Apple Search Ads Optimization Checklist & Troubleshooting

Apple Search Ads is a dedicated user acquisition channel for the App Store and a top priority for any app marketer promoting an iOS app or mobile game.

The advertising platform is focused, streamlined, and implementable by anyone. Still, it requires a proper understanding of the App Store environment, impacting the full scope of optimization needed to make it work and contribute to profitable app growth.

This article expands our primary introductory guide to Apple Search Ads by describing the full scope of its optimization and redirecting you to even more detailed guides in our educational library. The journey from a beginner to an expert in Apple Search Ads can be a great experience, provided you don’t skip any steps. Before reading, it would be good to have a basic understanding of key Apple Search Ads performance metrics and campaign structures, but you can read on them as we guide you to relevant materials along the way.

…and more!

What is the scope of Apple Search Ads Optimization?

The main areas of Apple Search Ads optimization are:

• Keyword optimization is the process of building and continuously expanding a pool of relevant keywords with a high potential to generate traffic. Relevant for search results ads;
• Bid optimization means systematic monitoring of keyword and ad performance and adjusting bids to fit a specific target. Relevant for every ad placement;
• Audience optimization is adjusting audience setting options based on platform options (like demographic or geographic targeting). Relevant for all placements;
• Creative optimization means utilizing custom product pages to create better experiences for strategic keywords (for search results ads ad variations), and or best possible engagement for top-of-the-funnel users encountering Today tab ads (which rely custom product pages as destinations by default).

Keyword optimization and bid optimization are at the heart of managing Apple Search Ads search results ads and require regular health checks and control.

Audience, ad creative, and product page optimization are performed when needed and warranted by the app’s business model. Creative optimization is becoming increasingly important. It significantly impacts the performance of search results ads, by allowing advertisers to perfectly align app’s icon, title, subtitle and other creatives with the intent behind a specific keyword. It can help captivate more users with Today tab ads, resulting in higher tap-through and conversion rates for this placement.

App Store Optimization (ASO) and Apple Search Ads

App Store Optimization (ASO) is crucial for Apple Search Ads because its vital component is conversion rate optimization. It has a tremendous impact on attainable cost per tap (CPT), cost per acquisition (CPA), cost per goal (CPG), and return on ad spend (ROAS). ASO is focused on optimizing the default product page on an app, while custom product pages are a tool for paid user acquisition, being available for search results ads (through ad variations) and Today tab ads (being required to operate). Knowledge gained in analyzing custom product page performance can help optimize the default product page. Therefore, we treat relevant ad creatives and custom product pages as a component of Apple Search Ads performance optimization.

Q&A before you begin optimizing Apple Search Ads

The most significant setback to success with Apple Search Ads is starting without a plan. There are three starting questions you should ask yourself, as only you can answer them.

What is your budget structure?

You may have a single budget in mind when managing Apple Search Ads campaigns. Still, it’s advisable to establish separate, daily budgets for specific areas and waterfall remaining resources according to priority for transparency and future control when scaling.

• Today tab ads, Search tab ads, and product page ads are always assigned dedicated campaigns, which should have separate budgets.
• Brand campaigns in search results ads are a high priority regardless of your brand’s awareness. If not for user acquisition, then for brand protection.
• Competitor campaigns are essential for user acquisition, but their high competitiveness requires an individual approach.
• Category campaigns will form the bulk of your user acquisition due to their sheer volume.
• Discovery campaigns are crucial to finding new keywords for your campaigns.

The budget structure is directly reflected in your campaign structure, either semantics-based or value-based, although both models allow for a granular, budget-dependent approach in structuring.

You need to understand your app, brand, users’ journey, competitors, and functionality (which will impact the semantic core you’ll use for your campaigns). The chosen campaign structure will be critical in determining your workflow and possible automation strategy.

Do you plan international expansion?

It’s possible to include multiple markets in a single campaign, although we’d prefer to separate them into separate ones. With multi-geo campaigns, you give up control over individual markets. There can be considerable differences between them regarding average conversion rates (CR) and cost per acquisition (CPA). It might be easier to allocate a separate budget for expansion rather than analyzing markets and selecting similar ones regarding operational costs and potential gains in a single campaign.

How important are seasonal and holiday promotions for your app?

