What We Learned from Auditing Apple Search Ads Campaigns

Since the launch of Search Ads Manager, our data science team has conducted many in-depth audits of various Apple Search Ads (ASA) campaigns, offering a unique perspective. These audits uncover fascinating insights, revealing aspects of ASA campaign performance that often remain hidden. These aren’t your typical tips — they’re specific, data-driven strategies that can make a real difference in how you approach your ASA campaigns.

1. Spending concentrated on a few keywords

Many advertisers heavily focus their ad spend on a small set of keywords, particularly on brand defense. While brand defense is important, it’s crucial to diversify your strategy with discovery campaigns to tap into new markets and reduce dependence on brand keywords.

However, we’ve observed that even outside of brand defense, a significant portion of ad spend is often concentrated on just a few generic keywords. This is not scalable and exposes your campaigns to vulnerabilities. If competitors start bidding on these keywords, your cost per install could rise rapidly, leading to a sharp decline in return on investment.

Discover how to select effective keywords to maximize the performance of your Apple Search Ads campaigns

How SoundCloud scaled their ASA campaigns with AppTweak

SoundCloud faced challenges in effectively scaling their ASA campaigns, with spending reaching only 56% of their daily budget.

Using AppTweak’s proprietary AI engine Atlas AI, we created an exact match discovery campaign to identify new, relevant keywords for SoundCloud.

To optimize performance, we moved well-performing keywords out of this discovery campaign into stable (or generic) campaigns. The discovery campaign can then focus on continuing to find new keywords.

We applied this simple rule:

• If CVR > xx% → move the keyword to stable campaigns and add it as a negative keyword in the discovery campaign.

By transferring high-performing keywords to stable ASA campaigns, we could increase both budget and bids on these keywords, resulting in a surge in impressions and downloads. To prevent double bidding, we then added those keywords as negative keywords in the discovery campaigns. We repeated this process several times, ensuring that the majority of the budget was allocated to keywords driving the best performance.

After just one month, SoundCloud achieved:

• 99% budget saturation
• tripled the amount of keywords
• doubled the installs while reducing CPI by 23%

Read the full case study here

2. Overbidding on brand defense

Many advertisers are overbidding on their brand defense campaigns, sometimes placing bids as high as $200 per tap. This aggressive approach can lead to significantly higher costs if competitors decide to target your brand. You will probably still win the auction, but will end up paying a high cost per tap. Additionally, a heavy focus on brand defense often means less investment in discovery campaigns, leading to missed opportunities for growth.

Should you run brand defense campaigns in Apple Search Ads?

3. Improper use of broad match campaigns

Advertisers who invest in keyword discovery sometimes tend to overspend on broad match campaigns. With broad match, you rely on Apple to find new keywords related to your seed keywords. However, Apple only reveals the search terms your ad appears on if those terms receive enough impressions. This means you may end up spending significantly on search terms you can’t see or evaluate, making it difficult to control where your budget is going. This uncertainty and the fluctuation in performance undermines the primary goal of discovery campaigns, which is to identify new, valuable keywords while maintaining control over your spend.

Learn about the different match types in Apple Search Ads

4. Underutilization of negative keywords in your ASA campaigns

Negative keywords help you avoid spending on clicks that are unlikely to convert, saving you money and increasing your ROI. By excluding irrelevant searches, you can ensure your ads only appear in contexts that are meaningful to your target audience, thus improving your click-through rates and conversion rates.

Although negative keywords make your ad budget efficient by preventing your ads from appearing for irrelevant searches, these are often overlooked.

5. Grouping together countries into one campaign

Many advertisers don’t split campaigns by country, often opting to group all English-speaking countries into a single campaign. However, this reduces your ability to optimize bids effectively across different markets.

6. Pausing keywords prematurely

Advertisers often pause keywords too quickly when they don’t see immediate results.

Instead of pausing, try lowering the bid first. There is usually a bid at which any keyword can be profitable. Persistence in finding this bid can pay off.

7. Regulating spend through budgets

Most advertisers rely on setting daily budgets to control their ad spend. While this approach might seem straightforward, it often results in budget saturation, where the daily budget is exhausted and your campaigns stop running before the end of the day. This leads to missed opportunities for high-performing keywords that could continue to drive valuable traffic.

Learn about scaling your Apple Search Ads growth with automation

TL;DR

Our data science team has worked hard to uncover valuable insights and data-driven strategies from ASA campaign audits. These are our key takeaways from the audit:

• Concentrating ad spend on a few keywords, especially for brand defense, can expose campaigns to scalability issues and increased costs if competitors bid on these keywords.
• Spreading out your ad spend into discovery campaigns opens the door to exciting new markets. Setting these campaigns to exact match helps you keep a tight rein on your budget and spot the high-performers.
• Setting your bids too high can burn through your budget quickly, which makes it important to have a grounded bid strategy for protecting your brand.
• Broad match might uncover new keywords, but it can also spiral your spending out of control on keywords you can’t see, making it hard to manage your budget effectively. We recommend sticking to exact match to keep things under control and make the most of your keyword discovery efforts.
• Adding negative keywords into your campaigns ensures you’re not squandering your budget on clicks unlikely to convert, boosting your overall ROI.
• By dividing your campaigns geographically, you can fine-tune your bids to better fit different market conditions and maximize returns.
• Instead of quickly pausing keywords that aren’t performing well, try adjusting your bids first. This can reveal a more profitable bidding level and enhance your campaign’s effectiveness.
• Rather than sticking to a rigid daily budget, managing your spending through strategic bids can help avoid early budget depletion and keep your most successful keywords active all day.

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