Our experience with Apple Search Ads: Solid Balance
Apple moves more and more to the service economy, and some time ago they introduced advertisement platform for App Store: Apple Search Ads. For more background on it, we recommend article by Gabe Kwakyi: Apple Search Ads 101: Terms & Tactics To Know.
Anyways, here is our experience with it.
Everything started when Apple ping our developer account with the email saying that they are willing to give us a credit of 100$ in case we are interested to advertise one of our apps in the App Store. We, of course, decided to give a try.
Apple did a great job of onboarding us: creating a campaign, give the ability to set limits for campaigns, add search keywords, setting up creating set with images/advertisement texts, etc.
Let us now share more interesting part — numbers. We decided to limit ourselves to a credit which was given by Apple, and in case of good results — pay ourselves. Initially, we created one campaign and run it 1 week with default Apple settings and then 1 week of the campaign with our custom settings.
As you can see Apple’s default setting worked better than our custom ones. However, we were a bit in shock to get 0 installs in both cases.
The main difference, we believe, between our settings and Apple’s was to target different keywords. While Apple did a bigger spread of phrases, we were mostly focusing on those which we think are the most relevant, thus, most of our budget went there.
Overall, it was a failure from a product point of view, but we learned a few lessons about creating ad campaigns.
Solid Balance is available today in the AppStore. If you have a moment, please vote for us on Product Hunt.
P.S. We would be happy to see comments according to mistakes & typos.
