Apple Search Ads Campaign Management: Workflow, Tasks & Best Practices

Apple Search Ads campaign management involves creating, analyzing, and optimizing campaigns on the App Store. Its activities include bid adjustment, overseeing the keyword flow, refining targeting, creative optimization, daily monitoring, budget allocation, and long-term performance analysis. Apple Search Ads management aims to ensure the best performance, return on investment (ROI), and goal delivery within a reasonable time frame and workload.

Apple Search Ads, a platform exclusive to the App Store, is streamlined and focused. However, maintaining an ordered workflow is still necessary. It will benefit all users and help make this user acquisition channel profitable.

This article aims to show you an optimal workflow for Apple Search Ads and advise you on how to approach optimization tasks. Along the way, we’ll show you how the free SplitMetrics Acquire Starter Plan can help you do that, with an added layer of functionality, its own UI improvements, automation, and visual aides.

The physical workload matters, especially for small and medium enterprises. How much time and labor does running Apple Search Ads campaigns require? How frequent should our check-ups be? What should our daily, weekly, or monthly tasks include?

Continue reading, especially if you’re entirely new to Apple Search Ads and the free SplitMetrics Acquire Starter Plan. We’ll help you get through your first month and show you how to wrap it up so you can continue your journey without problems for much (hopefully) longer.

Apple Search Ads Guide for 2024: From Beginner to Expert

This guide will help you start your journey with Apple Search Ads. It covers all the steps and links to relevant articles on our blog.

Before you begin

The app’s business cycle is the primary factor determining the time needed to run Apple Search Ads campaigns, which hugely impacts workflow, check-up frequency, and scope.

Your business goals and your app’s sales cycle determine how you optimize your Apple Search Ads campaigns and how much attention is needed. The scope of optimization is the foundation of your workflow and task list:

Apple Search Ads Optimization Checklist & Troubleshooting

The scope of optimization depends on goals. This comprehensive guide will help you plan & optimize your campaigns.

However, it is good to know the engine’s inner workings before setting out on a journey. It will surely benefit you in the long run.

Remember that the timeframes in this article are merely suggestions. For example, in certain circumstances, it may be advised to give keywords more time before pausing them (up to 4 weeks). The time between a download and a revenue-generating in-app activity is a consideration for Apple Search Ads managers. However, your Apple Search Ads campaign management strategy should always serve your business goals.

What tasks are a part of campaign management in Apple Search Ads?

Here’s a brief overview of tasks awaiting a UA Specialist / Advertiser working with Apple Search Ads, depending on the scope of optimization described in the article on Apple Search Ads Optimization.

Apple Search Ads offers four ad placements:

• search results ads
• Today tab ads
• search tab ads
• product page ads

All tasks involving keywords are related to search results ads. Tasks involving ads are related to the other placements or ad variations, which are search results ads leading to custom product pages set up in App Store Connect.

SplitMetrics Acquire & Apple Search Ads Setup

Let’s assume you begin your journey with the free SplitMetrics Starter Plan. It’s setup is a one-time task that involves:

• Connecting a properly configured Apple Search Ads Advanced account;
• Adding a mobile measurement partner (MMP) through a no-code integration;
• Configuring campaign goals (like trial, purchase, subscription, engagement, game event, or other) and assigning them a monetary value.

Proper campaign configuration and management begins with the following:

• Building a keyword pool and sorting them into a proper account structure for search results ads;
• Setting up any automation rules or alerts.

The free SplitMetrics Starter Plan will guide you through the first three steps: connecting your app, adding an MMP, and creating goals.

Manage, automate, and analyze Apple Search Ads campaigns

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Monitoring campaign performance

This task involves a variety of activities, with scope depending on the period being analyzed:

• Checking whether keywords and ads delivered goals/downloads in a designated time frame
• Monitoring target KPIs (CPA, CPG, ROAS) on keywords or ads
• Monitoring additional KPIs to understand target KPIs (CR, TTR, view-through conversions)
• Observing various performance metrics: conversion rate (CR), tap-through rate (TTR), impression share, etc.

