Apple ads is a great way to get downloads and make money, but it's also a really good way to throw away your money.
I've seen too many developers throwing away hard-earned money for no good reason, only because they either check the wrong box or are doing something really simple that "makes sense" but really doesn't.
Today I'm going to take a look at apps viewers submitted over the last week. We're going to take a look at the keywords in your Apple ads campaigns, what the App Store sees, not what you put into App Store Connect or Apple ads. That's the best way to see if you're wasting money or if you're doing a good job.
If you submitted an app, hopefully I'll get to see it. If you didn't submit an app and you're here to learn, this is the best way to learn off of other people's mistakes.
One of the biggest mistakes that almost everyone I've talked to makes with Apple ads is using Search Match. Apple doesn't make it any easier. Apple checks it on by default when you create a new campaign.
The whole idea behind Search Match is that Apple will find keywords that could be useful for your campaign, and all you have to do is set a bid so you're not spending more than what you want to be spending, and Apple will do the rest.
The only problem is the keywords that come from those campaigns are completely irrelevant in most cases. They're all over the place in my experience. They make absolutely no sense. I can see maybe a thread, a little bit of a thread, of why that would be even remotely connected to my app. But realistically, I just don't think any of those keywords work.
Anyone who has turned it off really thanked me because they're saving money and they're getting better conversion rates. So if you have that on, I'm curious to know why. It's one of those things that just doesn't make any sense to me.
I'm going to pick an app at random and open its app profile on Appfigures. The app profile on is going to have all the keywords that the App Store sees, all the paid keywords. So the Apple ads keywords that the App Store sees. We're going to analyze it.
If it's your app and maybe the keywords on the screen don't align exactly with what's in your Apple ads campaigns, that's perfectly normal and perfectly fine. The reason for that is we're looking specifically at what end users are seeing.
If you have a thousand keywords in your Apple ads campaign, but none of them are actually getting any sort of visibility on the App Store, that's super important because it doesn't really matter what you give Apple. It really matters what users end up seeing.
We're going to take a look from the user perspective and see if they're seeing you in keywords that make no sense, in keywords that are amazing, or anything in between.
I'm not seeing any keywords at all in the last 180 days, which means one of two things. One, there just aren't any Apple ads running and this app was submitted by mistake, or the bids are just too low.
Let's see if there are any other countries. There we go. We got some countries. So if you are running Apple ads in the US and our system is not seeing anything, it means that you're probably advertising so little that maybe you get a few chances a day, maybe once or twice, to be seen in search results. But if that's not driving any traffic, I would not be surprised, because when people don't see it, they can't click it.
Let's see what's happening in other countries. We have 12 keywords in Ukraine. I do not speak Ukrainian, but all this is English. Interesting.
All these are fives, which means that if you have bigger keywords, they might be underpriced, and that's why they're not being seen. That's one of the biggest problems I have seen in my own experience with Apple ads.
You put in a keyword, and then you put in Apple's recommended amount, recommended spend per click, per tap, per install, and nothing happens.
I just did this last week. I set up a campaign as a test, mostly. I set up a campaign for a real app that wants to spend the money, and I used Apple's own bidding amount, and it has gotten no hits, not even a single one. That's kind of a big problem with Apple, and that's something you should pay attention to.
If you set up a campaign and nothing happens after 24 hours roughly, you know that your bids are too low and you have to increase them. You don't have to increase all the bids, not the default, but you have to go after one keyword at a time.
Usually the fives, or the keywords with lower popularity, will be cheaper. That's exactly what popularity stands for. You want to go after those. That's called a longtail strategy, and that's something I love to do.
Find a whole bunch of low-popularity keywords. They're going to be really cheap. Then just have a thousand-keyword campaign with a bunch of things that might show up once or twice in search results a day, but as they add up, you get exactly the same amount of traffic as you would from a larger keyword.
That's what I would do. All these keywords I'm seeing here kind of make sense. They're all about motivation. There's nothing obviously bad, which means this developer is probably not using Search Match. Hooray. That's good.
It's not that I hate Search Match. It's just that I think it doesn't serve the purpose it was meant to serve, and it costs too much money. With ads, you can burn thousands of dollars on nothing and get zero return within a short period of time. Don't ask me how I know. I've been running ads for a long, long time.
