How do Apple Search Ads actually work?🤔
In today’s video, we’re going to talk about what are Apple Search Ads, and how do they actually work, so that you know, how to get your share within the App Store.
👉🏼 Find out who’s bidding on your keywords: 👈🏼
(00:21) What are Apple Search Ads?🤓
When searching for a keyword within the App Store, what you will see is that the first result is often marked as an ad. This means that somebody is actually paying for being found in position number one for this specific keyword.
Now, you might think:
“Ah, ok, that sounds really easy, I’m just gonna pay and I’ll be in position number 1.”
Yes, that would be true if you would be the only one that is trying to rank for this keyword out there.
With more than 5 million apps out there in the world nowadays. Probably, you are not going to be the only app that is trying to rank for a specific keyword.
(01:06) What can we actually do to become number 1 for a specific keyword?🏆
When setting up an Apple Search Ads, it’s important to understand that you have different levels. Within the Campaign itself, what you normally try to target for are the different markets out there, as well as the goal of your Apple Search Ads Campaign.
Very important, on the Ad Group level, as well as in the keyword level, you can set a maximum cost per tap.
This means, how much are you willing to spend when somebody is clicking on your ad and eventually ending up landing on your app store page.
If you have competitors that are willing to spend more money on specific keywords to get traffic from specific keywords than you are. Chances are that the ads of your competitors will be shown more frequently than your ad.
(02:23) Share of Voice 📣
In other words, how we often refer to this as app marketing experts is the term Share of Voice. If you think of a big cake, and this cake exists out of 100 pieces, the one that is buying the most pieces, has the highest percentage of being shown on the ads.
It is very important to understand that this is happening on a keyword basis. This is also the challenge for you to find the right keywords to optimize for, and also to find the right biddings for a specific keyword.
When talking about the Share of Voice, it is also very interesting to know who is actually trying to rank for a specific keyword. And this is one of the awesome features of App Radar. Within App Radar, what you can do is you can click on a keyword and actually, find out which are the apps that are trying to rank for a specific keyword.
You can analyze the keywords, and you can also try to reverse engineer the Search Ads campaigns of your competitors and try to find out which keywords they are optimizing their campaigns for.
So, if you are interested in finding out more about the Search Ads strategies of your competitors, go to and create an account.
(03:32) Search Ads Fails 🛑
There are a lot of potential failures that can happen.
We picked up the 3 most common ones.
(03:48) Brand Cannibalization 👀
If you are already ranking on position number 1 for a specific keyword, this could be, for example, your brand keyword, and you are also paying money to rank for this keyword, chances are that people will click on your ad, and then come to your app store page and you will pay for it.
Otherwise, if you would have been ranking on position number 1 organically, and that would have been no ad, people would just have clicked at your search result and you didn’t have to pay for it.
But nowadays, as mentioned, with more than 5 million apps, chances are also quite high that your competitors are also trying to rank for your keywords.
So this is very important that you really have a look at your keywords, on the one hand, that you don’t cannibalize them yourself, and, on the other hand, that you also protect them from your competitors.
(04:41) Burning Money 🔥
This happens if you don’t set up any limits of how much you are willing to pay as a maximum amount for a tap or per an install.
When you are giving the App Store the possibility to go up with the bids, and one of your competitors is also going up with the bids, this means that you will be paying way more for the traffic, and this will end up very very soon in burning a lot of money.
(05:09) Keyword Relevancy 🔍
The third factor something that we have also been talking about in our previous videos is if you are putting search ads on keywords that are not relevant for your app, this could also end up in burning a lot of money.
Because people out there are having specific keywords, they are having specific use cases in their mind, when they are searching for an app, when they are searching for this keyword, they expect to find something that is really matching, that is really relevant to their search request.
And if your app has nothing to do with the search request, it could be that you pay for this position, but it will not result in an install.