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Apple Ads — 16 Jul 2026
Apple Ads (Formerly Apple Search Ads) Guide for 2026 and Beyond: What It Costs and How to Win With Your App
Ivan Žgela
Ivan Žgela 
Apple Ads, formerly Apple Search Ads, is Apple’s advertising platform for promoting apps on the App Store. Advertisers bid to show ads in search results, on the Search tab, on the Today tab, and on product pages, across 91+ countries and regions.
The channel earns its budget through intent. According to Apple, 70% of App Store visitors use search to find their next app, almost 65% of downloads happen directly after a search, and ads at the top of search results convert at over 60%. Users act fast: 95% of downloads after an ad tap happen within one minute.
The platform has changed more since April 2025 than in the nine years before it: a new name, AdAttributionKit registration, a doubled custom product page limit, 21 new countries, and multiple ad positions in a single set of search results. This guide covers Apple Ads as it works today.
Apple Ads is Apple’s advertising platform for promoting apps on the App Store. Apple launched the platform as Apple Search Ads in 2016 with a single placement at the top of search results, and renamed it Apple Ads in April 2025 after ad offerings grew beyond search.
The renaming affected product naming and sign-in pages, while campaigns, keywords, and reporting carried over unchanged. Apple also sells ads on Apple News and MLS under the same Apple Ads brand. This guide covers ads on the App Store, where app installs are won.
| Apple Ads Advanced | Apple Ads Basic | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Cost-per-tap (CPT) | Cost-per-install (CPI) |
| Placements | All four App Store placements | Search results only |
| Keywords | You choose and bid | Automated by Apple from your metadata |
| Audience refinement | Demographics, location, device, customer types | Automated |
| Custom product pages | Yes, as ad variations | No |
| Budget | No minimum, no maximum | $10,000/month cap per app |
Apple Ads Advanced is the tier this guide is about. Basic trades control for simplicity: setup takes minutes and management time drops by roughly 80%. The tradeoff shows up in unit economics, because well-optimized advanced campaigns achieve 30-40% lower cost per install than Basic (according to SplitMetrics campaign data).
For anyone spending more than a few thousand dollars a month, Advanced pays for its own learning curve.
Apple Ads run in four placements, and each one reaches users at a different point of their App Store journey.
Search results ads appear after a user types a query, matched to the search term itself. That direct intent signal is why ads at the top of search results convert at over 60% (communicated by Apple, based on measurement from November 2024 to October 2025).
Since March 2026, one query can show more than one ad position: Apple rolled out multiple ad slots in search results to all markets, on devices running iOS 26.2 or later. Relevance gates every position, so an app that does not match the query will not show regardless of bid.
Search tab ads appear at the top of the suggested apps list, before the user types anything. The ad is built from your existing product page assets: app name, icon, and subtitle.
Today tab ads put your app on the front page of the App Store, where over half a billion weekly visitors start their session (Apple). Today tab ads require a custom product page set up in App Store Connect, which serves as both the ad creative source and the tap destination.
Product page ads appear in the “You Might Also Like” section at the bottom of other apps’ product pages. You can run them across all categories or refine where they show, which makes them the placement for reaching users while they research alternatives.
Each placement covers one stage of demand:
Across the accounts SplitMetrics manages, the standard path is to start with search results, prove unit economics there, then expand one placement at a time, stickting the best Apple Ads practices.
Apple Ads Advanced charges per tap, and impressions are free. You set a maximum cost-per-tap (CPT) bid, which is the most you are willing to pay for one tap on your ad, and the actual price you pay is often lower than your max.
Search results campaigns offer two bidding strategies:
Relevance decides which ads appear. Apple matches ads to people based on the direct signal of their intent, the search term, and relevance comes from your metadata and from how users engage with your ad. When a keyword gets impressions but few taps, or competitive bids earn zero impressions, the fix usually starts with metadata rather than with a higher bid.
Two additional controls shape spend:
Three numbers to plan with:
The spread between categories is wide, and the full breakdown is in the cost section below.
Apple Ads costs vary depending on the category and which metrics you are looking at.
Apple Ads has no flat fee. You pay per tap, at a price set by bidding, so costs depend on your category, market, and competition.