Even before Apple ads, I used to run ads professionally on Google. That feels like a previous lifetime before the days of Appfigures. I learned my lesson. I burned so much money experimenting and learning and getting to a point where I actually feel comfortable spending other people's money. It was not an easy journey, and I would not recommend doing that unless you absolutely have to.
In this case, I think this is good. This means this app is using exact match. If you're not sure what exact match is, or even how to set up a campaign, make sure to go into my channel. There's a tutorial, a step-by-step on how to set up your Apple ads campaign. It's a little bit old, but everything is still the same. I'm going to update it with a new version very soon.
Make sure you're subscribed to the channel if you want to see that and also how to get around all the different little issues that Apple throws your way when you're setting up an Apple ads campaign, so it's the most efficient campaign that you can have.
I would learn from this: use exact matches, use longtail, and then that's how you're going to get visibility without having to break the bank.
Savings Tracker Fin Dependence. That's such a clever name, but at the same time, it's so long for App Store optimization.
We have Empower Retirement. Empower is a 401k management company, I think. So this kind of makes sense.
I'm only seeing one keyword in the US in the last 180 days. It doesn't mean there aren't any others in the campaign, and it doesn't mean some of those are completely invisible. There might be one or two that are still showing, or maybe even more, but they're showing not enough for our platform to recognize them, and that means users are not seeing them as much.
It's possible this campaign is burning. The only good thing is it's not burning, that I can see, on anything obviously wrong. If it's a financial independence or savings tracker, something that has to do with 401k, I think would work.
One of the challenges you have in something like this is a popularity of 58 means this keyword is not cheap, not in the finance segment where things are actually worth quite a bit of money. Maybe this keyword is really expensive at the end of the day.
What you could be doing instead is looking at some other competitor. So, a savings tracker. Not exactly Acorns, not exactly Rocket Money, but let's take a look and see what happens.
What is Acorns doing? They're spending on competitor names, on Fidelity and Robin Hood and a bunch of others. There we go: Empower Retirement. So they know what they're doing.
Let's see if they have any ugliness in here. Trading stock market app. I don't know what Letter is. I don't think I see signs of Search Match here, but maybe Letter is something else. Investor money savings better app. This looks fairly good to me.
What I would do from this is probably steal all of their fives that make sense. Maybe not investing app, stocks app, or trading app. But there are keywords here like save money, investments.
The fact that investments is a five confused me at the beginning. But you can see some of these are really, really useful. I would take these fives, throw them into Fin Dependence's campaign, and lower the bid.
This way you're going to get some visibility that's hopefully not going to cost you an arm and a leg and make you compete with them full-time on a 58 popularity. Maybe a 58 is going to be worth, I don't know these particular keywords, but maybe it's going to be worth 50 or so fives. Find 50 or so fives. I think it's not going to be too difficult. Then you can get the same level or more visibility for kind of the same amount of money, give or take.
None of this is really precise. I'm just giving you ideas for things you can do, and this will be healthier.
Smoothie, detox, and diet planner. Diet planning is probably a really competitive market on Apple ads. Let's see. I'll show you how I do this.
We said diet planner. That might be a five, but there might be a similar keyword. Wow, an eight. Then I'm going to go into Apple ads. I'm curious who's advertising for this.
MyFitnessPal, Lose It, AI Calorie Counter. A whole bunch of apps. This is competitive.
Even though this is just an eight, you have all these other apps that are pretty big and they come with pretty large budgets who are spending on this because they did just what I was just talking about. They're using the longtail strategy to find all of these keywords that together add up to a big audience as opposed to just targeting one.
You don't have to go both big and longtail. You can just go longtail and save money. But if you're MyFitnessPal, you're probably doing all of the above. That's something that's really important to look at.
It kind of looks like MyFitnessPal is the big king of this keyword. They are more than half of all the visibility. Every time someone searches for this keyword, there is a 52% chance they will see MyFitnessPal, which means all of these other ones are splitting together half of a chance. In this case, they're splitting even less.
You may not want to necessarily go and throw money on something like diet planner. You have to find an even less popular keyword so you don't have to spend budget on a keyword that MyFitnessPal is just going to win. They're going to be there most of the time. One out of two searches is going to get MyFitnessPal. You really don't want to do that. That's why it's important to look these things up.
