Measuring Ukraine’s Active Digital Audience Through Cross-Operator Collaboration

Challenge

FMCG brands and agencies planning awareness campaigns in Ukraine relied on addressable audience figures reported by Google’s buying tools, which showed roughly 40 million weekly reachable unique users in Ukraine, based on 46.8 million weekly active users gross, including 6.5 million desktop users. The figure was difficult to reconcile with market reality: Ukraine’s pre-war population was about 40 million people, while widely reported estimates indicated that at least 12 million citizens had left the country after the Russian full-scale invasion. If the denominator was inflated, reach forecasts, frequency capping and budget allocation could not be reliably trusted.

Solution

Using its integrations with all three mobile operators in Ukraine, myGaru coordinated a cross-operator study designed to measure active mobile internet users inside the country. Kyivstar, Vodafone Ukraine and lifecell each contributed a broad segment of real subscribers who met a deliberately simple activity threshold: at least 200 MB of monthly mobile data consumption plus basic behavioural activity. myGaru then resolved these audiences at the network connection level and deduplicated them across operators. The study identified approximately 20 million deduplicated active subscribers across Ukraine’s national mobile networks, revealing a substantial gap between telecom-verified audience measurement and the audience volumes available through Google’s RTB planning tools. This created a unified, bot-filtered measurement layer based on real SIMs and live network sessions, rather than cookies or device IDs. It gave advertisers and agencies a telecom-verified denominator for media planning, supporting more reliable reach forecasting, frequency capping and budget allocation towards genuinely reachable users.

Outcomes