US Brands Advertising Most in Europe

What this measures — read this first

3 things keep this page honest, and all 3 are different from a spend report:

Ad presence, not spend. Google discloses which ads ran, where, and roughly how often — but no spend figures for commercial ads. Every ranking here counts distinct ad creatives.

A brand running hundreds of thousands of ads is running a genuinely larger operation than one running a few dozen, but this page cannot tell you what either spent.

Put another way:

Nothing here is a revenue or budget estimate.

"Active" means shown in the last 90 days. Where a figure says active, it counts ads whose most recent serving date falls inside the trailing 90-day window ending at the snapshot date. Ad presence is current to the day.

Impression volumes, by contrast, are the one thing Google reports on a lag of roughly 90 days — so this page ranks by ad counts, which are current, and the impression bounds live in the download with the lag noted.

EU serving data only. An advertiser appears because its ads served in the EU.

A US brand missing from this page may simply not advertise in Europe. This page says nothing about anyone's North American advertising.

Full method, sources, and revision policy: how these benchmarks are built.

The leaderboard

Where they advertise: category cuts

Format mix

New entrants

Advertisers whose first EU ad ever recorded in this dataset appeared on or after Sep 1, 2026 — brands that just arrived in Europe, ranked by how many ads they already have running.

Movers since the last edition

Change in ads active in the last 90 days since the August 2026 edition, for advertisers on the leaderboard (the top 50 US and top 25 Canadian advertisers) both times.

Biggest risers

Biggest fallers

New to the leaderboard

What the numbers say

Travel is the machine that never stops. The entire top of the leaderboard is travel marketplaces — booking platforms whose business is matching a traveler in one country with a room or a flight in another. They advertise in every EU country at once and rotate enormous volumes of text ads continuously.

Why does this matter?

If you compete with a US travel platform anywhere in Europe, you are bidding against six figures of active creatives.

Text still dominates the format mix. Most active ads from North American advertisers are plain text — search ads, mostly — with image and video a distant second and third.

The takeaway for anyone entering the EU: North American brands buy European intent, not European attention. Search is the beachhead; brand video comes later, if at all.

The long tail is the real story. The famous names at the top are a rounding error against the total: hundreds of thousands of North American businesses have EU ad history, and most run modest footprints. Selling into Europe with paid traffic is not an enterprise-only motion — it is something ordinary US and Canadian SMBs already do at scale.

New entrants are worth watching monthly. The new-entrants table catches brands whose first EU ad ever appeared in the last few weeks.

A cluster of new entrants in 1 category is an early signal of a category discovering — or piling into — the European market.

Movers show who is pushing harder, and who is pulling back. The movers tables compare each edition's leaderboard with the one before. There was no September edition, so this one compares October with August.

The biggest move is a fall. Priceline went from 191,076 active ads to 56,458, the largest drop on the board, while Viator added the most. A drop in ad count can mean a brand consolidated its campaigns rather than cut its budget, so read movers as a change in footprint, not in spend.

Why Europe is the harder market

Most of the brands I work with find North America the easier market to advertise in, and it isn't close.

It's much larger, and it behaves like 1 audience. Europe is split by culture, by language, and by the different legal rules the EU puts on running ads, so every country is a little campaign of its own.

The ease goes beyond ads. The US is a friendly place to do business, and so is North America with it. In some categories, buyers are also quicker to make an impulse purchase, and buying on credit is very easy.

The European brands I work with are often surprised that conversion rates are higher in the US than at home. It depends on the product, of course.

That's the context for every number above. A North American brand that shows up in this data has chosen the harder market on purpose, and most of them start where intent is easiest to buy: search.

What this is not

This is not a spend ranking, a market-share estimate, or a measure of success — an advertiser with many creatives may be testing aggressively, localizing per country, or simply fragmenting campaigns.

Simply put:

It counts distinct creatives as Google discloses them. Agencies and resellers occasionally appear under their own names rather than their clients'.

And because the disclosure regime is an EU one, "who advertises in Europe" here means the EU plus a handful of adjacent EEA markets — not the UK, which runs its own regime.

Use this data

The full leaderboard, category cuts, format mix, and new entrants are free to download and reuse with attribution — that's the point of publishing them.

• Download the CSV — full leaderboard depth, license and provenance in the header
• Download the JSON — every table on this page plus method notes

Cite as: Bytown Benchmarks, October 2026 — bytown.co/benchmarks/north-american-brands-in-europe. License: CC BY 4.0.

FAQ

Tomas Kolafa

Founder, Bytown

14+ years running paid acquisition, managing $85M+ in ad budgets — co-founded the ad agency Growth Media, led marketing ($0–50M) at RVezy.com. I’ve spent the budgets, run the campaigns, and read the reports.