Complete guide to AppTweak’s Automation Solution for Apple Search Ads

Apple Search Ads is an essential tool for app marketers aiming to increase visibility and drive downloads on the App Store.

Manually managing Apple Search Ads campaigns across multiple countries and regions, ad placements, and performance metrics takes time and effort—especially when optimizing performance at scale. That’s where automation comes into play.

By leveraging automation tools for Apple Search Ads, you can streamline your campaign management, optimize bids, and monitor performance with lower effort and often much greater impact.

In this guide, we’ll explore how to effectively automate your Apple Search Ads campaigns in AppTweak. Drawing heavily from Apple Search Ads best practices, we’ll cover:

• Custom and preset automation rules
• Practical examples
• Strategies to maximize your campaigns’ performance with automation

Why is automation crucial for Apple Search Ads?

Apple Search Ads practitioners often manage campaigns across multiple regions while tracking various KPIs, including daily spend, CPI (cost per install), and impression share.

With the right tools, advertisers can scale their Apple Search Ads campaigns more efficiently by optimizing budgets, improving keyword performance, and maintaining strong visibility on key terms.

With our expert team of Data Scientists having audited many Apple Search Ads campaigns, we’ve found that automation makes it easier to apply key optimization strategies consistently—whether it’s adjusting bids, managing budget limits, or identifying opportunities to improve performance.

Read our guide to mastering Apple Search Ads.

Automation for Apple Search Ads helps by:

• Reducing manual oversight of large-scale campaigns.
• Automatically adjusting bids and budgets based on performance metrics (for a truly data-driven Apple Search Ads strategy).
• Sending timely notifications when issues arise, allowing for swift action.
• Ensuring key performance metrics are kept under control.

AppTweak’s automation features for Apple Search Ads

In Search Ads Manager, AppTweak provides a set of powerful tools to help you automate your Apple Search Ads campaign management.

To help you quickly get started reaping the rewards of automation, we’ve built ready-made automation presets based on Apple Search Ads best practices.

For those seeking more control, you also have the option to build custom automation rules tailored to your specific needs, offering flexibility to fine-tune your strategy based on your most important KPIs. More on customizing these rules below.

Key automation rules to use for Apple Search Ads

We group our automation presets into three categories based on their goals: Optimize, Protect, and Monitor.

You should be able to apply at least one automation preset to at least one of your campaigns or keywords – but the best strategies happen when you combine our rules together.

Optimize – Decrease bids for high-cost keywords: This rule reduces keyword bids by 10% if the keyword’s CPA significantly exceeds the campaign average.

• Why use it? To avoid skewing your budget to a handful of keywords that cost too much, this rule identifies high-cost keywords and decreases their bids if the cost-per-acquisiton (CPA) is too high.

Optimize – Increase bids for high-potential keywords: This rule increases keyword bids by 10% for cost-efficient keywords with a low CPA, and strong potential for visibility (impression share) growth.

• Why use it? This automation rule optimizes your profitability by increasing bids for high-opportunity keywords that could help to scale your campaigns.

Optimize – Decrease bids for saturated impression share keywords: This automation preset gradually reduces bids on keywords where your impression share is above 90%.

• Why to use it? This rule prevents overspending on keywords for which you already have the maximum impression share, allowing you to invest more into discovering new keywords that expand your reach.

Protect – Increase bids if top performers lose visibility: This preset ensures that your impression share on important keywords remains above 90%. If your impression share drops below that threshold, the bid is gradually increased.

• Why use it? In Apple Search Ads, it’s crucial to protect important search terms like your brand name by maintaining the highest impression share possible. This rule helps keep your visibility high for top performers, ensuring competitors can’t take your spot.

Learn how to leverage Apple Search Ads for ASO (and vice versa).

Monitor – Track campaign budget saturation: This rule notifies you when your campaign spend has reached its daily budget, preventing unnecessary disruptions to campaigns and allowing you to adjust them accordingly.

• Why to use it? When your campaign is saturated, high-performing keywords are not exploited to their full potential. This automation rule helps you monitor budget saturation to reach the full potential of your campaigns.

Monitor – Track campaign CPA: This rule alerts you when your CPA rises beyond a certain threshold (double the average campaign CPA over the last 30 days).