I see diet planner. I see healthy. I see smoothie. I see yogurt. On one hand, these make sense, but I don't think they're really the kinds of things you're going to get.
Smoothie Plus, I don't really know what that is. Smoothie being a 30 popularity is interesting. I'm guessing here, so correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're advertising on your brand name, smoothie is just such a generic term that if you're doing brand protection on smoothie, you're probably burning most if not all of your campaign budget on this.
The odds of someone searching for smoothie and needing a diet planner or a detox and diet planner are not high. I don't know if this is a good idea. I would test not doing this.
I'm also testing taking away the best keywords of campaigns that are only slightly relevant to see if they would hurt conversions. They definitely hurt downloads. I'm working with an app that is using a whole bunch of keywords for an app niche that is not very common but also has very stiff competition.
One of the keywords was generic enough that I felt like it would get a lot of downloads, and it definitely did at a cost, but none of those convert. So I turned it off, and the downloads tanked, and the conversion increased, and the number of installs stayed the same. But we're saving a bunch of money now, which we can use for a bunch of other longtail keywords.
That's the kind of thing we need to do here. Is smoothie really a keyword worth spending on? I don't think so. Just looking at this without knowing anything else, without knowing the return on ad spend or any sort of conversion rates, I would not.
Maybe that's also the reason why we're only seeing a small selection of keywords being presented on the App Store, because smoothie and yogurt are eating up all of the budget, and there's not enough money for anything else.
That's what you want to stay away from. One keyword should not dominate your campaign regardless of how big your spend is. If you're spending $100, that's the last thing you want to do. If you're spending a million dollars, that's the last thing you want to do.
You always want to have variety because most people think differently, and with a very small number of exceptions, mostly around branding and branded terms, people are going to look for things in slightly different ways. You want to cover as many of those as possible.
That's why if you look at most of the apps in the top 100, top 100 paid, top 100 free, top 100 grossing, all of those usually run large campaigns of hundreds if not thousands of keywords. I've seen campaigns that run 30,000 keywords.
If you ask how do you get to 30,000 keywords, using tools, using automations like the ones we offer. If you're curious about any of that, drop me an email later and I'll tell you what we're working on.
That's the thing you have to look at. I was talking to someone on social media a few days ago who mentioned that they ran a campaign and it didn't work. I said, how big is your campaign? He said, six keywords. Six keywords is not a campaign. Six keywords is a list. Unless you're spending enough money, it's not going to give you anything. Realistically, that's not what you want to do. You want to find the longtails.
Art Stage, display your art. Interesting. We have 222 keywords. Now we're talking.
Art, Framio, gallery art, art set. All these make a lot of sense to me. This is good. If Art Stage is in the chat, I'm curious to see if you're using any sort of broad matches on this or if it's all exact match.
The difference is: when you put in a keyword into Apple ads and set it to exact match, which is not the default, Apple will match it exactly. If you put art set into your keyword list, Apple will only show you in searches for art set.
But if you put art set as a broad match keyword, Apple will match you for art or set or other things that combine with art or other things that combine with set. That's really where stuff gets kind of weird. They try to make it as relevant as possible. It doesn't always work.
It's not as bad as Search Match because you have some control over where the keyword is going, but it really depends. I aim not to do any sort of broad match on any of my campaigns. It takes a lot more time to set up the campaigns when they're all exact, but at the same time, you have so much more control over not burning your budget.
That's the key of running paid ads successfully, whether it's on Apple or on Google or any other platform that lets you do things like keywords. You have to make sure it's as focused as possible and you're not burning. Once you start burning, then that's really the end, and you're not getting the conversion you're looking for or the return you're looking for.
You might in some very rare cases, but unless your campaign is very optimized, you're not going to see that. That's a big problem considering every penny here is a penny that leaves your pocket and goes somewhere else. That goes the same for an indie developer who's working really hard for that money, maybe even using some savings to build up momentum for a brand new app, but also for a large company that has an actual budget.
You want to have as big of a return as possible for every penny you spend, and that's how you do it: by keeping things efficient.
Jennifer asked: For negative keywords, should we do exact match or broad match?
Ariel: That's actually a really advanced question because I don't get this very often. For negative keywords, you want to do exact match for the exact same reason. You don't want to accidentally block out keywords that somehow manage to look like a broad match negative keyword.