Here is the full category breakdown for the US market, April to June 2026:
| Category | TTR (%) | CVR (%) | CPT ($) | CPA ($) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Books | 9.9 | 62.3 | 1.49 | 2.39 |
| Business | 11.2 | 67.1 | 3.34 | 4.99 |
| Education | 7.7 | 60.2 | 1.93 | 3.21 |
| Entertainment | 8.7 | 63.4 | 1.44 | 2.28 |
| Finance | 4.2 | 53.2 | 3.80 | 7.14 |
| Food & Drink | 2.4 | 41.7 | 2.31 | 5.53 |
| Games | 7.4 | 55.7 | 3.02 | 5.43 |
| Graphics & Design | 10.4 | 65.1 | 1.34 | 2.06 |
| Health & Fitness | 9.4 | 62.7 | 1.50 | 2.38 |
| Lifestyle | 6.5 | 63.1 | 1.83 | 2.90 |
| Medical | 3.4 | 40.1 | 1.88 | 4.69 |
| Music | 9.8 | 59.1 | 0.97 | 1.63 |
| Navigation | 6.1 | 56.1 | 0.55 | 0.98 |
| News | 3.7 | 44.8 | 4.55 | 10.16 |
| Photo & Video | 11.3 | 69.8 | 1.62 | 2.32 |
| Productivity | 5.6 | 56.0 | 1.79 | 3.20 |
| Reference | 13.4 | 61.7 | 0.71 | 1.15 |
| Shopping | 5.1 | 63.4 | 2.38 | 3.76 |
| Social Networking | 3.0 | 56.6 | 0.99 | 1.76 |
| Sports | 10.6 | 72.7 | 16.96 | 23.33 |
| Travel | 10.3 | 66.9 | 1.80 | 2.70 |
| Utilities | 10.5 | 68.1 | 1.92 | 2.82 |
| Weather | 9.8 | 62.5 | 1.00 | 1.60 |
Source: Apple Ads benchmarks via SplitMetrics, US, April to June 2026. Sports is excluded from the median figures above because its costs run 5-10x every other category.
A note on data freshness: the figures most often quoted for Apple Ads costs, a $2.40 average CPA and a 9.9% tap-through rate, date from 2022. The current medians are $2.76 CPA and 8.2% TTR. Benchmarks decay, which is why every number in this section carries its measurement period.
The gap between the cheapest and most expensive category is large enough to change your entire channel strategy:
One number deserves its own paragraph: median conversion rate across categories is 62%. App Store search traffic converts at this level because the user has already decided to install something; the ad decides which app wins the download.
Each of these Apple Ads metrics has its own evaluation logic and optimization levers, from creative changes that lift TTR to bid changes that control CPT.
Take your category CPA and multiply it by your target install count. At the $2.76 median, 1,000 installs cost roughly $2,760 in US ad spend. The same 1,000 installs cost about $980 in Navigation and over $10,000 in News, so the category conversation comes before the budget conversation.
There are two planning rules we see proven across the accounts we manage at SplitMetrics:
Want these benchmarks for your category and market, updated continuously? The Apple Ads Benchmark Dashboard by SplitMetrics shows current CPT, CPA, TTR, and CVR.
The proven structure of Apple Ads uses four campaigns per market, each with one job. Apple’s own documentation recommends the same four campaign types (Apple calls the Generic campaign “Category”), and it is the default structure in SplitMetrics Agency accounts:
| Campaign | Targets | Job |
|---|---|---|
| Brand | Your brand name, company name, and variations | Protect brand searches from competitor ads and win them at low cost |
| Generic | Non-branded category and feature keywords | Acquire new users who search by need, and carry most of the performance budget |
| Competitors | Competitor app and company names | Reach high-intent users who are comparing alternatives |
| Discovery | Broad match and Search Match, no manual keyword list | Find new keywords and feed the validated ones back into the other three campaigns |
Match type discipline holds the structure together. Brand, Generic, and competitors campaign run exact match only, which keeps bid control on high-intent keywords. Discovery is the only campaign where broad match and Search Match belong.
One wiring rule makes Discovery work: every exact match keyword from your performance campaigns must be added as an exact match negative in Discovery. Without those negatives, Discovery bids against your own campaigns on keywords you already run, and the overlap dilutes both budgets and statistics. Review performance keyword lists quarterly and update the Discovery negatives accordingly.
Running a separate campaign set for each country or region is a common approach. The same keyword can be fiercely competitive in one market and cheap in another, so identical bids produce very different returns, and campaign data never syncs across markets.
A consistent naming convention such as US_Brand, UK_Generic, and DE_Discovery keeps multi-market accounts manageable and supports automation later. Combining countries is justified only when a single market lacks the traffic to optimize on its own data.
Having a working Apple Ads campaign management takes time, so make sure to plan it with your internal UA and ASO team carefully.
