Data Studies
Studies on how websites set up for paid social: which ad pixels they run, from Meta and TikTok to LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat and X, and how adoption differs by site size, country and platform. Nearly all of them use the public HTTP Archive crawl of about 15.5 million websites, repeated monthly to track growth and decline, with popularity ranks from Google's Chrome UX Report. One study uses Google search results to check brands' own YouTube videos. Use them to see what tracking your competitors have in place before you plan campaigns.
14 studies · Need help acting on them? See our paid social services.
33.7% of Australian websites run the Meta Pixel, the tracking code behind Facebook and Instagram ads, six times the 5.3% of German websites. Worldwide the pixel is on 15.5% of websites and 61.1% of Shopify stores, and no other social ad tag reaches even 2% of the web.
The TikTok Pixel is on 15.5% more websites than a year ago, 255,413 homepages in September 2026, and it has just passed the X (Twitter) ads pixel, which was on twice as many websites in late 2024.
The Reddit Pixel is on 44.8% more websites than a year ago, nearly three times the 15.5% growth of the TikTok Pixel, and it has more than doubled in two years. It rose in 22 of the last 23 months.
The X (Twitter) ads pixel ran on 407,972 website homepages in October 2024 and 253,066 in September 2026, a 38% drop, about 155,000 fewer websites. Embedded Twitter widgets fell even faster, down 44.6%.
1.4% of online stores load the Pinterest tag on their homepage, fewer than one store in seventy, while 30.7% of the same stores run the Meta Pixel. For every store measuring Pinterest ads, 23 measure Meta ads.
99.9% of the 5,993 websites that load the Snap Pixel, Snapchat's ad tracking code, run on Shopify. Across the whole web the Snap Pixel is on 0.04% of websites, fewer than one in 2,500, and the Meta Pixel is 399 times as common.
84.7% of websites that run a social ad pixel run just one, almost always Meta's. 17.4% of websites track social ads at all, and 2.7% track two or more platforms, with B2B companies and the biggest websites the main exceptions.
12.9% of B2B websites load the LinkedIn Insight Tag, LinkedIn's ad tracking code, about ten times the 1.3% rate across all websites. That still leaves 87% of B2B websites, companies with serious marketing software, without it.
66.7% of popular websites that link to X still point only to twitter.com addresses, more than two years after the platform renamed itself and moved to x.com. For every website that has fully switched, more than two still use the old address.
Social share button tools appeared on 222,470 website homepages in September 2026, down from 358,044 in October 2024, a 37.9% drop. All eight tools tracked lost websites, and 39,812 homepages still load AddThis, a service Oracle shut down in 2023.
When people search Google for a brand's name, a YouTube video from that brand appears on page one only 21% of the time. Facebook pages show up on 61% of the same searches, nearly three times as often.
14.9% of the 1,000 most visited websites run an advertising pixel on their homepage, half the 29.6% rate of sites ranked between 100,000 and 1 million. Ad tracking peaks among mid-sized websites and falls away at both ends of the web.
64.8% of online stores load no advertising pixel on their homepage, so their ad platforms cannot see who visits or buys. Shopify stores do better, with 63.6% running at least one pixel, and the stores that track at all run 1.26 pixels on average.
2.9% of Shopify stores run the TikTok Pixel, the tag that measures TikTok ads, and 89.5% of those stores also run the Meta Pixel. On Shopify, TikTok is an add-on to Facebook and Instagram advertising, not a replacement for it.
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