Apple Ads Search Results Benchmarks Report 2026
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Benchmarks serve as critical performance indicators that help advertisers optimize campaigns through data-driven decisions.
They are effective for performance gap analysis:
They have broad strategic application:
This is why this report is grounded in expansive, real-world campaign data from SplitMetrics Acquire, spanning over 6.3 billion impressions, 495.6 million taps, and 315.6 million downloads across 22 App Store categories and 91 markets.
This vast range of data provides the essential, actionable context you need to evaluate your performance, understand key category and seasonality trends, and drive truly profitable growth. It reflects the peak performance of our clients, benchmarks worth following.
SplitMetrics is a global mobile marketing technology company offering an ecosystem of products and services for profitable app growth. SplitMetrics Acquire, our platform for managing and automating Apple Ads campaigns with AI capabilities, has been at the forefront of making the platform accessible and profitable for all user acquisition managers worldwide.
Consequently, we’ve been analyzing our clients’ campaigns in this user acquisition channel since its inception, with the benchmark report series officially launched in 2018 and trusted by over 7,000 marketers since.
SplitMetrics’ journey has always been about solving mobile growth challenges of apps, embracing their ambitious goals as our own. From the very beginning, it meant making the dynamic Apple Ads ecosystem accessible and profitable, with a wide array of management, automation, and market intelligence tools helping mobile marketing specialists understand and navigate it.
The launch of Iris, our AI market research agent, is the definitive next step in that mission and peak achievement by SplitMetrics. It solves the fundamental pain point in user acquisition and performance analysis—the struggle to connect market intelligence with first-party performance data in real-time.For this edition of the report, we’ve welcomed Iris to contribute insights to our benchmark analysis, along with our specialists from the Agency and Customer Success teams. Together, they provide context to help understand the factors shaping user engagement on the App Store, as reflected in continuously shifting metrics.
Following this report, a conversation with Iris or one of our experts may be an excellent way to better understand the Apple Ads ecosystem for profitable campaigns.
SplitMetrics’ Apple Ads Search Results Benchmarks Report covers:
The report is based on aggregated data from apps and mobile games that optimize Apple Ads search results campaigns using SplitMetrics Acquire.
The period under review is January — December 2025. Averages are based on over:
Excluded categories: To ensure consistent, reliable data, we excluded categories with fewer than 25 unique apps, which could yield statistically insignificant results in aggregate. Excluded categories include: Newsstand, and Developer Tools.
Excluded developers: SplitMetrics Acquire customers whose policy states that their user data shall not be used in our reports, including anonymous aggregate data.
The methodology is based on dividing specific quantitative data, such as spend, taps, impressions, downloads, and installs, by a specific total, depending on the required indicator in accordance with the necessary type of information display: the App Store category or Apple Ads region.
We used the following formulas to calculate each of the key indicators:
CR = downloads/taps
TTR = taps/impressions
CPM = spend / (impressions / 1000)
CPT = spend/taps
CPA = spend/downloads
In this report, you’ll find the average TTR and CR, as well as CPT and CPA, by category and market for 2025. We’ve also compared them with Apple Ads search results benchmarks from previous years, quarter over quarter.
