counter at all” is not always a saving

Behind the absence of counters there is usually one of three situations.

First: the site does not advertise at all and lives on organic search or referrals. In that case the missing Meta pixel hurts no one, but the absence of any analytics means the owner does not know even the basics — how many people visit, which pages they leave from, what they search for in the site search.

Second, and much worse: the site advertises, but the counters are not installed. Then money is paid for clicks, while decisions about “which campaign works” are made by gut feeling or by the number of calls that nobody links to a source.

Third: a counter was once installed and broke during a migration, a template change or a CMS update. This is the most common scenario among those we have seen on client sites: the code still contains an empty tag manager container with no tags inside, or a counter with the wrong ID.

Dead counters are a separate story

On several sites we measured in other samples, we came across Universal Analytics — a system that stopped collecting data in July 2023. Formally, the counter is in the code. In reality, it collects nothing.

This means the simple question “is analytics installed” does not give the full answer. A second one is needed: is data coming in right now. This can only be checked in the account itself — open the report for the last 24 hours and see whether there are any sessions in it.

A separate variant of the same problem is when analytics collects data but goals are not set up. Then you can see how many people came to the site, but not how many of them did what the site exists for: left an inquiry, added a product to the cart, placed an order.

What this costs in practice

Without the Meta pixel, the ad account cannot optimize delivery toward people who actually buy. The algorithm works blind: it sees clicks but does not see the outcome of a click. The difference between these two modes is the difference between advertising that becomes more precise over time and advertising that stays equally approximate the whole time.

Without the Google Ads tag, it is the same story in a different account, plus automated bidding strategies become impossible: they are built around a conversion event, and if the conversion event is not visible, the strategy has nothing to work from.

Without any analytics at all, it is impossible to answer even elementary questions: on which page people leave, how many of those who opened the cart get to payment, what percentage of visits come from mobile.

How to check your site in five minutes

1. Open the homepage and view its source code (Ctrl+U).
2. Search the code for: gtag, googletagmanager, fbq, connect.facebook.net. Each match is one of the counters.
3. If you found googletagmanager, that is only a container. There may be no tags inside it at all, and you cannot see that from the outside: you have to log in to the tag manager account itself.
4. If you found UA- followed by digits, that is the dead Universal Analytics, which has not collected data since July 2023.
5. The last and most important step: open your analytics account and look at the real-time report. Visit your own site from a phone — your visit should appear in the report within seconds. If it does not appear, there is a counter in the code but no measurement.

The limits of this measurement

We measured only the homepage and only the presence of the code itself. A counter installed on inner pages but not on the homepage is not counted in our data. Likewise, server-side data collection, which is not visible in the page code at all, is not counted.

Five sites answered our script with an anti-bot stub page instead of content — they are excluded from every count, so all three percentages are calculated from the same 99 sites that answered.

And as always in this series: the samples per niche are small (4–8 sites), the measurement is external, and the causes were not investigated. This is a snapshot of the state on the date of the check, not an assessment of the companies or their contractors.