Comparing Apple Search Ads Storefronts
Apple introduced Search Ads last fall, but only allowed creating campaigns for the US App Store at first. In April they expanded the program and now allow you to run ads in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. While the US App Store is undeniably the largest, I still wanted to see how it compares to the newly offered storefronts and more importantly, how they differentiate from each other.
Before introducing you to my little experiment, you should know that I don’t work in marketing and have no business in giving you marketing advice. I’ll simply present my experiences. That said, I don’t think Search Ads were made for marketing experts only.
Setup
I created four equal campaigns for each storefront. They all have the same budget, keywords and CPT (Cost Per Tap) bids. As this is an experiment and not a serious marketing campaign, I set the budget to €5 each. The selection of keywords is based on my previous experience of running a campaign with the €100 credit Apple gave away for free. For these new campaigns I chose the keywords that worked best for me back then.
Starting out
I set the CPT bid to €0.2 per keyword. If this seems low to you, let me tell you that URL Shortening is not a competitive field. Nonetheless, the CPT bid seems to make a difference. More on this later.
My plan was to let the campaigns run for a week and then check in, maybe adjust the keywords and CPT bids.
US Campaign
Unexpectedly I received an email after 5 days because the US campaign had run out of budget. The other campaigns were still running, but let’s take a look at the US campaign first: 895 impressions, 35 taps and 9 conversions.
- €0.56 Avg. Cost Per Acquisition
- €0.14 Avg. Cost Per Tap
- 3.91% Tap Through Rate
- 25.71% Conversion Rate
UK Campaign
The UK campaign lasted for another week and ran out of budget after overall 12 days. It got 910 impressions, 83 taps and 28 conversions.
- €0.18 Avg. CPA
- €0.06 Avg. CPT
- 9.12% TTR
- 33.73% CR
As you can tell by the numbers, it seems like you get more for your money running a campaign in the UK than in the US. Does the fact that I already ran campaigns for Short Menu in the US prior to this one have anything to do with that? Have most customers interested in the app already downloaded it? I’m not sure. Let’s go on with the other campaigns.
AU Campaign
The AU campaign started out noticeably slower than the US and UK campaigns. It got some impressions but barely any conversions. After the US campaign had run out of budget, I upped the CPT bid of all keywords for the AU campaign to €0.3. Unfortunately this change didn’t have much of an effect. After a couple of days I finally decided to set the CPT bid to €0.4 for all keywords, double of what I used for the US and UK campaigns.
This finally brought some change to the game and the campaign received more impressions and taps. It ran out of budget pretty soon after that, 19 days after its start, with 710 impressions, 56 taps and 19 conversions.
- €0.25 Avg. CPA
- €0.09 Avg. CPT
- 7.89% TTR
- 35.71% CR
In the end I got more users from it than from the US campaign, but it still couldn’t beat the UK campaign. I also had to double my CPT bid for the campaign to have any effect, although it had a much lower CPA than the US campaign.
NZ Campaign
The NZ campaign started even worse than the AU campaign. After all other campaigns had already run out of budget, this one had only generated 15 impressions and not a single conversion. I took the same actions as I did with the AU campaign and increased the CPT bid to — ultimately — €0.4.
Unfortunately the changes didn’t have the same effect as they did on the AU campaign. After running for almost 2 months I stopped it with only 175 impressions, 14 taps and 5 conversions.
- €0.13 Avg. CPA
- €0.05 Avg. CPT
- 8% TTR
- 35.71% CR
While it was relatively cheap to run the NZ campaign, I didn’t have a big influence. It’s also hard to tell here if the CPT bid affected the campaign and questionable whether the numbers would’ve increased had I set the CPT bid to €0.5.
Always be closing
Lots of numbers, huh? Ignoring the cost at first, we should identify the campaigns that actually made an impact.
Running the US and UK campaigns simultaneously resulted in triple the downloads. After the US campaign stopped the numbers were still 60% higher than without ads. After the UK campaign stopped too, the downloads dropped to their original level. It’s safe to say the AU and NZ campaigns didn’t influence the download numbers noticeably.
What I found no explanation for is the low number of conversions and a major increase in downloads during the US and UK campaigns. Be aware that the increases mentioned earlier only include the downloads resulted from App Store Search but not e.g. Web Referrers during this period.
Interestingly, the sales (In-App Purchases) were more consistent while running the US and UK campaigns. The AU and NZ campaigns didn’t have an effect on them either.
If we only regard the numbers presented by the Search Ads Dashboard, we come to the conclusion that the UK campaign brought the more conversions at a lower cost than the US campaign.
Conclusion
I presented these numbers to give you an insight into my experience with Search Ads. Please feel encouraged to share your experiences too so everyone can learn from it.
Obviously Short Menu is an niche-app with a small audience, but if your app isn’t location-specific, my results could very well reflect the actual effectiveness of Search Ads across its Storefronts for your app too.
Whether you have the same experience or a completely different one, I’m interested and would love to hear about it!
Postscript
This was an experiment and not an endorsement of Search Ads. I’m still conflicted about the current implementation of Search Ads due to several examples of them manipulating the search results:
Nonetheless I find it interesting to see what they can do for your app’s downloads and sales if used in a fair manner.