I always use the negatives on exact match, and I have as many negative keywords as possible because when I do that I have exact control, specific control, over what I'm blocking.
There is a case for using negative exact keywords and broad match regular keywords. You're blocking out what you really don't want, and you're allowing Apple to expand your campaign. That's kind of an advanced technique, and you will burn something. It's going to slow down the burn, which is great, and maybe give you access to keywords you wouldn't think about before. It really depends.
If you know what you're doing, that's a good way of going about this. If you're not exactly sure, use keywords from competitors. I prefer to do that. Competitors, other apps that are similar, or other apps that your users are using, which you can find from cross usage.
If users are using both of our apps, that means that can interest them. That's how you really expand your campaign.
Back to Art Stage. It looks really good to me. What I would do at this stage is pick art, and you see we have a very long tail of a ton of pages that are mostly fives. That's exactly what you want to do.
Art Stage, well done. That's really the right way to go about it. The next step from here would be to optimize your bids based on your return and find ways to target the bids for the specific audiences that go about it, and continue to expand this.
Nikolai asked: Speaking of negative keywords, if you just have exact match keywords, do you still need to add negative keywords at all?
Ariel: No. Negative keywords are only for anything that is not exact. Search Match or broad match, both of those will be the kind of things you need to negative against. But if you only have exact, you'll be fine.
I've seen some cases where exacts kind of veer off a tiny bit, but I don't think they're common. I think those only happen maybe in very large campaigns, or maybe I messed up and forgot the brackets.
The way you do an exact match in Apple ads is you can select it from the list, or you can just wrap your keyword with the brackets. They're not going to show up in search. It just tells Apple you want this as a precise exact match and not as anything else.
On the Art Stage side, I think this looks really good. This is what a good campaign looks like. You want to have a lot of longtail. If you can afford it and the keywords in your category are not crazily expensive, I have a feeling art is not going to be cheap, but at the same time it might work for this.
This is where you need to rely on tools to understand your return on ad spend and if you're really making back the money that you're spending on this. We can't see this for every app because that's a data set that's incredibly complicated to get precisely right. But you will be able to see this for your own data, and that's how you make that decision.
Well done, Art Stage. Learn from this, please.
Petress asked: How to decide which similar keywords to use in the campaign, as even with exact match close variants are still matched? Including similar keywords can cause duplication.
Ariel: Duplication in the world of Apple ads is not a problem. The only possible issue you would have with duplication is if you run the same keyword across multiple campaigns and you end up eating into different budgets. That's really the only thing I would worry about.
Let's say you put $100 per day on one campaign and $100 on another campaign, and you have the same keyword in both. Now you've taken from both, and if it's an expensive keyword, it's really not allowing any of the other keywords in the campaign to get any sort of breathing space.
That's really the only place. Otherwise, duplication is not a real problem. If you do two exact matches and they veer off a tiny bit, it's not a big deal.
Ultimately, it's all depending on the analytics. The one that Apple will match is the one that Apple will report on in terms of performance, and that's really what you want to be looking at. That's how I would look at all of this.
This app is called Paid. That's interesting. Let's take a look at what Paid does because I'm curious.
Point of sale, accept credit card, accept credit card reader. Okay, that's kind of cool.
Fun fact: in a previous life, right after I did search engine optimization for a few years, I also ran a point of sale company that does physical point of sale, way before the days of the iPad, way before the days of Stripe and Square and all of those. It was actually a really nice experience to work with real software running on real hardware and doing real networks in real retail stores, not e-commerce.
I did that for a while and eventually decided all the realness was fun, but I love the internet. So that's what I have been doing for the longest time: the internet.
Back to keywords. This is a point of sale app, looks like a way to accept money. This is not an easy category for a variety of reasons.
One, the kind of people who are looking for this are usually small business owners, and they get bombarded with offers from pretty much every single point of sale company. There are a whole bunch, and Stripe and Square and all of those.
You're advertising to a crowd that by the time they get to the App Store, they might be looking for an alternative, or they might know about something and just don't like it for some reason. You have to really compete with that.
Let's see what we see in Apple ads. Oh, this is bad. I think we landed on a Search Match.
If Paid, if you're here in the crowd, let me know if you have Search Match turned on because I think that's what we're seeing here.
