Bolt Accelerates Market Growth Using Keyword Expansion Strategies in SplitMetrics Acquire

Bolt is a global mobility app for ride-hailing, scooter and e-bike rentals, car sharing, and food delivery. It serves over 200 million people across more than 600 cities worldwide, while providing income opportunities for over 4.5 million drivers and couriers.

Bolt uses Apple Ads to reach high-intent users directly on the App Store and runs campaigns across dozens of international markets. 

Challenge

Bolt’s UA team runs Apple Ads campaigns in dozens of fast-moving markets. As the app continued to expand its App Store presence, two needs became more apparent:

• When Bolt entered new markets, the UA team had to focus on finding and adding the right keywords at scale.
• Keeping campaigns competitive in existing markets also meant the team had to keep looking for new keyword opportunities on an ongoing basis.

These activities placed extra demand on UA specialists. To improve efficiency, Bolt looked for a way to automate keyword discovery. Otherwise, Bolt risked slower market launches, higher CPIs, and missed share of voice in competitive categories.

Solution

Bolt adopted Keyword Expansion Strategies in SplitMetrics Acquire to speed up keyword discovery and streamline campaign scaling.

Here’s how the feature became part of their day-to-day process:

• The system analyzed Bolt’s campaigns against competitors to quickly uncover missing keywords — from typos and translations to long-tail terms.
• Keywords were discovered for both new markets (to accelerate expansion) and current markets (to keep existing campaigns fresh and competitive).
• New keywords were deployed into ad groups with competitive bids and clear labels, making them easy to track.
• Keyword research tasks were now completed much faster.

Results

Since adopting Keyword Expansion Strategies, Bolt has achieved measurable improvements in the way its Apple Ads campaigns perform and scale:

• Greater efficiency: With keyword research accelerated, the team can focus on strategy and creative tasks. 
• Faster market growth: New keywords are deployed more quickly. Since the adoption of Keyword Expansion strategies, the team added around 1,000 new keywords to their campaigns. This helped Bolt speed up their expansion into new markets faster than competition.
• Stronger ongoing performance: Continual keyword discovery keeps existing campaigns competitive and ensures no opportunities are missed.

Keyword Expansion Strategies helped the team get more results with less effort and consistently discover new, high-intent keywords that fuelled market expansion, and boosted campaign performance across multiple markets.

By continuously uncovering keyword opportunities, Bolt keeps acquisition costs low and drives profitable, sustainable growth.