The ecom verticals with the worst (and best) tracking in 2026

21 September 2026

Charlie Semmence

In our UK State of Tracking 2026 report, we found that almost every one of the 500 high-growth Shopify brands we audited had at least one primary tracking issue. 98% did, to be precise.

That means 98% of those brands are optimising ad spend on incomplete and/or inaccurate conversion signals - limiting targeting, attribution and bidding efficiency.

When we broke that number down by retail vertical, one thing was clear: no vertical is immune to the impact of broken tracking.

However, some fared slightly better than others. Below we share the ecommerce verticals most heavily impacted by conversion tracking issues, and the ones that came closer to getting it right.

Six verticals, zero clean stores

Six of the ten verticals we audited came back with a 100% broken tracking rate. Every single store we checked had at least one core tracking issue impacting paid media performance and/or analytics accuracy. No exceptions.

Health & beauty - 97 stores audited, 100% broken
Home & garden - 64 stores audited, 100% broken
Food & beverage - 47 stores audited, 100% broken
Hobbies & gaming - 14 stores audited, 100% broken
Pets - 12 stores audited, 100% broken
Baby & kids - 7 stores audited, 100% broken

Health & beauty is worth calling out specifically here because it's the largest sample of the group: 97 stores, and not one of them came back clean.

The best (relatively speaking)

"Best" is a generous word for anything on this list. The closest any vertical came to functional tracking:

Fashion & accessories - 220 stores audited, 96.4% broken
Sports & outdoors - 27 stores audited, 96.3% broken
Other - 7 stores audited, 85.7% broken
Electronics & tech - 5 stores audited, 80.0% broken

Electronics & tech technically had the lowest broken rate, at 80%, but with only 5 stores in the sample it's too small to call a genuine pattern.

Fashion & accessories is the more meaningful result. It's the largest vertical in the entire audit at 220 stores, and even at that scale, it's still broken on 96.4% of them. Just 8 stores passed without a core tracking issue.

Ultimately, even the best-performing vertical in the UK is failing almost universally.

What's driving it

There are five core tracking issues we checked for across every store (we went into detail about each in this post).

But across verticals, it's the same three that dominate:

Missing Key Parameters - events fire but without the data ad platforms need for value-based bidding and audience building.
Cookie consent issues - tracking fires without valid consent, breaching GDPR and making reported conversions unreliable.
Google Consent Mode issues - limits Google's ability to model conversions accurately, weakening bidding and reporting.

Duplicate Events and Missing Tracking, by contrast, are consistently the least common issues across every vertical.

That consistency matters. This isn't ten different verticals with ten different problems - it's the same handful of faults showing up at different rates depending on what the brand sells.

Why this matters

Tracking quality sets a ceiling on how well a brand's paid media campaigns can perform.

When 100% of ecommerce sites across verticals like Health & beauty, Food & beverage and Pets are impacted by critical tracking issues, every one of them is asking Meta and Google to bid on incomplete signals. But without the full picture of what's actually converting on-site, their algorithms are forced to make high-value decisions on low-value information.

The same logic applies across every vertical on this list: the tracking problem comes first, and it limits what everything built on top of it can achieve.

Get the report

Learn more about the core tracking issues impacting UK DTC brands - and their impact on paid media ROI - in the UK State of Tracking Report 2026 here.

What’s inside?