The pattern we find most often in account audits is broad match running as the default instead of the exception. Accounts arrive with 70-90% of spend on broad match and few negatives, because broad match is easy to set up and delivers impressions fast. The result is off-target impressions, inflated CPT on irrelevant matches, and budget waste that hides the true efficiency of the account.
Do this diagnostic and spend 5 minutes wisely to make your Apple Ads campaigns more profitable – pull your match-type distribution by spend. When broad match exceeds 40-50% of spend without a specific reason, structure is the first thing to fix.
To build a keyword strategy in Apple Ads, start from how Apple’s matching actually behaves, because it differs from every other ad platform:
Those differences carry a practical consequence – a Google Ads keyword list does not transfer to Apple Ads. Keywords that performed on Google regularly fail on the App Store, and Apple shows no competitor CPC data to calibrate against. Build the Apple list from Apple’s own signals.
The working cycle we recommend looks like this:
Two cautions on negatives: never use broad match negatives in ad groups with exact match keywords, because they block relevant searches, and keep Brand campaigns free of negatives except for clearly necessary cases.
Keyword search volume deserves less respect than it usually gets. Some low-volume and long-tail keywords outperform high-volume terms on CPA, especially in niche verticals, so test before dismissing them.
The honest limit of manual keyword work is that analyzing one keyword properly takes 6-7 minutes, which means 500 keywords in one market is a multi-day task, and most UA managers end up reviewing only the top 10% of their list.
This is where keyword gap analysis earns its place – it is an automated comparison of your keyword list against competitors’ shows which keywords they run that you lack. SplitMetrics Acquire runs this comparison continuously, and the manual alternative is searching each keyword 100+ times to estimate who appears.
Keyword intent also connects forward to app creatives – the strongest apps align the keyword, the audience refinement, and the custom product page the ad leads to, so a user searching “workout tracker” lands on a page showing workout tracking. The custom product pages section below covers how to build that alignment.
Managing bids in Apple Ads means regularly checking how competitive you are for each tap. Budgets decide how much a campaign can spend. Managing the two together is most of the day-to-day work in Apple Ads.
A daily budget works as a soft target rather than a hard stop. A campaign can spend somewhat past its daily budget on strong days, while the monthly total never exceeds the daily budget times 30.4.
Always set a daily budget, even with conservative bids. And when you plan to reduce spend, act early: increases take effect almost immediately, while decreases can take a day or two to apply.
Bidding usually starts conservative. Early performance data is what later optimization learns from, so low starting bids let you see real cost and conversion patterns before you scale anything. Ongoing management then follows one principle: raise bids where performance beats your target, reduce them where it misses, and pause keywords that spend without converting. The right thresholds depend on your category, margins, and volume.
One configuration tip is worth stating directly: avoid tight CPA goals in Brand campaigns, because they can limit delivery on exactly the searches you want to win every time.
Share of Voice (SOV) measures how often your ad appears for a keyword compared with competitors, and brand defense directly connects to it. Apple Ads reports impression share in 10% ranges; SplitMetrics Acquire measures SOV to the exact percentage point on a 5-day rolling average, and the spend difference between holding 91% and 99% of a brand term can reach tens of thousands of dollars.
These SOV levels are useful orientation points, verified in enterprise brand-defense work:
| SOV level | What it means |
|---|---|
| 30% | Minimum visible brand presence |
| 70% | Strong brand defense, the standard protection target |
| 90-95% | Optimal cost-efficiency ceiling |
| 95-100% | Cost per point climbs steeply; rarely worth it |
Keep Brand campaigns broad, with no demographic refinements and all devices covered: 78% of App Store search volume on iOS 17+ comes from devices with Personalized Ads turned off, so demographic targeting cannot see most traffic anyway. Watch that the Brand campaign’s daily budget never becomes the limiting factor.
In mature markets, a large share of brand-term downloads are redownloads by existing users – in one enterprise account SplitMetrics measured 85% of brand traffic as redownloads. Brand spend in mature markets is mostly defensive, which argues for holding SOV at the efficient level rather than the maximum.
Apple Ads management should be automated when the analysis stops fitting into the week. Analyzing one keyword properly takes 6-7 minutes, so a 500-keyword account in a single market is a 50-hour job. Most teams end up reviewing only their top keywords manually, and everything below the top stays unoptimized.
Within Apple Ads itself, automation means Maximize Conversions, the AI-powered bidding option for search results campaigns, plus bid and budget recommendations – which basically means optimizing your Apple Ads from start to end. Rule-based automation and portfolio-level AI bidding work through management platforms and SplitMetrics Acquire provides both.
