Last month (January 2021), we ran our usual end-of-January course promotion on Facebook. We currently target the Italian market, specifically a segment made of games developers and technical artists. The first image here shows our target definition.
Our finding is indeed interesting, so let’s have a look at the various statistical sections.

 

Target definition

As shown in the image below, our target is quite simple, so nothing is significantly biased. We have selected people from Italy aged 18 and over, having interests and field study related to our specific sector.

Our campaign has a target made of less than 50 thousand people overall. In 4 days, we were only able to reach 7,221 among them.
No matter the budget we decide, that is the real reach and cost (less than €16). We can see that only 1.4% clicked on the ad, against an engagement of 2.5%. These figures are relatively low, given the subject of the ad (Substance Designer training). This is not entirely unexpected because in Italy paid tools are not very welcome, even when industry standards such as the Substance suite.

Main figures and platforms
Geographic Distribution

The most exciting set of data anyway is in the breakdown of the target that was reached. Let’s start with the most surprising set: the geographic distribution.

When talking about Italy and advanced technology, people always expect the region Lombardia (Milan as the regional capital city) to sit on the top of the list, #1 in technology. Well, our data show a different reality here.

The #1 region is Sicily (Palermo as the regional capital city), with 13.69% of the target, followed by the region Campania with 13.55% of our target. 

Region Lombardia only comes third with 11.53% of our target. 

To make these data even more meaningful, projecting over the respective local population, we find that:

  • Sicilia reached target represents 313 per million
  • Campania is set at 262 per million, and 
  • Lombardia is just 130 per million! 

The above data are based on the official ISTAT demographic data for 2020, accounting only the active population age band.

So, Campania has twice the density in gaming development and technical artistry skills than Lombardia. And Sicilia almost 2 and a half! 

The region Puglia sets at 229 per million, Calabria 256, while Emilia-Romagna is 197 and Toscana 188 and Lazio 192.

These data give us a clear picture. Data tell us that the South of Italy has way more interest and skills in games development and technical artistry than the North or the Centre of Italy. 

Considering that politicians and academics tend to tell the opposite story, these data are really interesting. We will follow up with a more in-depth analysis based on our advertising campaigns. From now on, we’ll make a point of getting these skill-related data updated.

Data about age and sex do reflect a common global trend, telling us that women are starting to get engaged in our industry, but they are still a minority. The professional and interest side of this puts the age group between 18 and 44 at 75% of the segment, which is as well not a big surprise.

Age and Sex
Media platform distribution

The placement data as well give us an interesting picture about how social networks such as Facebook are used by our target.

We see here that 96.6% of our target uses the mobile version of Facebook, leaving the PC in a small corner, almost forgotten.

Another message we can derive from these data, which tells us that our target, when on PC, doesn’t use social networks on it.