Meta Ads Audience in Italy. Facebook and Instagram Consumption in 2025
Italy remains one of the key markets for worldwide digital marketing in Europe, with Meta platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network — typically playing a central role in the Performance Media Mix. For brands, agencies, and marketers operating in Italy or planning to enter this market, understanding the structure and size of the Meta Ads audience is a critical step in building an effective advertising strategy.
In this article, we provide up-to-date data on Meta Ads reach in Italy, including breakdowns by age, gender, location, and interests. Use these insights as a foundation for media planning, audience targeting, and assessing your brand’s potential in the Italian market.
As part of our analysis, we reviewed Meta Ads Manager to assess the declared audience volumes across different targeting parameters. According to Meta’s own data, the estimated reach for Advantage+ targeting (with all placements enabled) in Italy is approximately 35.3 million users. This positions Meta Ads as a critical channel for both brand awareness and performance-driven strategies in the Italian market.
Platform and Placement Trends by Age Segment
Platform usage varies significantly across age groups. Older audiences tend to be more active on Facebook, while Instagram shows higher engagement among younger users.
Facebook In-Feed Placements: Among users aged 18–24, reach does not exceed 25%, while penetration steadily increases with age, reaching up to 80% for users aged 55 and above.
Facebook Stories Placements: These placements capture a smaller portion of the total audience, but follow a similar trend: reach increases with age. For the 55+ segment, Stories placements reach up to 65% of the audience.
Conversely, Instagram exhibits a younger demographic profile and consistently higher reach across placements:
Instagram In-Feed: Reach among the 18–24 age group exceeds 85%, gradually declining to 55% among the oldest users.
Instagram Stories and Reels: These formats achieve reach of 95%+ in the 18–24 group, decreasing to approximately 45% among users aged 55 and older.
These patterns are consistent across both male and female audiences, reinforcing age as the primary differentiator in platform and placement engagement within Meta Ads in Italy.
Engaged Shoppers targeting is available across Italy
This targeting option allows advertisers to reach a specific segment of the audience for which Meta has substantial transactional data — including purchases and interactions with call-to-action buttons in other advertisers’ campaigns.
This audience includes approximately 11 million users in Italy and is particularly valuable for brands that sell products or services directly to consumers.
One notable trend is the increasing share of users included in this targeting segment with age. Only about 7–8% of users aged 18–24 fall into this category, while for users aged 30 and above, the share exceeds 30%.
Use this targeting to focus on the most economically active consumer segment — those who are not only comfortable shopping online, but also likely to purchase non-essential goods and services.
Entrepreneur Audience
Within Meta Ads, entrepreneurs can be reached using the Small Business Owners targeting option. In Italy, this segment currently includes approximately 725,000 users.
This audience tends to grow in volume with increasing age, indicating a higher concentration of experienced professionals. Additionally, the segment is heavily concentrated in Italy’s top 10 metropolitan areas, with the majority of users located in Rome, Milan, and Naples.
This makes the Small Business Owners targeting especially relevant for B2B offers, business services, and tools designed to support local entrepreneurship and small enterprise growth.
Parent Audience in Italy
Meta Ads provides relevant targeting options to accurately reach parent audiences in Italy, including the ability to segment users based on the estimated age of children in the household. These options enable advertisers to tailor messaging and offers to specific parenting stages — from new parents to families with teenagers — making this targeting especially effective for brands in the parenting, education, retail, and family-focused sectors.
Audience for B2B Product Promotion
The decision-maker audience across various industries and sectors within Meta in Italy is relatively limited. Targeting Italy alone can be costly and challenging when optimizing campaigns for conversion actions. However, as part of a broader European campaign, Italy can represent a significant share of your business segment. The professional audience can be segmented using several targeting options. The table below highlights the most commonly used targeting parameters to reach specialists across different business fields — from HR professionals to supply chain and logistics experts.
Traveler Audience in Italy
Another effective way to identify the top 10-20% most economically active audience in Meta Ads is through traveler targeting. Meta creates these behavior segments based on app activity detected from devices located in atypical places.Currently, about 35% of users in Italy fall into the frequent international traveler segment. This targeting option allows advertisers to reach a highly valuable and affluent audience, making it especially suitable for brands aiming to engage consumers with strong purchasing power.
Use these insights on Meta product consumption in Italy to optimize your ad buying strategy. Consider Instagram’s higher popularity among younger audiences and Facebook’s stronger engagement with older demographics. Leverage the growing reach of Stories & Reels placements to deliver more impactful full-screen video ads on Instagram.
When promoting products aimed at affluent consumers, target Engaged Shoppers and frequent travelers in Italy for better-quality leads. For B2B products, focus on key cities with concentrated entrepreneur and decision-maker audiences—namely Rome, Milan, Naples, and Turin.