Seasonal and holiday campaigns are frequently tied to other promotional activities on the App Store, like in-app events or Today tab campaigns. New keywords pop up, selected ones gain more traction, and seasonal updates to product page creatives can significantly impact conversion rates and, as a result, CPA and CPG.

This is optional, but consider whether seasonality and holiday promotions are essential for your app. Separate campaigns may help you maintain transparency and improve control. However, this approach makes sense only if such activities are a vital source of new users (or increased engagement) for your mobile game or app, to an extent that warrants this more granular approach. A mobile game may find this viable when a holiday campaign is frequently coupled with a timed, meaningful, engaging in-game event.

Apple Search Ads Keyword Optimization

Keyword optimization involves building and maintaining a pool of relevant keywords with high traffic potential. It’s relevant to search results ads and an integral part of creating and maintaining an Apple Search Ads account structure that will organize all your campaigns and ad groups.

Early keyword expansion and evaluation

Early keyword optimization aims to find relevant keywords with the best possible potential for high-quality traffic.

In the early stages of creating your campaigns, you’ll have no historical performance data to rely on, but both Apple Search Ads and the free SplitMetrics Acquire Starter Plan will help you build a strong keyword pool.

We offer a robust Keyword Discovery feature that gives you three perspectives on mining: by your app, competitors, and your choice. The platform also includes several vital metrics for keyword evaluation.

• Search popularity indicates possible impressions a keyword might get
• Impression share will help evaluate a given keyword competition level
• Brand protection is a feature of the free SplitMetrics Acquire Plan that shows how well-defended brand keywords are to select the most attractive ones for your Competitor campaign.

Ongoing keyword monitoring & optimization

Launching your first campaigns will allow you to aggregate and process performance data for your keywords, allowing proper management within your structure and bid optimization according to their priority. How this process works depends on the principles of your campaign structure. Let’s use the process for the semantics-based campaign structure as an example:

This process is explained in great detail in our article on semantics-based structure for campaign management, so we’ll focus on the principles here:

• Understand your target CPA, CPG, or ROAS. This is necessary to establish clear criteria for transferring a keyword to a proper campaign.
• Understand your app or game’s business cycle. Conversion delay is crucial in setting timeframes for keywords to deliver results.

How to Build a Semantics-Based Apple Search Ads Account Structure for Search Results Ads

Apple Search Ads campaigns need strong keyword pools that are systematically optimized.

The role of Apple Search Ads Discovery campaigns

An Apple Search Ads Discovery campaign is crucial to optimizing your keywords. It utilizes the broad match setting and the Search Match feature for the widest possible reach and continuously supplies new keywords for your other campaigns.

You need only one Discovery campaign, regardless of account structure. The logic and configuration of Discovery campaigns are well described in the article above, but given their importance, we’d like to point you to another article dedicated to their optimization:

How to Manage and Optimize Apple Search Ads Discovery Campaigns?

Searching for the best possible keywords to bid on.

Best keywords optimization tips

Let’s summarize this chapter by highlighting critical principles of keyword optimization:

• Prioritize relevance: High conversion rates signal an app worth recommending by the algorithm. You will always try to get the best out of the two metrics, but prioritizing relevance is safer in the long run.
• Consider seasonality: Keyword search popularity fluctuates, and popular seasonal events or festive periods boost specific keywords. Never neglect monitoring your keywords and ads on a regular basis and extend the scope of your analysis every month or so. Remember you may need to revise your CPT targets periodically as many apps will intensify their user acquisition during important holidays or in specific months hoping to capitalize on their growth potential. You too may not want to miss this opportunity.
• Consider conversion delay: Allow keywords to run for at least a month before pausing them. Some may even bring conversion after being paused!

For more insights on keyword expansion and optimization, please refer to our guide:

Apple Search Ads Keywords in 2024: Basics, Expansion & Best Practices

Find the best App Store keywords for your mobile app or game.

Bid Optimization

Bid optimization involves strategically adjusting bids to improve the performance of keywords and ads while staying within the budget. It’s relevant to all Apple Search Ads placements.

