State of tracking 2026: Nordic online stores
We loaded the home pages of 214 large online stores in a real browser, three times each: accepting the cookie banner, rejecting it, and through a redirect with test ad click IDs. 128 sites could be scored. Here is what their tags did.
Published 2026-10-28 · scanned 2026-10-28 from a browser in Stockholm (EU), so banners show their EU version
Key findings
97%
set a Google Consent Mode v2 default before their tags fire
100 of 103 sites with a Google tag and a banner
15%
fire at least one advertising pixel before the visitor answers the cookie banner
16 of 104 sites with a banner
14%
still send advertising pixel requests after the visitor clicks "reject all"
8 of 59 sites where we could click reject
46%
show no "reject" button we could find on the first layer of the banner
48 of 104 sites with a banner
5%
never tell Google when the visitor accepts cookies
6 of 122 sites with a Google tag
7%
lose at least one ad click ID (gclid, fbclid, …) in redirects
9 of 127 sites where the redirect test ran
75%
score 80 or more out of 100 on our scan
96 of 128 scored sites
Median score: 100 out of 100. Percentages based on fewer than 10 sites are shown as n/a.
By country
| Country | Scored | Median score | Pixel before consent | Pixel after reject | No Consent Mode default | Click ID lost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sweden | 62 of 69 | 100 | 11% | 8% | 2% | 3% |
| Norway | 48 of 54 | 90 | 22% | 20% | 3% | 15% |
| Denmark | 17 of 44 | 90 | 17% | n/a | 0% | 0% |
| All | 128 of 213 | 100 | 15% | 14% | 2% | 7% |
Country samples are small; read differences between countries as indications, not rankings. Finland is left out of this table: only 1 of 46 sites could be scored. Its scored sites are included in the totals.
Which platforms they use
| Platform | Share of scored sites |
|---|---|
| Google tag / Tag Manager | 95% (122) |
| Google Analytics 4 | 89% (114) |
| Google Ads | 63% (81) |
| Meta (Facebook & Instagram) | 61% (78) |
| Microsoft Advertising (Bing UET) | 59% (75) |
| TikTok | 38% (49) |
| Floodlight (DV360 / CM360) | 36% (46) |
| Snapchat | 33% (42) |
| 21% (27) | |
| LinkedIn Insight Tag | 9% (12) |
| Criteo | 5% (6) |
| Adform | 4% (5) |
Median number of ad and analytics platforms per site: 5. IAB TCF consent framework found on 6% of sites.
What this means for a store
A pixel that fires before consent or after "reject all" is a compliance risk in the EU, and it also makes reporting unreliable: the same visitors are counted on some platforms and not on others. A missing Consent Mode default or a banner that never updates Google means Google cannot model the conversions of visitors who decline, or treats every visitor as declining. Lost click IDs cut the link between an ad click and the sale, so bidding learns from fewer conversions than really happened.
All of these are quick to check and usually quick to fix. Each one has a free checker or a fix guide:
- Consent Mode v2 checker and how to set the default
- Pixel fires without consent: how to fix it
- Click ID redirect tester
Is your store in the same place? The free scan runs the same three visits on your page and shows the evidence for each result.
Method
- Sample: home pages of 214 large online stores, picked from public rankings of the biggest e-commerce sites in each country (sources below), leaving out telecoms, ticketing, travel and global brands without a Nordic shop. Sweden: AdRelevance, "Sveriges största e-handlare på Google 2026". Norway: Netthandel.no, "Norges 100 største nettbutikker", plus the large chains missing from it. Denmark: well-known Danish webshops and chains, as no complete public ranking was available. Finland: "Suosituimmat verkkokaupat Suomessa – TOP 50", plus stores named in Walley's "Suurimmat verkkokaupat 2025".
- Visits: each home page was loaded in Chromium three times: once accepting the cookie banner, once rejecting it, and once with test values for every platform's click ID, checking which IDs survived redirects. Banners were found by their consent platform's markup or by accept and reject texts in 12 languages.
- Counting: a site counts as "before consent" if an advertising platform other than Google sent a tracking request before the banner was answered. Google tags are judged by Consent Mode instead, since they may send cookieless pings by design. A check that could not run on a site (no banner found, no reject button, redirect test failed) leaves that site out of that percentage rather than counting it as a pass.
- Not scored: 85 of 213 sites could not be scored: they blocked our automated browser, timed out, or showed no tracking tags to it.
- 67 × The website took too long to load. Try again in a minute.
- 7 × The site answered with HTTP 403 and showed no tracking tags. It probably blocks automated browsers, so we cannot give it a score.
- 6 × We found no tracking tags on this page. Either the site has none, or it blocks automated browsers like ours, so we cannot give it a score.
- 2 × The site answered with HTTP 429 and showed no tracking tags. It probably blocks automated browsers, so we cannot give it a score.
- 1 × The site answered with HTTP 503 and showed no tracking tags. It probably blocks automated browsers, so we cannot give it a score.
- 1 × The site answered with HTTP 530 and showed no tracking tags. It probably blocks automated browsers, so we cannot give it a score.
- 1 × The scan failed. Try again, or check that the page opens in a normal browser.
- Limits: home pages only, from one EU location, on one day. Checkout and product pages, logged-in visitors and other countries' banner variants are not covered. Sites that timed out or blocked automated browsers are missing, and they may differ from the ones we could scan. This is a technical measurement, not a legal assessment of any site.
- Privacy: we publish aggregate numbers only and name no store. We stored no cookie values, user IDs or IP addresses from the scanned sites.
Aggregate data: state-of-tracking-nordics-2026.json. Questions or corrections: hello@plumfinch.com.