App Growth Week 2023: Day 2 — Apple Search Ads
Gabriel Kuriata
Gabriel Kuriata 
The App Store is a dynamic, fast-paced environment. Its competitiveness is offset by all the opportunities available to those willing to reach for them. Apple Search Ads is crucial to finding success here. The platform sets pace on the App Store by offering advertisers new features and placements. Today, we have more means of reaching our target audiences throughout their customer journey than ever before. More options bring more considerations though. In 2023 and 2024 the proverb “you snooze, you lose” is and will be very true.
Day 2 of App Growth Week 2023 brings topics that pros are interested in the most: international expansion, synergy with ASO, scaling, integrating with other channels and laser-focus on generating revenue.
There’s a twist though: in the form of AI-driven innovations and bigger emphasis on market & competitor intelligence, necessary to succeed in the increasingly evolving world of the App Store. Enjoy!
Day 2 opened with a best-practice session by Anastasiia Shagaleeva, User Acquisition Manager at Flo, a period & pregnancy tracking app used by more than 300 million women worldwide.
Discussing bid management, incrementality, cannibalization, branded and generic campaigns and creating more personalized user experiences with the help of custom product pages, Anastasiia gave us a one-of-a-kind first hand and a very practical experience gathered in the process making Flo the true market leader it is today.
Stable impression share may be a signal that the auction is stable and there is a limited number of buyers. Decreasing bids by 5-10% a week may help you to find much cheaper traffic without losing it.
For more detailed & data rich insights like the one above, watch the full presentation here:
Babbel is a language learning app that’s in the Top 10 in the entire Education category. On the second day of the event we had the great opportunity to have Derya Ayirtman, a SEM Manager of the app share her real-life experience on customer acquisition and scaling revenue.
Users don’t convert right away. Over time they might develop a blindness towards the creatives they have already seen. Custom product pages are a great way to touch them with different creatives and also with the ones that answer their needs.
More creative insights with hard-data confirming their effectiveness are in the full presentation here:
ASO + Apple Search Ads are the foundation for any success on the App Store, that becomes even stronger when fueled and augmented by the possibilities offered by AI. This is what Thomas Kriebernegg, Managing Director & Co-Founder of App Radar, together with Ben Collins-Jones, a Customer Success Manager atSplitMetrics showed during their presentation – rich in prompts and visual examples of AI being put to work.
AI tools that can help us prepare briefings for our designers. We can use them as a shortcut to better communicate what we have in mind. My personal favorite is Midjourney.
Asking AI the right questions will help you find everything, from appropriate app metadata keyword titles and descriptions to good comparisons about what may separate you out from your competitors
Watch the full presentation (and witness some fantastic Midjourney created imagery) here:
How to deal with increased competition when scaling Apple Search Ads campaigns? How to manage your budgets and what methods to use while tracking the performance of custom product pages? Finally, in the year of AI-driven solutions, when is it best to automate the process and how to set it up for accomplishing the best results possible?
These were merely a few among many questions answered by Maryna Orobets, Apple Search Ads Manager at Hily, a highly successful dating app.
For brand campaigns our main goal is to find the right balance between protecting our brand and maximizing the cost effectiveness. It doesn’t always make sense to go for 99% of impressions for your branded keywords if it results in a negative ROI. It’s better to target 80 or 90% of impressions, but with a positive ROI
Are you hungry for more practical and detailed tips like this? Then watch the full session here:
Same factors that bring us new opportunities, result in new considerations. New solutions offered by Apple Search Ads, AI, seasonal campaigns – all these are a key component of app growth today, but also require more expertise, experience and nuance to our strategies. We need to know more about our app’s environment.
At SplitMetrics we know this very well. This is why we delivered some new, fantastic features for market & competition intelligence and our team consisting of Ksenia Artemenko, Lead Product Manager, Anastasia Borisova, Product Manager with Hanna Kachalka, Head of Sales at SplitMetrics joined forces to shine the spotlight on them.
With more than 5.7 million apps on the market, new opportunities, increased complexity, data & insights are more important than ever before.
Using CPP Intelligence is very easy. Select your top competitors – either paid or organic – and immediately access all custom product pages they’re using for a particular market.
Dynamic, AI-driven automation & optimization strategies means offering over 500 automation rules, but we go beyond that with the feature “Bid Strategy”. our proprietary AI-driven smart bidding algorithms
Watch the entire presentation below, it’s a great opportunity to see a dynamic demo of our very own SplitMetrics Acquire and these features in action:
Have a peak at what we have to offer here:
Day 2 of App Growth Week 2023 introduced many concepts, technologies and strategies. Scaling and seasonality are tremendous challenges with great pay-offs, so for the final session we’ve gathered four experts for an open-minded panel discussion about them:
Together with the host, Ben Collins Jones, Customer Success Manager SplitMetrics, panelists talked about:
With enough time at their hands, they were able to really dive into the nitty gritty details of all the aspects of seasonal campaigns:
What’s worked well for our clients is utilizing our Dynamic Product Ads (DPA). They leverage our advanced ML-models to show relevant ads to each user and optimize them automatically. In Moloco’s case, on average, the performance of DPA ads when compared to static ads was an 280% increase in ROAS and 107% in CVR.
I want to highlight here that not all holidays are celebrated around the world or they can be celebrated in a different manner or at a different time. For example, most of the countries celebrate New Year’s Eve on December 31st, while Asian countries have it a bit later depending on the lunar calendar. That’s why custom product pages are the best solution to utilize around the holidays to foster a stronger emotional bond with users and as a result increase conversion rate.
CTV stands as a pivotal and increasingly preferred channel for UA managers. The integration of CTV with other digital channels unravels a myriad of advantages, reshaping the landscape of a marketers advertising strategy. CTV provides a distinctive environment where users actively engage with premium, high-quality video content where advertisers can captivate audiences through visually stunning and engaging ads, which foster a deeper connection with potential customers. It goes without saying but CTV audiences are on a constant upward trajectory.
The window of opportunity for running holiday campaigns always exceeds the duration of the holiday itself. This approach should give you enough time to design all necessary elements for your app’s product page, custom product pages, as well as in-app events. Make sure to start early before Halloween, Christmas & New Years Eve, as well as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This will give you the time to conduct any A/B tests.
Grab a coffee, because during the over 40 minute panel discussion there will be many more practical insights like this. Watch them here:
Day 3 of App Growth Week brought even more creative insights. Dedicated to optimization, ASO, user engagement, A/B testing and validation, it’s a must see for all app growth hackers. Stay tuned for another recap!
Participants on Day 2 asked many questions. Some were answered during Q&A sessions, but some had to be left for email (with a 100% guarantee of answers coming!). You too can ask any questions that you might have, we’re always happy to help.