Bid optimization

Bid management and optimization is a relatively frequent but straightforward activity, provided you’re operating with clear goals and within a well-planned framework:

• Raising bids on well-performing keywords and ads to maximize performance
• Decreasing bids on underperforming ones to cut losses
• Pausing unprofitable keywords and ads
• Unpausing those who start performing with a delay

Bidding is the best candidate for early automation in the free SplitMetrics Starter Plan because it is repetitive, purely data-driven, and grounded in clear financial goals (at least, we hope so for each client).

Keyword optimization

Ongoing, regular keyword optimization involves:

• Transferring keywords from discovery to probing or proper campaigns
• Adding specific, not relevant keywords as negatives to Discovery
• Adding the best keywords to discovery with a broad match to find relevant variants
• Competitor research to continuously expand the discovery campaign
• Manual, cyclical keyword research (you can never get enough keywords)

The free SplitMetrics Starter Plan allows you to manage 20000 keywords simultaneously, so don’t hold yourself back. You can never have enough (good) keywords in Apple Search Ads!

Managing ad variations and custom product pages

Creative optimization is gaining prominence in Apple Search Ads as the best way to address user intent behind each search query. Trying out new designs and providing unique experiences for strategic keywords with custom product pages is becoming a significant part of Apple Search Ads management.

From the perspective of someone managing Apple Search Ads, this activity involves:

• Designing and setting up custom product pages in App Store Connect;
• Creating individual ads for custom product pages in Apple Search Ads;
• Analysis of ad performance, also in comparison to the default product page.

It naturally widens the scope of necessary daily, weekly, or monthly analyses, as it directly affects the granularity of your work.

Designing custom product page creatives that best match the target keyword may be challenging, but it can also be fun and very rewarding, leading to higher conversion rates and more downloads.

Analyzing Apple Search Ads campaign performance

Comprehensive analysis for ongoing or strategic optimization involves:

• Spotting trends in keyword and ad performance
• Observing cost per acquisition change in relation to targets
• Observing seasonal fluctuations in all key performance metrics
• Benchmarking of target KPIs
• Comprehensive overview of custom product page performance with a general update in mind

SplitMetrics’ recommended campaign management workflow for beginners

Let’s split all these tasks into a workflow that new free SplitMetrics Acquire Starter Plan users could employ (provided the account structure and proper configuration are behind us).

Daily campaign management activities

Daily activities in Apple Search Ads should include tasks with precise conditions to be performed. Your daily decisions should be entirely data-driven, without “figuring things out” as you go. This is why daily tasks are the first to be automated.

• Monitor key metrics: Cost per Acquisition (CPA), Cost per Goal (CPG), downloads, spend, and impression shares.
• Adjust bids: do it when needed for each keyword or ad, depending on when they were introduced to your exact match campaigns.

The free SplitMetrics Starter Plan has built-in Smart suggestions to help you organize your daily tasks. For example, our Smart Suggestions can tell you to:

• Add high-performing search terms as keywords to campaigns
• Move well-performing keywords to discovery’s broad match ad group
• Raise or lower bids or even pause/unpause keywords or ads.

Weekly campaign management activities

Weekly activities typically require some more data for meaningful decisions. Weekly, you can do the following:

• Optimize keywords: Add promising search terms from discovery to probing or proper exact match campaigns. Add the best ones from exact match campaigns as a broad match to discovery.
• Negative Keyword Review: Add any new negative keywords to filter out irrelevant traffic.
• Review TTR (Tap-Through Rate): A low TTR may signal the need for creative updates or better keyword or ad targeting.
• Review CR (Conversion Rate): A low CR may signal a need for creative updates.
• Verify spend patterns: After a week, you should have enough data to see optimal daily spending. Reassess daily campaign budgets.

Monthly campaign management activities

One month of running Apple Search Ads campaigns is an excellent opportunity for a more comprehensive review session. We recommend it to all newcomers to the free SplitMetrics Starter Plan, especially if it’s clear that optimization is necessary for future progress. The following months can maintain this scope of work.