HSBC is a bank. I don't think a bank is relevant for Paid. It's a 49 popularity, so it's costing a pretty penny, I would say. If you look at the share of impressions, it's really, really low. You're spending a lot of money. You're not getting any visibility.
I don't know what this even means in this case. Vamos, I don't know how that's related to anything. Bank names, JS. We're not doing JavaScript here. Brisbane.
What I'm seeing here is potentially Search Match keywords that Apple just decided made sense, and Paid is now paying, no pun intended, for bank names and for branded keywords.
Stripe Terminal might be really the only thing that is remotely even close to this, or Pay for Stripe, but none of these make any sense to me. Social wallet. Ultimately, if you're spending money on any of these, I have a feeling the conversion rate, the number of impressions to number of downloads, is incredibly low. That's a bad thing.
I think JS is probably the most horrible of all of those because you can look at it with your eyes and you can see. You don't even need analytics to tell you this is not how you would do this.
The other problem is that Paid is not really suitable for search engine optimization or App Store optimization in this case because I don't know what Paid is. I had to go look at the screenshots to know what Paid is, and that's kind of a problem regardless of what you do.
To me, this looks like Search Match, and I think this is pretty bad. I would easily redo this entire campaign in about 10 minutes, and it's probably going to do a much better job by just looking at other similar apps that have to do with point of sale and are competing against Square and against Stripe, or are utilizing Stripe competing against Square.
I think you can put together a campaign that is considerably stronger, more efficient, and more effective at the end of the day. There's some experimentation to be done. I have way too much point-of-sale knowledge, so I can talk about this for days, but what I see on the screen, in my professional opinion, is not the way I would put money into Apple ads.
This is the problem with Apple ads. It's so easy to spend money on Apple ads. You can run this campaign and easily spend $5,000, $10,000, $30,000 a month on this without really getting any meaningful results. No one is going to say, hey, maybe you should pause this. You are the only one who has that capability. So don't make that mistake.
Apple's not going to call you and say, hey, you gave us $30,000 and we gave you 17 downloads. They're not going to do that. Don't ask me how I know.
If the performance is not right, change it. I think you have better opportunities here that you can do.
Just because I have a long-standing passion for point-of-sale businesses in general, if this is something you need more advice on, send me an email. I would love to give you some thoughts and ideas. I know way too much about this.
Paul asked: Beginner question. How much should I spend or be willing to spend on Apple ads?
Ariel: I do not have the answer to this, but I have a way for you to answer this yourself. Ultimately, the idea behind ads is you spend money to get downloads. You can spend more money and get more downloads. You can spend more cleverly and get more downloads, but ultimately you still have to spend.
I would say spend anything you feel comfortable spending. Do that for a short amount of time to see that you're getting some results. Within a few weeks you'll have some idea of what you can get.
Let's say you're comfortable putting $10 a day. It's not going to get you a billion downloads, but at the same time it's going to get you some visibility. Give it three, four, five days. If nothing works, the bids are wrong, so you have to up them and or find keywords that are longtail that will work for a lower bid.
Do that, and at some point within maybe a week, that's usually what I give this, you'll have an idea of: I put in potentially $300 a month if I do $10 a day, and I'm going to get 16 downloads. From those 16 downloads, I made one subscription, let's just say.
Now you have the economics. It's going to cost you $300 to get one subscription. If that's the case, now you have to say, am I going to get $300 back from this one subscription? If the answer is yes, you did it. If the answer is no, now you have to figure out how to reduce the cost of my ads.
Once you do that, you can increase the spend once you get to a point where spend equals return, immediate return, because for the most part we're talking about subscriptions that are utilizing Apple ads heavily.
What you get immediately is not what you will get in the lifetime of the user, as long as you're not doing anything crazy and you're getting cancellations immediately. Once you break even at that point, continue to push it up. That's what I would do.
If you're above break even, continue to push it up. Start with what you're comfortable spending without seeing returns. Start seeing returns. Optimize, optimize, optimize, and then push it up. That's the summary of how I would do this.
Ariel: I don't think it's completely random. I think Apple uses relevance, so it really depends on the keyword. I think the keyword, the ad, and relevance to the keyword matter, and relevance is also something Apple does and doesn't really talk about.
