How we measured 31 advertisers in Qatar

The question was simple. When a business in Qatar pays for a click, can it tell whether that click became a customer? We picked 31 advertisers and checked.

How we chose the 31

We started from Semrush's advertising data for Qatar, which lists businesses running Google Ads. From that list we took 31 advertisers. Every one of them was actively running paid ads when we checked.

How we checked each one

We opened each advertiser's landing page in a real browser, the same way a customer would. Then we recorded which tracking tags actually fired, not just which ones were written into the page.

That difference matters. Many tags are added by other scripts, so they never appear in the page source. Others are installed but wait for the visitor to scroll or tap before they send anything. Reading the source alone would report both kinds as working.

What we found

• 31 advertisers measured, all running paid ads in Qatar.
• 6 had no tracking of any kind. They were buying clicks with no way to connect any of them to a booking.
• 5 had tags that only fire after the visitor scrolls or taps. Anyone who lands and leaves without touching the screen is never counted.
• 1 took bookings inside a third-party page, which cannot be measured from outside.

In all six untracked cases, the ads themselves were running normally. Nothing in the ad account looked wrong.

What we publish, and what we don't

We publish these figures only as totals. We never name an advertiser on a public page.

The study covers Qatar only. Our pages about the UAE and Saudi Arabia quote it as Qatar data, because we have not run the same study there yet.

What the numbers cannot tell you

31 advertisers is a sample, not a count of every business in Qatar. Treat the figures as a sign of how common the problem is, not as a precise rate.

We can only see what happens in the browser. Tracking that runs somewhere else, such as sales uploaded from a CRM, cannot be seen from outside.

Where the search figures come from

The search volumes and click costs on our industry and market pages are a separate data set. They come from Semrush's Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia databases, pulled in September 2026. Each table names the database it uses.

The short version

Semrush gave us the list of advertisers. We checked each one in a real browser. 6 of 31 had no tracking at all, and 5 more only counted visitors who scrolled or tapped.