• Why use it? If you don’t want to use automated systems to update your bids, you certainly want to be notified when your performance is dropping. Monitoring CPA across multiple campaigns takes time, so this rule helps you track performance efficiently and take action when needed.

How to build custom automation rules for Apple Search Ads

For more advanced users looking for greater flexibility and precision, AppTweak allows you to create custom automation rules based on both Apple Search Ads metrics and MMP data (such as in-app events from AppsFlyer or Adjust).

Automation rules based on MMP in-app events can greatly increase the profitability of your ads, allowing you to more effectively run ads on keywords that drive high-value users (e.g., with high interest to pay for in-app services).

For example, maybe you want to reduce spend for keywords that receive clicks from bots. This could be possible with an automation rule like “for keyword X, if in-app event Y (representing a typical user action) is equal or less than 0, AND installs in the last 7 days are greater than 5, pause keyword X”.

Step-by-step guide to creating custom rules

1. Choose the target: Select the keywords, ad groups, or campaigns you want the rule to apply to. If you create a rule at the campaign level, it applies to all the keywords in that campaign. If you create it at the keyword level, the action will be more granular.
2. Set conditions: Define the conditions that will trigger the rule. Common conditions include:
   • CPA exceeding a threshold. For example, CPA > $10 over the last 7 days.
   • Impression share falling below 90% for a top-priority keyword.
3. Define actions:
   • Lower bid: If the CPA is higher than desired, try decreasing the bid by a certain percentage (e.g., 5-10%).
   • Pause keywords: If performance is consistently poor, automatically pause the keyword to save budgets.
   • Increase bid: If impression share is low but CPA is within acceptable limits, increase the bid to capture more installs.
4. Set frequency: Determine how often the rule should be executed. Daily and weekly checks are common. We recommend weekly checks are ideal for bid optimization, ensuring that you don’t overreact to short-term data fluctuations.
5. Review and assign the rule: Assign the rule to the desired campaigns, ad groups, or keywords. Once set, AppTweak automatically adjusts the parameters based on real-time data.

Advanced automation strategies for Apple Search Ads

By using a combination of automation presets, you can optimize your Apple Search Ads campaigns to maximize performance and ROI. Let’s explore two advanced strategies AppTweak users have successfully implemented.

1. Advanced bid optimization for critical keywords

Maintaining a high impression share on critical keywords is key to protecting your brand’s visibility. By setting up automated bid adjustments based on impression share, you can ensure consistent results while optimizing spend.

Two-rule strategy:

• Preset 1: Increase bids if top-performers lose visibility to ensure you maintain an impression share over 90%.
• Preset 2: Decrease bids for saturated impression share keywords to improve budget efficiency.

Combining these two presets will help you find the minimal bid on which you keep over 90% impression share. Use this combination for brand defense or for any high-importance keywords where you need to keep the impression share above 90%.

2. CPA-based smart bidding

Automating bid adjustments based on CPA ensures you don’t waste money on underperforming keywords, while also scaling bids on high-performing ones (ultimately optimizing your spend).

Three-rule strategy:

• Preset 1: Decrease bids for high-cost keywords will lower keyword bids by 10% when their CPA exceeds the campaign average by 20%,
• Preset 2: Increase bids for high-potential keywords will increase keyword bids by 10% for high-performing keywords, when their CPA is 20% below the campaign average.
• Preset 3: Decrease bids for saturated impression share keywords will lower keyword bids by 5% if impression share is already high.

The combination of these 3 presets provides a fully functional and automated smart bidding algorithm. The system will safely converge to the optimal keyword bid, optimizing your overall CPA.

We recommend applying these 3 presets to all campaigns populated with keywords of similar search intents: only brand, only competitor, or only generic terms.

Bonus tip for optimal budget management

Setting a campaign daily budget is a great way to keep budgets under control.

Nevertheless, having a daily spend that reaches your daily budget usually means there is room for improvement. You can seize this opportunity to either scale high-performing campaigns or refine your bids for lower-performing ones to increase profitability.

