Italian Marketplace Instagram: Sales Stability and Traffic Spend Upside

Italian retail marketplace advertisers appear to use Instagram sales and traffic campaigns in different ways. Sales ads have higher median spend and reach, while traffic ads show a much higher spend level among the top quarter of ads. That contrast can help marketing teams plan budgets and set separate expectations for each objective.

Across 406 sales ads from five brands over 90 days, median spend was €7.08 and spend at the 75th percentile was €37.46. Among 237 traffic ads from 11 brands, median spend was lower, at €5.60, but the 75th percentile reached €70.63. [1][2]

The traffic cohort’s 75th-percentile spend is nearly twice the sales cohort’s at the same point in their distributions. But its median is lower. This suggests that traffic budgets may be concentrated in a smaller group of higher-spend ads, while the typical sales ad receives more spend than the typical traffic ad. The figures describe spend patterns, not campaign efficiency or performance.

Read the spend distribution, not just the median

A €5.60 median could make traffic look like the less expensive objective. The distance between median and 75th-percentile spend tells a different part of the story: €65.03 for traffic compared with €30.38 for sales.

That gap is not proof that traffic ads perform better or earn more budget because they are efficient. CPM data is unavailable for either cohort, and the dataset does not show results such as qualified visits or conversions. It does show that spending varies more sharply between the middle and upper portion of the traffic cohort.

For campaign teams, the planning question is therefore not simply whether traffic costs less. It is what evidence should qualify an ad for additional investment. A practical approach is to:

1. Begin with a constrained traffic test. The lower median is consistent with many ads receiving modest spend, though it does not establish how individual campaigns were set up.
2. Set a scale trigger in advance. Possible measures include qualified sessions, product-detail views, new-to-file visitors, or the quality of a downstream retargeting audience.
3. Report tests separately from scaled ads. Combining low-spend tests and high-spend executions can obscure how budgets are distributed.
4. Assess sales campaigns against conversion goals. Their higher median spend may reflect a steadier deployment pattern, but spend alone does not prove stronger conversion performance.

Sales ads have higher median reach

Median EU total reach was 30,039 for sales ads and 16,956 for traffic ads. [1][2] This indicates a wider accumulated audience for the typical sales ad in this dataset. It does not establish that sales ads are more cost-efficient or that reach produced more sales.

CPM was unavailable for both cohorts. Daily reach was reported as zero at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles, so those values do not provide a useful basis for comparing daily audience delivery. The median EU total reach is the clearer reach measure available here.

The difference may help teams think about how to evaluate each objective, without assuming why advertisers chose their budgets. Sales activity can be assessed for its contribution to conversion goals; traffic activity can be assessed for the visits and audiences it brings in. Applying one reach or volume target to both may lead to misleading comparisons.

Measure sales campaigns as part of a conversion system, and traffic campaigns as part of a discovery and qualification system. A traffic campaign evaluated only against sales-ad reach could be stopped before its audience has been assessed for quality. A sales campaign evaluated only on traffic volume could encourage clicks without accounting for conversion outcomes.

Use organic video as a creative reference

Organic YouTube posts from Italian retail marketplace brands offer another useful signal about the range of creative response. Across 2,688 posts from 17 brands over the same 90-day period, median views were 3,933, median interactions were 184, and the median engagement rate was 3.47%. At the 75th percentile, posts generated 18,875 views, 952 interactions, and a 7.35% engagement rate. [3]

These figures show that organic post results vary substantially. They do not demonstrate that YouTube content will perform the same way in Instagram ads, or that organic engagement predicts paid outcomes. Instead, teams can use the posts as a source of creative ideas: product stories, price hooks, creator approaches, or shopping questions that attract stronger voluntary response may merit further testing in paid media.

Match the paid objective to the intended job. Offer-led creative can support sales campaigns, while curiosity, comparison, and category education may be useful starting points for traffic tests. Then evaluate each execution using measures suited to its goal.

The central finding is not that traffic or sales is the better objective. In this Italian marketplace sample, sales ads have higher median spend and reach, while traffic ads have a lower median spend but a higher 75th-percentile spend. Budget planning and reporting should reflect that difference, while avoiding conclusions about efficiency that the available data cannot support.