Optimize Keywords and Bids with the free SplitMetrics Acquire Starter Plan

Learn More

The Role of a Bid Optimization Strategy

In theory, bid optimization is straightforward and involves the following activities:

• Increasing bids on best-performing keywords or ads
• Decreasing bids on underperforming ones
• Pausing keywords and ads that don’t deliver downloads or goals
• Unpausing those which ultimately do, but with delay

In practice, reaching profitability won’t be possible without considering an array of factors that determine our approach to bidding, which should be strategic and managed within a transparent and well-defined framework:

• Campaign type: Brand, competitor, category, and discovery campaigns require differing approaches to match their relevance to user acquisition and competition levels.
• Campaign value: High-priority campaigns (brand or top-tier generic ones) may require a more courageous approach, visible through frequent updates and higher incrementality. Campaign value will be mostly aligned with type.
• New or existing campaigns: New campaigns may benefit from more courageous bidding, giving them a significant impression boost and, consequently, faster evaluation. Existing campaigns with aggregated historical data may be managed more leisurely.
• Current CPA and target CPA relation: CPA below your target CPA signals an opportunity to increase bids or budgets to capture more downloads while staying within your profitability goals. Alternatively, you may focus on cost per goal (CPG) or return on ad spend (ROAS).
• Spend efficiency: Money spend with no downloads or goals delivered calls for pausing a keyword or an ad.
• Impression share: This can be a crucial metric in some cases, like branded keywords you want to own exclusively to avoid competitors taking traffic away from your app.
• Download or goal velocity: whether a keyword or an ad delivers required app downloads or leads to meaningful in-app or in-game activities.

These, in turn, influence the following variables of your optimization:

• Date range: The date range you consider while analyzing performance determines how often you raise or decrease bids. 
• Bid increment: The percentage increase or decrease of your bid.

The bid optimization process should be strategic and focused on your target cost per acquisition (CPA), cost per goal (CPG), or return on ad spend (ROAS), with all factors mentioned above taken into consideration. The interrelation of these elements into a cohesive bidding strategy is well displayed in the chart below:

Target metric optimization (CPA, CPG, ROAS)

Apple Search Ads CPA optimization means bidding to maintain a cost per acquisition at a certain level.

• CPA below target CPA means you may not be utilizing the full potential of selected keywords or ads.
• CPA exceeding target CPA means you’re unlikely to increase your impression share for a keyword or ad. Accept this and decrease the bid to maintain them at an acceptable price (as bottom-range converters) or increase your target CPA.

Tunnel strategy

The Tunnel Strategy is a great way to approach CPA optimization through bidding. It revolves around gradually adjusting bids within a “tunnel” created by two metrics: maximum and minimum CPG/CPA. The chart below illustrates the concept:

This strategy requires historical data for implementation, but by sticking to it, you will be able to get more downloads while reducing the cost per acquisition/goal.

Funnel strategy

This strategy assumes that poor performance can be detected early, as low tap-through or conversion rates signify a low probability of performing a revenue-generating action inside the app. As with the tunnel strategy, you need historical data to properly implement the Funnel Strategy and determine your target cost per goal (CPG) and optimum spend levels.

Implementing these strategies requires historical data and a solid framework to adjust bids strategically, with little to no room for decisions that aren’t purely data-driven. Given the scope, it’s easiest to implement them along with automation. Both strategies are described in the article below:

SplitMetrics’ Ultimate Apple Search Ads Automation Guide [2024]

Maximizing impression share

Depending on the campaign type, your goal of bidding might also be maintaining impression share at a certain level.

This strategy is especially recommended for Brand campaigns, which should have an impression share of around 90-95%. This ensures protection from competitors who might bid on your keywords and claim your precious traffic. Competitor campaigns can also be optimized for impression share to keep the brand top of mind in the market.

In the case of category campaigns, fixating on a specific impression share doesn’t have to be productive, as the primary goal is to consistently deliver maximum goals or downloads at optimal CPA and CPG. 

However, you may be interested in boosting impressions for new keywords to try out their potential as quickly as possible. This is especially important if you plan to focus on goals and CPG, as the conversion delay in such a case may be more significant.

What is the best way to start, and why automate Apple Search Ads on day one?

Suppose you’ve just signed up for Apple Search Ads and are willing to manage it with our free SplitMetrics Acquire Starter Plan. You’re ready to give the platform one month to see if you can make things work.