AppTweak’s automation tools allow you to monitor and adjust campaign budgets based on performance. You can either leverage:

• The Track campaign budget saturation preset to be automatically notified when reaching budget saturation, and later take the appropriate actions yourself (e.g., increasing daily budgets or lowering your bids).
• A custom rule in which:
  • You define budget saturation: SPEND last 7 days > $ 500
  • You set an action: INCREASE DAILY BUDGET by 5%

Our data science team has identified saturated campaign budgets as one of the most overlooked opportunities in Apple Search Ads management. Addressing this can be a significant source of improvement.

Monitoring and adjusting automation rules

Automation is not a “set it and forget it” solution. Effective management of Apple Search Ads automation requires regular monitoring and adjustments.

1. Check notifications

Many Apple Search Ads campaign management platforms such as AppTweak notify you whenever automation rules are triggered. For instance, you can receive email alerts when a campaign’s budget is exhausted or when keywords experience a spike in CPA.

Ensuring you actively review these alerts allows you to stay informed about your campaigns and quickly make decisions to optimize them.

2. Review the monitoring feed

AppTweak provides a detailed feed of all your automation rules, including which rules were triggered and what actions were taken. It’s essential to review this feed regularly to confirm that the rules are functioning as intended and contributing to your campaign’s overall success.

How to use the monitoring feed:

• Scan through the keywords, ad groups, or campaigns affected by rule-based actions.
• Confirm whether the automated adjustments are in line with your campaign goals, such as maintaining target CPA or keeping bids within budget limits. For example, if a rule to decrease bids on high CPA keywords is triggered too frequently, it may signal the need for broader keyword optimization or research.

Best practices for automating Apple Search Ads

When automating your Apple Search Ads campaigns, implementing best practices is crucial to ensure that automation works effectively and leads to optimized performance. Here are some best practices to keep in mind:

• Start with automation presets: Starting with pre-built automation rules is highly recommended. Automation presets simplify the process by optimizing your campaigns based on common KPIs, such as impression share or CPA, without the need for complex configurations. This allows marketers to quickly see how automation can improve campaign performance while avoiding the risk of over-adjustment or manual errors.
• Use granular data for custom rules: Custom rules allow more flexibility and control over Apple Search Ads campaigns. When using custom rules, it’s essential to base conditions on granular data to prevent overreacting to short-term fluctuations. This means analyzing performance metrics over a longer period (e.g., 7 or 30 days) before taking action.
• Combine rules for maximum effect: Combining complementary rules can greatly enhance your campaign’s efficiency. For example, in brand defense campaigns, you can set two rules to work together: one to increase bids if your impression share drops below 90%, and another to try decreasing bids once the impression share stabilizes above 90%. This strategy helps you maintain visibility without overspending.
• Monitor results regularly: Automation doesn’t eliminate the need for oversight. Regular monitoring of your automation rules ensures that they’re delivering the desired results. Use tools like AppTweak’s activity feed to review actions taken by the rules, such as bid adjustments or budget changes, and make necessary refinements.
• Implement negative keywords: Negative keywords help refine targeting and prevent wasted budget on irrelevant searches. It’s a good practice to include negative keywords in automation rules, particularly in discovery campaigns, where Broad Match keywords can lead to unnecessary spend.
• Adjust frequency of actions: Automation tools allow you to define the frequency at which rules are applied. While frequent updates are beneficial in fast-paced campaigns, too frequent changes can destabilize your performance. With AppTweak’s “limit action frequency” feature, you can avoid over-adjustment and ensure that rule execution is consistent with long-term goals.

Conclusion

Automation isn’t just a convenience for managing Apple Search Ads campaigns – it’s a competitive advantage. By streamlining workflows, minimizing manual errors, and facilitating data-driven decisions, automation helps app marketers optimize performance more effectively than through manual management alone.

AppTweak’s automation tools in Search Ads Manager offer a unique blend of preset and custom rules designed to adapt to your specific needs, whether you’re focusing on budget control, bid optimization, or impression share management.

Thanks to our intuitive interface, even those new to Apple Search Ads can easily get started with automation, while advanced users can create custom rules that provide complete control over every aspect of their campaigns.

The real value of automation? Its ability to efficiently scale your growth. Automation allows you to focus on strategic initiatives such as optimizing ad creatives, experimenting with new keywords, or expanding into new markets – all while your automated rules handle the repetitive and time-sensitive tasks in the background.

Start automating today to unlock the full potential of your Apple Search Ads.