Facebook Ads in Italy: What 498 Long-Running Ads Show
What 498 Meta ads that ran 60+ days with Italy as their main market have in common: fashion leads, short copy lasts longer, and many brands have just one winner.
adthief.ai · · 5 min read
Italy is the third biggest market in our archive of long-running Meta ads, behind the UK and Germany. It is a very different market from both: more fashion, shorter copy, and winners spread across many brands that each have only one or two.
This post looks at 498 ads from 352 brands whose main market was Italy.
How we built the data
- Source: Meta’s public Ad Library, collected by adthief.ai every night. Snapshot: 31 October 2026.
- Which ads: ads that ran for 60 days or more in Europe, in six industries: supplements and health, beauty, fashion, home, pets, and food and drink.
- Main market: the country where the ad reached the most people. Italy is in the EU, so the Ad Library publishes reach by country for these ads.
- The whole archive: 9,839 ads from 5,185 brands.
Every ad here already ran for two months, so this is a study of survivors: it shows what winners look like, not how many ads win. And because Meta doesn’t publish spend or sales for commercial ads, a long run stands in for a profitable one. It is a good signal, not a guarantee.
498 ads is enough for the overall picture. When we split Italy by industry, each group has 100 to 140 ads, so treat those numbers as a direction, not a measurement.
Finding 1: Typical run, long tail
| Italy | The UK | Germany | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ads | 498 | 4,519 | 1,448 |
| Median days running | 66 | 66 | 79 |
| Ran 6 months or more | 17% | 17% | 18% |
| Longest ad | 564 days | 464 days | 766 days |
The median Italian winner ran 66 days, like most of Europe, and 17% passed six months, the same share as the UK. The longest Italian ad, at 564 days, has outlasted anything in the much larger British sample. A small number of Italian ads have been left running for well over a year.
Finding 2: Many brands, one winner each
Italy has 498 ads from 352 brands: about 1.4 long-running ads per brand. The UK has nearly 2 per brand, Germany about 1.7. The Italian market looks fragmented: lots of advertisers, each with one or two ads that held.
The brands with the most long-running ads in Italy include several international names: Alibaba.com (10 ads, the longest at 247 days), Frøya Organics (10 ads), Medicube (9 ads, the longest at 125 days), and fashion brands Rablaisie cool (7 ads, 243 days) and Galartsy (5 ads, 247 days). Even the busiest advertisers have only a handful of winners each.
What to do with it: in a fragmented market, studying one competitor tells you little. Look across the whole category: set the Ad Library country to Italy, search by keyword, and sort by start date. Our competitor ad research guide shows the routine.
Finding 3: Short copy ran longer
| Ad text length | Italian ads | Median days running |
|---|---|---|
| Under 30 words | 158 | 75 |
| 30 to 99 words | 207 | 66 |
| 100 words or more | 133 | 66 |
This is the clearest result in the Italian data. Short ads (under 30 words) had a median run of 75 days, against 66 for medium and long ones. Across the whole archive the gap is much smaller (68 days for short ads, 66 for long ones). The groups here are small, so don’t read it as a law, but it fits the rest of the picture: the median Italian ad text is 51 words, against 66 in the UK, and fashion, the biggest Italian category, runs on short copy everywhere.
What to do with it: for Italy, start with a short version of every ad: a strong image or video, one line, the offer. Add a long version as a test, not as the default.
Finding 4: Fashion leads
| Industry | Ads with Italy as main market | Median days | Ran 6 months+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fashion | 136 | 67 | 18% |
| Beauty | 130 | 65 | 11% |
| Food and drink | 121 | 66 | 16% |
| Supplements and health | 106 | 66 | 19% |
| Home | 104 | 72 | 17% |
| Pets | 29 | not enough data |
An ad can belong to more than one industry. In the UK and Germany, supplements are the biggest group; in Italy it is fashion, closely followed by beauty and food. Home ads had the longest median run (72 days) and supplements the highest share past six months (19%), but with about 100 ads each, those are hints, not findings. Pets is too small to say anything about.
What to do with it: if you sell fashion or accessories in Italy, you have the most competition and the most examples to learn from. Browse fashion ads in Italy to see the ones that held.
Finding 5: First lines: numbers yes, “you” less
| First line contains | Italy | Whole archive |
|---|---|---|
| An emoji | 55% | 47% |
| A number | 22% | 20% |
| A question | 14% | 16% |
| “Tu” or “you” | 18% | 30% |
| An urgency word | 11% | 10% |
| A percentage | 5% | 4% |
More than half of Italian winners start with an emoji, and 71% use emoji somewhere in the text. Numbers are slightly more common than elsewhere, and so are percentages up front, though 5% is still rare.
The low “you” share needs care. Italian often drops the pronoun (“Scopri”, “Prova”), and our test only looks for the word itself, so it misses many direct openings. Don’t read it as Italian ads being less personal.
Finding 6: Facebook and Instagram, mostly
93% of Italian winners ran on both Facebook and Instagram, with 4% Instagram-only and 4% Facebook-only. That is a little more single-platform use than in the UK (97% on both), but the rule is the same: let Meta place the ad.
What this means if you advertise in Italy
- Write in Italian, for Italy. These ads reached most people in Italy; translated copy from another market is not what holds here.
- Lead with the visual and keep the text short. Short copy ran longest in this sample.
- Research the category, not one rival. Winners are spread across hundreds of brands.
- Use numbers where you honestly can: sizes, quantities, days, reviews.
- Keep a winner running. Some Italian ads have lasted more than a year.
Try it on your market
Run a free competitor check to see which ads your competitors in Italy keep running, or compare Italy with the rest of Europe in our long-running ads study.