The two approaches work like this in SplitMetrics Acquire:
Search volume decides how you approach the automation. Lower-volume apps get further with condition-based rules, while high-volume advertisers standardize on AI bidding; across SplitMetrics Acquire clients, we see the majority of accounts using AI smart bidding because it provides better results compared to condition based automation.
Iris is the first AI agent purpose-built for Apple Ads, built & trained by SplitMetrics’ team of experts in mobile marketing, to drive app growth. It can make your journey with Apple Ads even easier, because just like ChatGPT, it provides instant answers backed by highly specific, app market intelligence data.
To measure Apple Ads campaigns and their performance, four metrics stand out for a high-level reporting:
| Metric | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Impressions | How often your ad was shown |
| Tap-through rate (TTR) | Share of impressions that became taps |
| Conversion rate (CR) | Share of taps that became downloads |
| CPT / CPA | What you paid per tap and per acquisition |
The median TTR across US categories is 8.2% and the median conversion rate is 62% (Apple Ads benchmarks via SplitMetrics, April to June 2026). Conversion rates on Apple Ads run far above web advertising norms because the user who taps an ad in search results is already looking for an app to download.
Apple and mobile measurement partners (MMPs) count different things under similar names.
A download is the Apple event: the user taps the download button on the App Store.
An install is the MMP event: the user opens the app for the first time.
Both platforms display the word “install,” and the numbers never fully match, because some users download an app and never open it.
When you read Apple Ads reporting, you are looking at downloads. When you read your MMP, you are looking at installs and everything after them. Keeping the two terms separate prevents hours of false discrepancy-hunting.
Apple Ads reports its own metrics in real time. Revenue and post-install behavior come from your mobile measurement partner, and MMP postbacks typically arrive with a 24-72 hour delay. Use Apple Ads data for quick campaign reads and MMP data for revenue analysis.
The two data streams stay separate by default:
For privacy-preserving attribution, Apple provides AdAttributionKit, the framework formerly known as SKAdNetwork. AdAttributionKit reports cohort-level results rather than user-level detail, so most teams read it alongside MMP data rather than instead of it.
Custom product pages improve Apple Ads performance because they let you create up to 70 additional versions of your App Store product page, each with its own URL, screenshots, app preview, and promotional text. Instead of sending every ad to the same default page, you match the page to the search intent – a user who searched “workout tracker” lands on screenshots about workout tracking.
Ad variations built on custom product pages deliver 9% higher tap-through rates on average, and in search results campaigns the uplift reaches 27% (SplitMetrics CPP Playbook, internal benchmarks). Graphics & Design apps see +39% TTR, Lifestyle +36%, and Sports +32%. 83 of the top 100 apps already use custom product pages, while Shopping, Finance, and Games show low adoption, which leaves an opening for early movers in those categories.
Custom product pages play a different role per placement. Today tab ads require one, because the page provides both the ad creative and the tap destination, and Today tab creative follows Apple’s stricter content rules. In search results and Search tab campaigns, the custom page controls where the user lands after the tap.
Three things are worth testing ongoingly:
The strongest setups align the keyword, the audience, and the landing page so all three tell the same story.
Custom product pages work alongside product page optimization (PPO) rather than replacing it: PPO improves the default page for all traffic through A/B testing, while custom product pages tailor the experience for specific segments.
When comparing Apple Ads vs other channels, the biggest difference is that Apple Ads captures demand that already exists: the user is already on the App Store, searching for an app.
Google, Meta, and TikTok create demand upstream, reaching people in feeds and videos before they think about the App Store. Most mature UA programs run both channel types, and the comparison below is about what each channel asks of you.
| Aspect | Apple Ads | Google Ads (App campaigns) | Meta | TikTok |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| You pay per | Tap (CPT) | Install / action | Impression, optimized to events | Impression, optimized to events |
| Targeting basis | Search terms and keywords | Automated, from your assets | Audience signals plus creative | Creative plus audience signals |
| Creative burden | Low: ads build from store assets and custom product pages | Low to medium: text and asset feeds | High: continuous creative testing | Highest: creatives fatigue in 10-15 days |
| iOS attribution | Direct, through Apple’s own framework | Runs through ATT/SKAN constraints | Runs through ATT/SKAN constraints | Runs through ATT/SKAN constraints |
Third-party cost benchmarks put the channels in comparable ranges: iOS CPI globally runs $1.5-3.5, Facebook Ads $1-3, TikTok $0.50-2.50, and Google Ads $0.50-2.50 per install (Business of Apps, CPI Rates). Treat these as orientation ranges rather than planning numbers, because methodology and market mix differ per source; our Apple Ads figures earlier in this guide are US-only medians measured April to June 2026.