Reaching profitability is possible but requires a strategic approach, with many factors and variables involved, which translates directly into your workflow.

Automation is an excellent aid in reaching profitability because, once on, it sets things in motion without missing a step. Our system has automation templates that will help you even in the planning phase by including all relevant variables, like bid increment, date range, etc.

There are three convenient CPA-based templates for automated bidding:

• Increase bid for top performers: The rule increases reach and gets more target conversions for high-performing keywords with the current CPA less than the target CPA.
• Decrease bids for low performers: The rule helps prevent overspending on low-performing keywords whose current CPA is above the target CPA.
• Decrease bids for non-converters: The rule helps avoid overspending on keywords that didn’t get target conversion but have already spent enough

Implementing these “by the book” will ensure that you adhere to the core principles crucial for your Apple Search Ads success. Automating Apple Search Ads requires a plan and order, and the lack of this component undermines the efforts of many newcomers to the advertising platform.

To put it lightly, achieving this level of complexity with manual control is not as easy. Our automation templates provide context and insights, so it’s simpler to consider all relevant metrics. You can use the tips above to fine-tune configuration details.

Best bid optimization tips

Here are some universal bid optimization tips to keep in mind:

• Proper account structure is critical, as can be seen—the bidding approach differs for campaign types. It will result in an ordered, efficient weekly or bi-weekly workflow.
• First and foremost, how frequently you change bids depends on your app’s business cycle. However, for new keywords with no historical data, you may keep underperformers under closer observation for a bit longer (about four weeks) before pausing them to account for conversion delay. You may act quicker when raising bids for them. For keywords with historical data at your disposal, your app’s business cycle will be the main factor determining frequency.
• Keep an eye on seasonality, as your CPA will fluctuate depending on the time of year or during significant festive periods. This incentivizes app and game developers to run timed promotions.

Bidding in Apple Search Ads: How to Win an Auction?

How to win an auction in Apple Search Ads and make money in the process? It takes a great deal of planning, discipline and swift optimization.

Apple Search Ads Targeting Optimization

This optimization activity applies to all Apple Search Ads placements: Today tab ads, Search tab ads, and product page ads. It’s highly dependent on your app’s functionality and user journey. It’s not something performed regularly. Instead, this optimization will alter your ad group structure within your campaigns. Precise targeting may be used from the first day of running Apple Search Ads, but this calls for careful audience segmentation.

In the first quarter of 2022, 78% of App Store iOS 15 search volume came from devices with Personalized Ads turned off. Therefore, a widespread practice is to target all users within an ad group. However, can name at least several scenarios when they’re applicable:

• A mobile game optimized for larger screens may benefit from more specific targeting per device type;
• Sometimes, it might be beneficial to create separate ad groups for new and returning users. This may work well for mobile games, which enjoy long lifecycles with engaging updates or launch seasonal promotions with in-app events.

There’s one more thing we’d like to point out:

Ad Creative and Product Page Optimization

Ad variations are unique creations that lead to custom product pages. They can highlight specific features or reach the maximum relevance for selected keywords. Because of these reasons, they can have significantly higher conversion rates and high download velocity.

Experimenting with custom product pages and ad creative optimization is a fun part of Apple Search Ads Optimization. It can tremendously impact your profitability and should be noticed by more developers.

We can share this advice on how to optimize Apple Search Ads with custom product pages and  ad variations to increase downloads:

• Select your best-performing keywords to see if you can give them an even bigger edge;
• Lift underperforming ones by increasing relevance through personalized messaging

Apple Search Ads Custom Product Pages Setup Guide

How to use them & why to use them: a comprehensive guide.

Troubleshooting

Let’s discuss the most common considerations new users have when starting their campaigns in  Apple Search Ads.

Cost per tap (CPT) is too high

After some time, your CPT bid might have outgrown its optimal value for some keywords: it’s too high to align with the KPIs while you have already reached the optimal impression share or too high for hardly relevant keywords or those with low search popularity. You should review and reduce potentially overinflated bids.

Some keywords can be expensive because they’re popular and highly competitive. If they’re essential but financially unviable, you can try these solutions:

• Invest in ASO and optimize your product page creatives
• Resort to using ad variations with custom product pages
• Turn to long-tail variants of such a keyword, which may be more accessible

Try to target competitor keywords, especially those with low levels of protection, as signified by our Brand Protection insight available in the free SplitMetrics Acquire Starter Plan.

