How many Greek businesses advertise on Google and Facebook

Ads on Google and Facebook have a public archive: Google and Meta keep every ad shown in the EU, with the name of the advertiser. Matched against GEMI, the Greek General Commercial Registry, the result is that at least 2.00% of active businesses in Greece advertise on one of the two platforms. That is 20,287 out of 1,013,176.

On 2 October 2026 I downloaded all 10,237,298 Google ads that have been shown in Greece, from 862,208 advertisers, and 265,229 active Facebook and Instagram ads. Of the advertisers based in Greece, 25,739 had a Google ad running in September. The 2.00% is the businesses I found in GEMI with certainty, so the real share is higher.

Which sectors advertise

Health comes first, with 5.19%. Next come support services, which include travel agencies and car rentals, with 4.32%, and education with 3.95%. In trade, the largest sector by count, 6,432 businesses advertise, almost one third of all the ones I found.

Accommodation and food service has 144,075 active businesses in Greece and stays at 1.55%, below the average. Last are energy with 0.30%, agriculture with 0.64% and construction with 1.03%.

Meta has more weight in education: there, for every two businesses with a Google ad there is about one on Facebook or Instagram, 545 and 280. In transport the ratio is 770 to 95.

Among legal entities (SA, private company (IKE), limited liability company (EPE), general partnership (OE), limited partnership (EE) and the rest), 3.26% advertise, 11,922 out of 365,753. Among sole proprietorships, 1.29%.

By regional unit

Thessaloniki comes first with 2.73%, right ahead of Attica, the region around Athens, with 2.68%. Of the top ten regional units, seven are islands: the Cyclades, Rethymno, Heraklion, the Dodecanese, Lasithi, Chania, Lefkada. At the bottom are Fokida with 0.63%, Evrytania with 0.68% and Rodopi with 0.70%.

A few advertisers have most of the ads

In September, Greek advertisers had 412,144 ads on Google. The 257 with the most ads, the top 1%, had 33.6% of them. The median advertiser had 6, and 4,461 had only one.

The first two places and the sixth are ferry tickets and food delivery: Ferryhopper, Ferryscanner and Online Delivery, the company behind the Greek food delivery app efood. The list also includes businesses that advertise on behalf of others. Chrysos Odigos, the Greek yellow pages, also appears in Meta as the payer for the ads of 22 pages of other businesses.

Google and Meta

16,473 businesses had a Google ad, 5,469 had a Facebook or Instagram ad, and 1,655 had both.

Facebook is undercounted. Meta does not give a list of all the ads in a country, only a keyword search. I searched with nine common words, "και", "για", "το", "με", "σε" (Greek for and, for, the, with, in), "the", "and", ".gr" and "www". I found 265,229 active ads from 45,613 pages. The Greek words stopped bringing new pages as early as the fifth: "σε" brought 287, 1.2% of what I already had. Whatever advertises only with an image, with none of these words in the text, is missing.

What went wrong in the matching

Google writes the legal name of the advertiser, but not a VAT number (Greek tax ID) or a GEMI number, so the matching is done by name. When I checked the 30 largest, I found three that landed on a business with a different legal form. "ΚΟΣΜΟΣ ΣΠΟΡ ΑΕ" had gone to a construction general partnership with the same name, and "ONLINE DELIVERY SINGLE MEMBER SA" to the limited partnership "E-WINGS ONLINE DELIVERY".

I counted all the matches where the Google name states a legal form: 1,088 of the 10,305 landed on a business with a different form. I added a check of the legal form and ran the matching again. In a random sample of 40 matches after the fix, 35 are correct, 2 wrong and 3 uncertain.

In Meta, every ad in the EU states the beneficiary, which is often a brand name. With the same name matching, about 10 in 25 came out right. I kept only the ones that share words with the legal name or the trade name in GEMI, and the ones that lead to a website that belongs to a single business. In samples, 27 of 30 and 18 of 20 were correct, in that order.

Methodology

Sources: the creative_stats dataset of the Google Ads Transparency Center in BigQuery and the Meta Ad Library API, downloaded on 2 October 2026. The businesses come from GEMI: active, one record per business, without branches of foreign companies. One ad is one Google creative or one Meta ad: one text, one image or one video.

A Google ad counts if it was shown in Greece from 1 September 2026 and the advertiser is based in Greece according to Google. With a start date of 1 August, the total rises to 21,285 businesses, and with 15 September it falls to 19,640. The top four sectors stay the same in the same order. The sector is the section of the main activity code (KAD, the Greek extension of NACE). The 76,523 active businesses with no main KAD in GEMI count in the total but not in a sector, with 0.59%.

Whatever did not match is missing. The 25,739 Greek advertisers on Google in September correspond to 16,473 active businesses in GEMI. The missing ones are mostly those that use a brand name or an English version of the legal name, and among the large ones Retail World and Dixons South-East Europe. So all the shares are lower bounds, and Meta is undercounted more than Google. The cost of the ads is not measured: the platforms give the number of ads and a range of impressions, not amounts.