Ecommerce in Italy 2022

Online Marketing

Regarding the online advertisement activities of one’s brand, Italian companies are struggling again after an easy year due to lockdown and the online demand for goods that exceeded supply. 32% of companies interviewed declared they were satisfied and to have found the right path to promote their brand (-16% compared to last year). Online advertisement activity is still considered difficult by 55% of companies (+12% than last year). 14% declared the activity unsatisfactory, being unable to find a system with a good cost/result ratio.

After quite an easy year for acquiring new customers, the theme of advertising and marketing becomes central again. The average acquisition cost in Italy is 34.4 euros with great differences between sectors. Fashion, for example, is the most expensive business: 93 euros to get a new customer; while for Food only a 25 euros marketing investment is needed, for Home-Office and Furniture 26 euros, and for Consumer Electronics 33 euros.

Among the marketing activities, SEM (Search Engine Marketing) continues to have the greatest investments (24%) with a higher increase than last year (19%). In second place with 14%, we find SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In third place, there is Social Media with 13%, followed by Email marketing with 9%, Display advertising with 6%, Comparison services with 5%, Remarketing and Retargeting with 5%.
Sponsorships drop two percentage points to 5%, Affiliation stays at 3% and Programmatic rises at 5%. A particular mention goes to TV, Radio and Press which after dropping from 13% to 5% last year, regain shares to 7%. However, by comparing data it can be noted that especially the companies declaring not to be satisfied with the results of the promotional strategy invest in traditional media.

E-commerce Manager

The main activities currently carried out by e-commerce managers are sales-oriented, such as monitoring sales performance and data on customer base (65% of e-commerce managers think it is very important), but include many other activities, such as defining the evolution of digital strategies (54%), managing their team and relations with other company areas (53%), defining and evolving advertisement campaigns (42%), organizing the evolution of the platform and technological innovation (36%), carrying out market analyses and studying trend evolutions (35%), checking daily operations and problem-solving (33%), managing collaboration with third parties (24%).

With the increase in turnover and the internal importance of the e-commerce division in companies, in many cases, there have been organizational restructuring to better integrate digital activities into the rest of the company. At the same time, there has also been an increase in people in the team.