Apple Search Ads discovery campaigns are an important part of mobile app user acquisition. App store search ads require a lot of tinkering with ASO and optimizing keywords in order to be the beneficial and fruitful marketing tactic that it can be. The app store optimization keyword tool along with a discovery campaign make for a great apple search ads strategy.
What is a Discovery Campaign?
What is a discovery campaign and why do you need it anyway? Though suggested keywords can always give you words related to your existing search terms, new keyword trends related to your brand or keywords specific to your niche audience may slip through the cracks. Your solution is a discovery campaign. Unlike other types of campaigns, a discovery campaign can reveal new keyword patterns that are related to your app.
You are certainly aware that optimizing your search results in the App Store is important to get organic traffic. App Store Optimization is crucial to lead people to your app and to get downloads. A Discovery Campaign in Apple Search Ads can help you improve your ASO.
Search Match and Broad Match features of Apple Search Ads will be switched on for this campaign. Thus you can discover new keywords that you may have never considered prior. You can then add them to your list of terms to bid on. You may even want to sprinkle them into your Title, Subtitle, or Metadata if they are good enough.
However, take caution. Some of the keywords that you find will undoubtedly be irrelevant to your app. Keep an eye on your campaign and adjust your budget to get new keywords but also not break the bank while doing so.
These are the types of campaigns on Apple Search Ads, as well as their ad groups. For a discovery campaign, as you can see, we will be using Broad Match and Search Match Keywords.
Here are some key aspects to look for:
Good keyword results from your discovery campaign should have three important traits:
- high search volume
- Competitiveness
- high relevancy.
How to create a Discovery Campaign
Suppose you have a chess game that you would like to run a discovery campaign for. Here are the steps we recommend you followKnow what you are looking for
Your goal in creating an Apple Search Ads discovery campaign is to discover keywords. You want these keywords to include the following.
Relevant terms to your app
If you have a Chess Game app, for example, you might have terms such as Chess, Play, Chess Game, Chess Online, and so on.
Long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords are common strings of words that people who might be looking for your app would search. These might include in the same example, something like Play chess with friends, chess games online free, real chess games multiplayer, and so on.
Synonyms
These are keywords that have the same meaning as your other keywords. Perhaps in the same example, if chess competition is one of your keywords you might try chess challenge, board game, chess tournament, and so on.
Misspellings
This is an obvious but important one. “Xhess” or “chess turiment” might have quite a few searches and they can be utilized for brand names of your competitors as well. If you have a competitor called BestChess for example, best-chess, chessbst. Bstchess and so on might be terms that you could bid on to get search results.
Other related terms from external influences
Sometimes things outside of the app world influence what is popular and what related search terms are. “Queen’s Gambit” for example, may now be a related term for chess games as people may have found a new interest in the game after the Netflix series surrounding the topic.
Search Match and Broad Match will help you discover these terms. You can then see which ones are the top performers and transfer them to your Exact campaigns with higher bids.
1. Create a new campaign named “Discovery”
Now that you know what you are looking for, it’s time to get started. Name a Campaign “Discovery” and get ready to find some new keywords.
2. Create a new Ad Group named “Discovery”. Make sure “Search Match” is on.
Your other campaigns have Search Match and Broad Match turned off. This campaign has the goal of finding as many words as possible so you must have these options switched on.
3. Get a head start on the discovery process by adding all keywords from other campaigns to the Discovery Ad Group as Broad Match.
This step is optional but suggested. It can be quite useful to have your existing keywords as Broad Match because it will look for synonyms and related terms specific to those keywords. This can be very fruitful. A handful of broad match keywords with a relatively small budget can get you many new search terms. The keywords generated from this process will also have a high relevancy. This is great, as the two factors on which your ad is shown are the auction and the relevancy of your keywords to the search.
4. Add all your existing targeted and negative keywords from other campaigns as Exact Match Negative Keywords to the Discovery Ad Group.
This step is very important. Adding the exact match negative keywords to your campaign will ensure that you are not getting words that you are already bidding on in other campaigns. This keeps you from competing with yourself.
Here is an example of a messaging app using negative keywords to block out search terms of competitors that do not perform well for their app.
How to maintain a Discovery Campaign
Now you have set up your discovery campaign. Job well done. But the next step is the most important. Monitoring and updating your campaigns based on the keywords that you find is crucial to having good ASO health. For the first couple of weeks, it may be a good idea to check daily to see what is coming up. You will be making constant adjustments at this time based on how your keywords are performing. After this initial period, you can scale back your updates to once a week or every two weeks.
