How SoundCloud scaled its Apple Search Ads campaigns and doubled installs

Challenge

SoundCloud’s UA (organic+paid) is mainly driven by Search traffic. As a result, SoundCloud’s growth marketing team had identified Apple Search Ads as a key channel to invest in for their paid UA efforts.

After having started researching with AppTweak potential synergies between ASO efforts and Apple Search Ads campaigns, we identified some campaign inefficiencies, however SoundCloud’s team was unable to address those because of a lack of resources. As a result, SoundCloud’s team asked AppTweak’s team to step in and evaluate what improvements could be made to revert the pending decision to start decreasing budgets for Apple Search Ads.

Solution

AppTweak’s App Growth Consultancy and Data Science teams collaborated with SoundCloud’s team and implemented a multi-step approach to restructure SoundCloud’s Apple Search Ads campaigns and achieve the desired goal: 

• First, AppTweak’s team evaluated the amount of cannibalization for brand search terms to set new rules for brand defense management
• Second, the team implemented a set of automation rules to manage all bids at the keyword level and maximize efficiency by adjusting bids based on performance, as well as to reallocate budgets and keywords to different campaigns or ad groups based on their performances.
• Third, the team added new sets of keywords to target leveraging AppTweak’s store semantic engine and AI technology, Atlas AI.
• Finally, they identified multiple keywords and ad groups that would benefit from custom product pages. Having done so, the team either re-activated existing custom product pages or designed new ones to increase conversion and decrease costs per install of relevant ad groups.

Results

Number of keywords targeted over x3

Comparing the last week before start and the last week of February, AppTweak managed to grow the amount of targeted keywords by more than 330%, also resulting in a +69.5% increase in the total number of search terms on which ads were placed.

Campaign performances: +97.5% installs, -6.6% CPI and reaching 99% budget efficiency

Comparing again the last week before AppTweak started managing SoundCloud’s Apple Search Ads campaigns with the last week of February (4 months later), campaigns now bring almost twice the amount of installs at a lower Cost Per Install, thus reaching 99% of the target budget compared to only 54.6% before at the end of October.

Campaign Performance Benchmark: reaching a Cost per Install below the 25th percentile

According to AppTweak’s benchmarks, the average Cost per Install of SoundCloud’s Apple Search Ads campaign for the entire month of February is below the 25th percentile of Apple Search Ads campaigns of all apps in the Music Category in the US, and this despite having smartly cut on brand defense campaigns (which usually lower the reported average Cost Per Install of apps).

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