Sometimes if you throw bad keywords into your campaign that have nothing to do with your apps, Apple will not show them even if you have a pretty decent bid amount. However, they will tell you, especially if you take the Apple ad certification, that you should never do that because Apple will never actually show an ad for a keyword that is not relevant.
However, if you throw too much money on them, they will definitely show it. Don't ask me how I know again, but you don't want to do that.
Lunor asked: If we are running A/B tests in App Store product page optimization, do these A/B tests get tested through ASA impressions?
Ariel: I don't think so. All the A/B tests for screenshots are done on the organic side of things. On the Apple ad side of things, the only way to decide which creative is going to be seen is through custom product pages.
If you're not using custom product pages for your Apple ads, you absolutely should. It will increase your conversion rate almost instantly for the most part. Not for all apps, but for most apps that I have seen, that gave them a huge boost and a huge lift.
Ariel: This is the question I get all the time.
Absolutely not, for the most part, with a small asterisk. Apple ads does not have any sort of direct impact on ASO. If that was the case, all the apps that are spending tons and tons of money would be number one in all of the keywords they're in, and that is not the case. I checked.
What is actually giving you a boost is ratings. Ratings are the currency for App Store optimization on the App Store specifically. The more ratings you have in the last 30 days, the higher your app will climb.
The more downloads you're getting because you're paying for them, the more potential you have to get more ratings, especially if you optimize for it. If you're optimizing for getting more ratings and you are spending money on getting downloads, the chances that you'll get more ratings go up. As they go up, your ASO rank goes up. That's the only way Apple ads will have any sort of impact on your ASO.
Paul asked: If it's a free app, is there any value to using ads to validate keywords? I plan to add subscriptions, but right now my angle is be the best free timer.
Ariel: It really depends. Not pricing your app and not putting monetization on it, in my opinion, not doing that early enough is a mistake. The days of I'm just going to be free and everyone is going to download my app because it's free and then I'll monetize, that was over in 2015.
What you're really seeing now is the app that can get in front of people the most is the app that's going to get the downloads, price or not.
I don't see many free apps for that specific reason because you have to spend so much effort, and in some cases even money depending on how you do it, on actual advertising and promoting and distribution, as a lot of people call it these days.
If you have a free app, what is the goal? If the goal is because it's free I'm going to get more visibility, the answer is probably not. Making it free is not really going to give you a huge boost unless you go after very specific niches, like a very specific subreddit of people that want this exact specific app because you built this one very complicated specific feature maybe. Then you're going to get in, especially if you're free.
It doesn't mean they'll pay you later. All the effort you're putting in now could be wasted.
Really, what you have to be thinking is: how do I get in front of users that will pay me for the least amount of money, preferably free? That's where App Store optimization becomes really critical because that can give you that initial boost.
If you want to grow beyond that, that's when you start using paid ads: Meta ads, Apple ads, Google, really everything you have access to.
For something like a timer app, there are so many different considerations because it's probably one of the most saturated niches of the App Store that I can think of. I can think of a handful of others, but it's a very small list. A lot of people need timers, it is built into the iPhone, and you really need to show the value instantly.
If you've been following me on social media, you know I've been posting a lot of data about custom product pages and how apps that to us seem very simple, successful yet simple, use custom product pages to advertise every single use case the app has to offer. In some cases 15 or 20 or 30 or even 40.
That's really the key at this point. Pricing your app free just so you can get more distribution is not going to give you a lot of downloads unless you spend on it.
Going back to Apple ads and your question: yes, I think it's worth it. How you monetize is completely detached from how you promote at this point. Hopefully one pushes the other, but if you're detaching them, that's still the same outcome.
Paul followed up: My app was $5 before and made $7,000 in revenue, but I haven't updated until now. So it's free while I'll fix bugs, and now I'm about to add subscriptions, but I may delay that.
Ariel: I think while you work on this, there's probably no real reason to spend that $7,000 on ads. I would keep that. I would let it run. I would make sure your ASO is fully buttoned up and that you're asking for ratings and that everything works, but then only spend once you have a way of recouping all that spend. I wouldn't do it any other way. I think that would just be burning money, and I don't like doing that.
Question: How should we know when we should stop a keyword bid? For example, my subscription costs $10 to $20 a year. How much money per install should I spend before I decide whether it works or not?