Here are the steps you should take in your campaign maintenance
- On Apple Search Ads click on your Discovery ad group
- Click the “Search Terms” tab
- Click the Sort by Search Term option so that the low volume terms are at the bottom
- Carefully inspect each discovered keyword. If the term is both relevant to your app and has a good TTRand or CR you can add it as an Exact Match Targeted keyword in the appropriate campaign. Then, add this term as an Exact Match Negative Keyword to your discovery ad group. If the term is irrelevant or is not getting good results, you can add it as an Exact Match Negative Keyword in your discovery group. This will ensure that you no longer get results from that term.
- Rinse and repeat
Automate with SearchAds.com
This process can be quite time-consuming. The best way to deal with this is by using SearchAds.com to automate the process.
SearchAds.com is an official Campaign Management Partner of Apple Search Ads. We provide automation rules to optimize your bid amount, freeze your campaign, add negative keywords, and search term specific rules so on. We can handle bulk operations such as increasing or decreasing your bid on multiple keywords at a time. You can also move a group of keywords to another group. You can filter everything by picking the metrics that are most important to your campaigns such as ROAS or CPI. This will save you time. For example, Remake, a Korean digital app marketing agency was able to use SearchAds.com’s keyword tools and automation rules. They ended up decreasing their operation time by 84%. SearchAds.com also detects and removes duplicate keywords so that you don’t end up bidding against yourself by mistake.
There is much more to be discovered concerning the Apple Search Ads tool. We have many more Apple Search Ads tips and tricks along with campaign advice to offer. For more insights concerning Apple Search Ads, campaign management, and more, sign up for a demo with SearchAds to get the best assistance and to manage your campaigns with ease.
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How to Optimize Apple Search Ads Campaigns: AI-Powered Smart Tools
Apple Search Ads is a powerful platform allowing UA managers to promote their apps on the App Store and reach millions of users. By targeting the right group of users and forming a well-designed campaign with our smart tools, you will an effective and efficient way to drive conversions and grow your user base with your Apple Search Ads.
To achieve the best possible results from your Apple Search Ads campaigns, setting them up correctly is essential. However, the variables you need to focus on will vary depending on your campaign type. That’s why we’re here to provide advanced automation that will guide and assist you in optimizing your campaigns. To help you understand the benefits of our automation, we’ve compiled a list of areas where we can simplify the process for you.
- Time spent
Manually setting up Apple Search Ads campaigns can be time-consuming if you have lots of campaigns running in multiple storefronts.
- Efficient optimization
Running Apple Search Ads have lots of layers that you can arrange based on your campaign goals and preferences such as bid management and keyword research. Having an automated algorithm on your sight to help you would create an advantage.
Apple Search Ads is a fast-paced, constantly changing environment, especially in dynamic parts like keyword bid auctions. By leveraging our smart tools you can transmit your time and effort to other valuable parts of your campaign management.
- Additional Insights
There are no limits when it comes to analyzing. You can check numerous other perspectives if you really want to dive into more. By utilizing our advanced machine learning, you can get additional insights about keyword analysis, category, and campaign performance.
- Avoiding human error
Dealing with major and complex datasets is no doubt one of the things that UA managers want to avoid. Trust an automated system to safeguard the changes you might make in dynamic areas like keyword bidding.
- Efficient Use of Resources
In campaign management, certainly, the two most important assets you could have are time and money. You need to focus on getting the best out of what you have and we aimed to help you with that. With our smart tools, you can allocate those resources to use in other productive activities you need to work on.
Knowing the importance of Apple Search Ads campaigns for UA managers, we developed our Smart Tools to help them along the way. Let’s dive in to see.
Keyword Advisor
This feature helps UA managers to identify new keywords for their Apple Search Ads campaigns. Our advanced algorithm suggests relevant keywords based on your app’s creatives. The algorithm creates the potential keyword lists while tracking your competitor’s keywords and detecting the high-intent keywords in the system. Doing this manually will take hours but with our algorithm, you can uncover them all in seconds.
In paid campaigns, keyword selection is a task that should be made carefully. After all, you will pay for each of your keywords. That is why creating a keyword list that you will get the most out of it is what UA managers want. Considering there are numerous keywords you can choose, having an automated advisor will help you a lot.
Once you open up the interface, you will see the list of keywords that are advised by our machine learning algorithm, their keyword types detected based on your app, and their strength.