Perform these tasks as a part of your first-month/monthly Apple Search Ads review:

• Adjust target CPA/CPG: This might be necessary, especially for newcomers who might need to counter their initial CPA/CPG assumptions with actual performance data;
• Full funnel review: Analyze the customer journey from Impression to Goal. Identify bottlenecks or drop-off points. Focus on TTR/CR. View-through conversion may help.
• Ad creative analysis: Low CR/TTR should indicate a redesign is needed. You can look at your best performers and see if a custom product page would help them improve even further.
• Revisit the Keyword Discovery: Don’t rely on Discovery campaigns alone. Use our keyword planner to find more keywords related to your app and competitors.
• Deep performance analysis: Conduct a more in-depth study of performance metrics, focusing on trends over the past 30 days. Analyze your impression shares and try to spot any trends. Are you below or above market benchmarks?
• Reassess bid strategy: re-examine your bid increments, frequency, and budgets.
• Adjust campaign structure: If certain ad groups or campaigns are underperforming, consider restructuring or redistributing your budget to high-performing areas. Creating a more granular structure may be better for category campaigns.
• Adjust audience targeting: If these are valid, create ad groups for new users, returning users, and device types.
• Introduce your first custom product page: You should be familiar with the platform and have sufficient data to select the best candidate (keywords) that could benefit from a personalized approach. Use it to showcase your app’s specific features and improve your conversion rates.
• Budget planning: You can reassess budgets per campaign or market to better respond to the changing competitive landscape on the App Store. Many of our advanced clients perform this task monthly and quarterly.

Quarterly Apple Search Ads management activities

The quarterly review includes tasks with an even broader scope better to understand seasonal fluctuations and the App Store dynamics. It can consist of the following tasks:

• Broader campaign optimization: Revisit overall campaign goals and strategies. This includes reviewing your budgets, goals, and target metrics.
• Competitor analysis: Evaluate impression shares of strategic keywords. Give a closer look at our best-performing competitors for new inspiration and keywords.
• A/B testing: Initiate or review results from A/B tests on creatives, keywords, and bidding strategies.
• Seasonality adjustments: Align your campaign strategy with any seasonal trends relevant to your app, adjusting bids, creatives, or ad spending for seasonal peaks and lows. At this point, you should have enough historical data for this optimization.
• Consider utilizing additional ad placements on the App Store: you may be comfortable with Apple Search Ads enough at this point to add more ad placements into your mix. Today tab ads and search tab ads have high potential to boost impressions and may lead to an increase in branded search queries for your app. Higher familiarity with your brand can result in better performance overall. Product page ads may help gain additional traffic by targeting users engaged on your competitors’ product pages.
• Consider expanding to more markets: automation features of the free SplitMetrics Acquire Starter Plan make scaling much easier. Start thinking of expanding early, to have time to map out changes to your campaign structure and secure additional funding. Additional markets are an opportunity, especially if your main one is highly competitive.

Yearly Apple Search Ads management activities

Yearly evaluation involves big ideas, bold decisions, and creative planning for the following year. The focus should on Apple Search Ads strategy. This most likely includes:

• Full strategy review: Assess what worked and didn’t, and plan your next year’s goals and campaign focus.
• ROI evaluation: Compare the total spend and revenue generated from Apple Search Ads over the past year. Assess whether your campaigns achieve a satisfactory return on investment (ROI).
• Budget planning: Based on past performance, reassess your marketing budget for the coming year to ensure you’re allocating sufficient resources to Apple Search Ads.
• Planning new things: Review and incorporate any new Apple Search Ads features or updates to stay competitive. Both Apple Search Ads and SplitMetrics work to help you succeed!

Best practices for Apple Search Ads campaign management for any mobile app

Regardless of your workflow and how you change the one we suggested above, we’d strongly recommend sticking to the following:

• Make daily tasks straightforward and automate them first. Don’t make ad-hoc daily decisions. All bid changes should be data-driven. If they’re purely data-driven, they can be automated. There is no need to waste your time on manual control.
• Automate weekly tasks second: Account management might need some planning. We do have templates, and the system can recognize brand/category keywords, but this may need some oversight from your side—especially if you have granular category campaigns.
• Revisit Keyword Discovery regularly; don’t rely only on  Apple Search Ads discovery campaigns. Make keyword discovery a part of your routine. Check on your competitors, brainstorm new ideas, and get them from your users by examining app reviews. Regardless of automation, your keyword insights, experience, and knowledge of your app will always be a key source of keywords for your campaigns.