Ariel: That's an interesting question, and it really depends on scale. Let's say you're making $20 a year on a subscription. Let's say $10 to make this even worse. If you're making $10 a year, that's not giving you a lot of money for spending on ads.
The real question is how quickly are you converting people once they see your app and how many of those are converting.
If you need 100 impressions to get one conversion, and let's say your bids are really high, let's say your bids are $2, it's going to cost you $200 to get $10. Once you think about it this way, now you can do the math and say, okay, if it costs me $200 to get one subscription, I can't scale this because it will cost me infinite money pretty much to get not infinite return.
At that point, you then optimize. That's when you go into the stage of optimization that I mentioned before.
When should you stop? You should stop when the gap between what you're spending and what you're earning is just way too big. At that point, you have to find other keywords that you can use in order to get more people, or make sure that your app is optimized for people who may not know exactly what they're looking for.
Make sure your onboarding is really tight. Make sure your paywall is really tight. Make sure your pricing is really tested. Make sure you're getting people to the paywall very actively because these cost you money.
If you think about it, let's say you need 100 clicks, 100 taps, and it costs you $2 each. Now you're talking about $200 to get, let's say, $20. But if you cut that in half, now it's $100 to get $20. The gap is still big, but now it's half. All you did was change a few pixels on the screen.
That's really what you want to do. You haven't thrown more money on the problem. You just optimized. That's where you want to be once you establish how much money it costs to acquire a paying subscriber.
Bruno asked: If Apple suggested a bid gets no install, should I raise the bid or does the keyword simply have no volume?
Ariel: Volume is determined by the popularity score and not by the bid. You will always get some volume on almost every possible keyword you can think of if you look at it for long enough. So, more than 24 hours.
In a week, almost every keyword I can think of will get at least a handful of impressions. That's how the algorithm works.
What I do is I would double until I get to a point where I'm starting to get impressions, and then I would lower it. Not by double. I would lower it as slowly as I can.
Increase fast so you can get some traction and not wait forever, and then slowly reduce it until you stop seeing traction, and then bring that back to when you last saw traction.
Jennifer asked: Can we trust Apple's recommended bid?
Ariel: No, not really. I don't know why, but the bids are always too low. Even when they're high, I was looking at a keyword a few days ago that was, I think, $4.56 or something like that. That was what Apple recommended, or not a keyword, a campaign. That was not even remotely close. The real bid ended up being somewhere around $8 to get real traction from those particular keywords.
Obviously that was too much, so I canceled it. But at least I knew Apple was about half.
Normally I would say it's probably at least 30% too low, and it's at the campaign level, so it's very hard for Apple to tell. I normally optimize keywords individually or within small ad groups so I can easily have more control over what I'm bidding on, and then I can increase it or decrease it.
I think one of my last campaigns, the bid from Apple was under $2, but then $5 was the number that really made traction happen. Whether it's worth it or not is a whole other question, but that's what I needed to do in order to get there. Somewhere between 30% and 50% off is my guess.
Muan asked: Would you please give your opinion on the automated Apple ads? Since we started running, the spend increased dramatically.
Ariel: When you say automated Apple ads, do you mean Search Match or do you mean the new Max Conversion? If you mean Search Match, absolutely not. Please turn it off unless you like burning money. If you do, I think setting money on fire, while illegal, is probably more fun than just giving it away. That's just my guess.
If you're talking about Max Conversion, I think that's what it's called, it's very new and I haven't used it yet because it requires Search Match, and I just don't want to do that.
Eventually I will do more experimentation with it. I think there is a world in which random keywords and some sort of tight optimization engine will work. I have a better solution that I'm working on that I will make available to everyone very, very soon. But if it's Search Match, turn it off.
Question: The longtail keyword strategy makes it hard to measure conversion per keyword and optimize a campaign with CPPs. How do you work around it?
Ariel: It does if you're measuring at the campaign level or at the ad group level. We're working on something where you can measure at the keyword level, and then you don't have to worry about any of this. Every keyword will just show all of the relevant performance so you don't have to go and guess.
We got a big one. Miraj. Again, a name with no keywords in it. What is happening? Do you not like App Store optimization? Do you not want to get free visibility?
Let's see. What is Miraj? Islamic books and activities for children. That's interesting. It's very, very specific. Islamic learning for children. Learn about Allah. Practice Arabic. We got a whole bunch of things here.