Our algorithm suggests keywords based on brand, competitor, and generic campaigns. You can select any keyword in this list and add either to your paid keyword pool or negative keyword list.
Smart Bidding
This feature is where you can automate your bid management for your Apple Search Ads campaigns. While automating your bid management process, saves your time and resources to focus more on other parts of your campaign. By using AI-based optimization, it continuously optimizes your bids based on real-time performance data.
Smart Bidding enhances your overall campaign performance by improving your targeting capabilities. Since the algorithm constantly optimizes your bids based on the bidding goal that you set, it automatically reacts to your target users’ behaviors. Meaning, if a keyword has an increasing volume, smart bidding arranges the bids to capture those users.
How to Use Smart Bidding
While setting smart bidding strategies, our algorithm gives you options for achieving different campaign goals.
You can select CPA Optimization, CPI Optimization, CPG Optimization, or ROAS Optimization for your smart bidding strategy.
CPA Optimization
You get to choose your preference among the goals related to cost per acquisition, as listed. In our algorithm, cost per acquisition means, the cost of achieving one download. Therefore, you do not have to indicate any goal for this bidding type before setting the rule.
- Scale up Traffic: This strategy increases your traffic while maintaining your current average CPA or maybe you are willing to increase your Average CPA a little bit for the sake of scaling up. However, even if your CPA little bit increase while scaling up, AI-powered smart tools will stabilize it once you hit the scale-up goal.
With Scale up Traffic, you will set a limit for your campaigns’ Average CPA, and our AI-based algorithm will do the rest.
- Scale Up Traffic & Average CPA Optimization: You can use this strategy when you want to increase your traffic, but you also need to decrease your overall Average CPA. Since you set your desired average CPA while you are forming your campaign, the overall CPA decreases gradually to keep the traffic steady.
In this goal, your Target Average CPA is the same as your Average CPA and set automatically, cannot be changed.
- Average CPA Optimization: This strategy can use when your main problem is a high Average CPA and you just want to decrease your Average CPA.
You can set the highest limit for your Average CPA and our system optimize your bidding around your limitation.
CPI Optimization
The designated strategies are the same as the ones for CPA Optimization. As you have already known, the CPI metric takes one step further from downloads and considers your installs as a step in the funnel. To finalize your bidding, you have to select a goal first. This is because, all the tracking has been made by MMPs, and any action should be taken by users after download for MMPs to track data.
You can select among optimization strategies to create the optimal bids for your campaigns.
CPG Optimization
You can create your Smart Bidding strategies based on what you would like to achieve for your designated goals. Our AI-powered algorithm will make the automation considering your selected goal and arrange your bids accordingly.
Before deciding which purpose your bidding campaign will have, you have to select a goal for your campaign.
ROAS Optimization
Automates your keyword bidding processes while optimizing your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). This option helps you to maximize your conversion while achieving your target ROAS.
You can select between ROAS-day combinations to target a ROAS.
Ultimately, Smart Bidding can help you maximize your ROI and get better outcomes from your Apple Search Ads campaigns. By utilizing automation, the system will check your competitors’ bids and arranges your bids to lead in the auctions. Therefore, Smart Bidding is a powerful tool that basically simplifies the management of your Apple Search Ads campaigns.
Smart Notifications
This feature allows you to be aware of what is happening in your running campaigns. Once you create your campaigns with designated goals, Smart Notifications will start checking on your campaign performance and whether are there any pain points that appeared. The goal here is to take time-consuming activities like monitoring and reporting from your hand and let our AI-powered algorithm do the job for you.
Considering all the constantly changing variables in a running campaign process is a challenging task for UA managers. Noticing an obstacle before it affected your campaign performance, and responding to them manually both takes time and effort. Even in some cases, time and effort won’t be the only problem due to the risk of error. That is why leveraging AI-based smart tools is the perfect solution.
In the interface, you will see the reason for the given heads-up, along with the time you first started to have this obstacle and the current status of the notification.
With the simple and to-the-point interface of Smart Notification, you will be alerted for your campaigns, ad groups, and keywords. Therefore, you will not miss out on any pain points that your campaign facing and waste no time finding their sources.
While clicking “see recommended actions”, you can look for which actions our algorithm is recommending for you to overcome these pain points.
With all of these optimization benefits, creating and managing your Apple Search Ads campaigns will be much easier. Sign up now to start saving both time and effort.
