North American Brands in Europe: Who Advertises Most

What this measures — read this first

Three things keep this page honest, and all three 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. 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 Jul 1, 2026 — brands that just arrived in Europe, ranked by how many ads they already have running.

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. 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 one category is an early signal of a category discovering — or piling into — the European market. From next edition, this page also tracks month-over-month movers.

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. 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, August 2026 — bytown.co/benchmarks/north-american-brands-in-europe. License: CC BY 4.0.

FAQ

Where does this data come from?

Google's Ads Transparency Center publishes a BigQuery dataset of every ad served in the European Union, updated daily, with history back to March 2023. We filter it to advertisers whose Google-disclosed business location is the United States or Canada, aggregate with committed SQL, and publish the results with the queries. Anyone can reproduce every number.

Why doesn't this show what brands spend in Europe?

Google discloses spend ranges only for political ads. For commercial ads it publishes the ads themselves, where they served, and bucketed impression ranges — never budgets. Counting distinct active creatives is the most honest available proxy for the size of an advertising operation, so that is what this page ranks, and it says so everywhere.

How current are these numbers?

Ad presence — whether an ad ran, and where — is current to the snapshot date shown at the top of the page. Impression volumes are the exception: Google reports those on a roughly 90-day delay, which is why rankings here use ad counts and the impression lower bounds sit in the download with the lag documented.

Can I republish or quote this leaderboard?

Yes. Everything on this page and in the downloads is licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse it, chart it, quote it in your newsletter or deck, with attribution to Bytown Benchmarks and a link to this page. The download files carry the license and provenance in their headers so the numbers stay traceable.

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.