This would be amazing for custom product pages. Let's see if they're using custom product pages. Just a couple.
I would actually do pretty much the same thing: focus on the languages for one and focus on this for the other. This is a good starting point. I see at least six other custom product pages in here.
If you're not sure what a custom product page is, Apple gives you the ability to change the screenshots and attach that to a specific keyword. When someone is looking for Arabic alphabet for kids, for example, instead of showing the default product page, which focuses on Islamic stories and books, it shows exactly Arabic alphabet for kids.
You search for Arabic alphabet for kids and you see the screenshot. You're much more likely to download this app because it answers your question. It matches the intent.
This is good. This is how I would do it. If you need examples, follow me on social media, whether it's LinkedIn or X. The links to both are in the video description, and you'll see a million examples. I share at least one of those a day, sometimes even two. You can see how all companies are leveraging custom product pages for this.
If you need to see the custom product pages of competitors, which is what I do all the time, you can use the promo code I left in the chat and it will give you 20% off. See how I brought that all together?
Let's look at Apple ads keywords very quickly because this is interesting.
I definitely see a little bit of Search Match in here. You can tell when an app is using Search Match because the words sound similar. The word Quran is in the screenshots, and the word Quran like this is here, unless this is how it's spelled in other languages and I just don't know. It's possible.
But I see a bunch of keywords, and that's already good. I see out of the gate a lot of this is a serious longtail strategy, and that's exactly what you want.
Maybe not Search Match on this. These are pretty decent. They kind of make sense. I'm glancing at them really quickly, but I see keywords that align with what we saw in the screenshots.
All of these are potentials for people to look for because people are looking for things in ways that don't necessarily make sense to the creator, and that's okay. People word sentences differently. People are looking for slightly different intents.
For an app that has learning and books and other things and languages, you really have a lot of opportunity. We're looking at almost 500 keywords here, and most of them are longtail. This is exactly what you want to do.
We already saw two apps that are using this longtail strategy, and that's really the way to do this. In a case like this, now you would go the extra step and start looking at the return on all of these keywords.
They're all five, so they're probably not costing that much, which is great. That's how we're getting low single digits, some double digits of share of impressions, and that's great.
Find the ones that work well and then own them. You'll do that by looking at your conversion. The keywords that are getting you downloads are the keywords you want to spend on, especially if they're very low bids because they're low popularity.
All you need to do is find 10, 20, 50 like this that are very low popularity and also have a good conversion rate for your app. Spend more on them, beat out the competition, get double-digit share of voice, share of impressions, and I think you're going to see a meaningful impact from that.
You definitely still need 18 or 19 pages of longtail keywords, but that's okay. That's how you do this. This is not wasted on anything. This is how you see and how you become very, very broad.
This looks very good to me. The custom product pages make a lot of sense. Please use those. I have a guide on how to use custom product pages, which is very, very useful.
Please log in to adsapple.com and turn off Search Match on all of your campaigns. If you don't know how, let me know. I will send you a screenshot because that's really killing your budget.
You're going to see impressions tank. You may even see downloads go down because you are getting downloads from bad keywords. I very much doubt you're going to see a decrease in revenue and in conversion rate from those downloads. That's really what we want to optimize for.
Remember, you want to test and make sure you know the costs, then optimize, optimize, optimize, then expand.
Start small, measure, spend. Optimize, spend. That's the way I would do it.
If you have any other questions at any point, or you're watching the replay of this, drop the question in the comments and I will respond to it later. If you haven't already, make sure you check out the promo code. It's going to be live for a couple of days, so even if you're not live on this, you're still going to be able to get it, but it's going to expire.
If you have any other questions, drop them in the comments, send me an email, or hit me up on social media. I love talking Apple ads, and it's one of those things that if you optimize well, you're going to see amazing success. We see that with larger apps. If you don't, you're not going to see amazing success, and you're just going to see your money slowly crumbling away. No one likes that.
Go and turn off Search Match, and I will see you in the next one.
✨ This transcript was generated and enhanced by AI and may differ from the original video.
Use ChatGPT to speed up App Store Optimization: keyword ideas, metadata drafts, and competitor analysis workflows (prompt sheet included).
Beat competitors faster by learning from their keywords, downloads, and store strategy on the App Store and Google Play.