Consider running product page ads for the same reason (diverting traffic from competitors who target those strategic keywords).

Cost per tap (CPT) is going up unexpectedly

Spikes in CPT are likely to indicate changes in the competitive landscape. This can be related to seasonality but doesn’t have to. The dynamic growth of a subcategory can drive high CPA, with new contenders bidding aggressively to maximize their impression share. There are two options here:

• Accept the new landscape and increase your bids;
• Explore alternatives, accepting lower impression shares for some of your current keywords or ads.

Such an occurrence isn’t unique to Apple Search Ads. It’s advisable to have a steady working routine or set up automation rules with alerts to turn your attention to sudden changes.

The conversion rate (CR) is low

Sometimes, the overall CPA remains high even with a reasonable CPT and a good number of impressions and taps. In these cases, it makes sense to look into conversion rates to identify where drop-offs are happening in the funnel. Analyzing different stages of the funnel can pinpoint potential issues and optimize for better performance.

• If you’re seeing Impressions but very few Taps, your problem might be keyword relevance, and people aren’t interested in your app. Review the semantic core of your Category campaign.
• If your app is receiving Taps but users aren’t converting into Downloads: app creatives might need optimization, to offer a more engaging experience on the product page.

Again, remember that ASO is the foundation of every Apple Search Ads campaign!

General best Apple Search Ads optimization practices

Time for a quick summarization, or TL: DR ;). Here are some Apple Search Ads best practices to remember, which are crucial for healthy mobile app growth.

1. ASO should be the foundation of all your Apple Search Ads campaigns. Its key focus is conversion rate optimization, something that affects all paid user acquisition channels;
2. Create a proper campaign structure. Plan international expansion and how to factor them into your structure;
3. Understand your user’s journey. It’s necessary to create a proper keyword strategy and estimate the conversion delay essential for evaluating the performance of keywords and ads;
4. Analyze Apple Search Ads cost on a category level to understand how your goals fit into the target market. Sometimes, it might be necessary to adjust your expectations.
5. Continuously expand your keyword pool to have alternatives ready when competition levels fluctuate. Maintain proper discovery campaigns;
6. Bid increases or decreases should be incremental and tied to the performance potential;
7. Increase bids for well-performing keywords and ads, decrease for others;
8. Automate bidding to factor in all variables impacting your CPA, CPG, or ROAS easily.
9. Maximize the profitability of the best keywords by utilizing ad variations and custom product pages.
10. Target all users and resort to more specific options when you understand your audience well.
11. Regularly check insights from Apple Search Ads reporting to track spikes in KPIs and detect seasonal fluctuations. Maintain a steady, ordered monitoring and management regimen.
12. Keep an eye on view-through metrics. Introduced relatively recently by Apple Search Ads, these help you better evaluate the value of your ads and keywords before pausing them or decreasing your bids. View-through metrics refer to downloads and redownloads within a day of viewing the ad displayed but not interacted with by a user.

You can create a custom metric in the free SplitMetrics Acquire Starter Plan to measure the effect of view-through downloads. Add a custom column in your ad manager with this formula:

To evaluate the effectiveness of direct interactions, create another custom metric that calculates the proportion of click-through downloads compared to total downloads:

If your view-through download share is higher than your tap-through download share in search results campaigns, it might mean that your ads lead to downloads without generating taps. In this case, review your Custom Product Page, as optimizing your creatives could help increase the number of taps on your ads. You can find more Apple Search Ads best practices in this guide:

11 Apple Search Ads Best Practices

Check yourself or plan your user acquisition with this guide.

Getting started with the free SplitMetrics Starter Plan

The free SplitMetrics Acquire Starter Plan can manage Apple Search Ads from A to Z. Its campaign management and automation features will help you optimize Apple Search Ads effectively. It’s a great place to start using this channel. Give yourself a minimum of one month, preferably two months, to discover the potential of this user acquisition channel.

The SplitMetrics Starter Plan is and will be free to use (you’ll only pay for your ads), so it’s a great way to start and the most effective way to optimize Apple Search Ads.