Common mistakes in campaign management

Maintaining a healthy workplace means achieving your goals easier. Avoid these mistakes in management that are hindering your app growth:

• Too low optimization frequency or bid increments to make a noticeable difference in performance.
• Pausing keywords or decreasing bids too soon, making ad hoc decisions, and operating outside a clear framework.
• Lack of focus while monitoring, which means not paying attention to budgets being exhausted or leaving Discovery campaigns unattended;
• Not maintaining a proper campaign structure, with campaigns being broken by keyword intent or value. In some instances, Discovery, Competitor, or Brand campaigns are omitted entirely, even though each is a crucial component of Apple Search Ads.
• Omitting steps in keyword flow is also a problem. For example, it is recommended that exact match keywords be added as negative exact match keywords to the discovery campaign. Without automation, things like that can be forgotten.
• Neglecting manual keyword discovery. Besides omitting Discovery campaigns, neglecting manual keyword research and evaluation is a considerable growth blocker. You should always factor this task into your Apple Search Ads routine.

A clear optimization plan and automation will help you eliminate these mistakes. A good framework will make your daily tasks a simple routine. Automating them will leave you more room to fix the other omissions limiting your growth, like additional, manual keyword research or account structure supervision.

How does the free SplitMetrics Acquire Plan improve campaign management in Apple Search Ads?

SplitMetrics is an official Apple Search Ads Partner. The free SplitMetrics Acquire Starter Plan is a front-end campaign management platform built specifically for Apple Search Ads, adding to it its layer of functionality. This includes our visual interface, automation, alerts, reporting, or new features based on our AI-driven technology and machine learning (ML)-based algorithms. Our platform connects with Apple Search Ads through a campaign management API. This is why a properly configured Apple Search Ads account must be used.

Automation allows you to introduce necessary optimizations whenever required, not when you are physically capable of taking care of them. You’ll be managing hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords. They will enter your exact match campaigns at different times and perform slightly differently. Even at this scale, the system will adjust their bids immediately when specific conditions are met. The sum of these hundreds of little changes will amount to tangible benefits.

Automation templates in the free SplitMetrics Acquire Starter Plan will guide you through the process. With eight automation rules, you can quickly reduce your workload with Apple Search Ads to weekly or monthly check-ups, mainly for creative data analysis and optimization.

The free SplitMetrics Starter Plan makes automation easy with templates that provide context and guidance for creating rules. Read all about automation in SplitMetrics Acquire here:

SplitMetrics’ Ultimate Apple Search Ads Automation Guide [2024]

Apple Search Ads management FAQ

Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about Apple Search Ads management.

What should I automate first in Apple Search Ads campaigns?

Bidding, pausing, and unpausing keywords or ads are daily, mundane tasks that should follow clear logic. The system will maintain an adjustment frequency aligned with your sales funnel without error and stick to increments adequate to CPA, CPG, or current ROAS.

What tasks remain after automating Apple Search Ads in SplitMetrics Acquire?

• Weekly, monthly, quarterly analysis: Anything that requires creative planning and long-term optimization. In other words, innovative data analysis.
• Manual keyword discovery: Don’t rely on Discovery campaigns alone. Revisit our tool whenever you can. Also, manually review search terms in Discovery campaigns, mainly considering their relevance to your app.
• Additional structure management: Our platform can detect your branded keywords and those belonging to your competitors, discern generic/category terms, and manage the entire campaign structure based on automation. However, a more complex structure may occasionally require your attention.

Final words

Apple Search Ads is an accessible and streamlined user acquisition channel for the App Store that can drive high-value traffic to your app. Maintaining an ordered workflow and a data-driven approach that simplifies day-to-day decision-making increases your chances of making it profitable and automating to improve your growth even further.

We encourage you to try it and make your first steps even easier with the free SplitMetrics Acquire Starter Plan. Let our automation features reduce your workflow, and the graphical user interface makes analysis and management a smooth experience.