Only a third of businesses in the EU advertise online
Evelyn Verdín, Unsplash
According to Eurostat, almost every third company in the EU with 10 or more employees in 2024 paid for online advertising. The leader was Malta, where more than 60% of companies used digital advertising. Finland (49.8%) and Cyprus (49.4%) also showed high activity. At the opposite end of the ranking were Romania (22.8%), Poland (23.2%) and Portugal (23.6%), where online promotion has not yet become a mass business tool.
The methods of targeting turned out to be quite diverse. The most popular was the contextual approach - using information about the content viewed or search queries of users. It was used by 76.8% of companies investing in online advertising. Geo-targeting, based on IP addresses and location data, was chosen by 44.3% of companies, and it is often combined with other methods to increase efficiency.
41.6% of advertisers used behavioural targeting based on the analysis of the user's Internet activity history and cookies. And 45.3% of companies used "other methods", including co-operation with bloggers, paid articles or retargeting.
This shows that a mature digital advertising ecosystem is actively forming in the EU, but its development is uneven: some countries are already building sophisticated marketing strategies, while others are still limited to more traditional promotional channels.