Each channel has a clear strength, based on what SplitMetrics Agency sees running all four:
One planning note applies everywhere: on iOS, every non-Apple channel measures through ATT and SKAN constraints, so dashboard numbers and MMP numbers will disagree, and 7-day-plus cohorts give the more honest read.
Apple Ads and app store optimization (ASO) operate on the same surface, and each one strengthens the other. Four connections matter in practice:
Paid downloads support organic rankings.
Download velocity is among the strongest ranking signals on the App Store, and paid downloads count toward it. The lift applies to keywords already in your metadata, so a paid campaign amplifies the organic position of keywords you target organically, and it will not create rankings for keywords your metadata lacks.
Apple Ads can be a keyword research tool for ASO.
Tap-through rate and conversion rate per keyword show exactly which search terms produce installs, which is evidence organic keyword research cannot produce on its own. Keywords that convert well in ads belong in your metadata.
Search Popularity adds volume context, and the scale is exponential rather than linear: a score of 90 means roughly three times the impressions of a score of 60, and half of all keywords score below 25, as a rule of thumb based on the data we see.
Custom product pages de-risk creative changes
Test new screenshots or messaging on a custom product page through ad traffic first, then promote the winning creative to your main product page, where it affects all organic visitors. Since WWDC 2025, custom product pages can also target specific keywords in organic App Store search, so a page built for a paid campaign now works in organic results too.
Metadata feeds ad relevance
Apple matches ads to searches partly through your metadata, so an optimized store listing improves which searches your ads can enter. Weak metadata limits paid reach the same way it limits organic reach.
In case you still have some questions unanswered or need a quick summary of the article, the FAQs below can provide more information.
Yes, Apple Search Ads is now Apple Ads. Apple renamed Apple Search Ads to Apple Ads in April 2025, after ad offerings grew beyond App Store search to include Apple News and MLS. Campaigns, keywords, and reporting carried over unchanged.
Advertisers choose keywords and placements, set a maximum cost per tap, and pay only when a user taps the ad. Apple matches ads to searches based on relevance, so an app that does not match the query will not show regardless of bid. Campaigns run manually or through Maximize Conversions, Apple’s AI-powered bidding option.
Apple Ads costs depend on your category, market, and competition, because pricing is set by bidding rather than a flat fee. The median cost per tap is $1.79 and the median cost per acquisition is $2.76 (Apple Ads benchmarks via SplitMetrics, US, April to June 2026). Median CPA ranges from $0.98 in Navigation to $10.16 in News, so check your category before setting a budget.
Yes, when your unit economics support your category’s acquisition cost. Apple Ads reaches users at the moment of download intent, and ads at the top of search results convert at over 60% (Apple). Compare your user lifetime value against your category’s benchmark CPA to size the opportunity.
Apple Ads charges per tap and captures existing demand on the App Store, where the user is one step from downloading. Google App campaigns optimize toward installs across Google’s networks and create demand upstream. Apple Ads wins the user who is already searching; Google reaches the user who is not searching yet.
Build three keyword groups: your brand terms, generic category and feature terms, and competitor names, all in exact match. Use a separate Discovery campaign with broad match and Search Match to surface new search terms. Keyword lists from Google Ads do not transfer, because Apple’s matching works differently and ignores special characters.
Yes, it is. Apple Ads Certification is a free online course from Apple that covers promoting apps across the App Store. Certification is available through the Apple Ads website.
Campaigns are created from the Apple Ads dashboard: choose the app to promote, select where ads run, pick countries or regions, set a daily budget, and add an ad group with keywords and bids. A proven structure separates brand, generic, competitor, and discovery campaigns per market.
Yes, there is. New advertisers receive a $100 credit when they first set up an Apple Ads account for ads on the App Store. Apple applies the credit automatically to eligible new accounts, and full terms are on the Apple Ads website.
Apple Ads is the highest-intent acquisition channel on iOS. To win with it, you need more than budget: structure, keyword discipline, current benchmarks, and creative alignment decide your cost per user before spend does.
Know your numbers
Get the structure right
Optimize with discipline
Align creative with intent
The benchmarks in this guide will change; that is why each one states when it was measured. The principles behind them will not: apps that match relevant keywords, aligned creative, and disciplined bidding win on Apple Ads, whatever the current prices are.
