Apple Search Ads is a terrific ad network for user acquisition. The way the platform works results in high conversion rates due to interested and relevant audiences. But what if we told you that Apple Search Ads can be the channel that you will get the highest ROAS possible? With an Apple Search Ads automation tool such as SearchAds.com, it is easier than ever to achieve tremendous growth in Apple Search Ads.

SearchAds.com provides the tools that User Acquisition managers need to increase the returns they get by using Apple Search Ads. This post will provide you with a simple step by step guide for taking your campaign management in Apple Search Ads to a whole different level.

Integrating your API & MMP

The first thing you have to do when setting up your SearchAds.com account is to integrate your Apple Search Ads API. As SearchAds.com is a recognized Apple Search Ads Partner, the dashboards of both websites can be integrated. Changes you make on one platform will appear on the other. After creating your API certificate, you are ready to integrate it to SearchAds.com!

You can check out our help page to get step-by-step instructions for both API certificate creation and integration to SearchAds.com.

Perfect. Now let’s continue setting up your SearchAds.com account. Apple Search Ads is great for bringing in new users. However, measuring in-app activity is also important to understand your ROAS. This is why it suggested that you integrate your attribution partner with SearchAds.com. By tracking in-app activity, you will be able to have more control over your revenue generation process. Especially for apps that rely on in-app monetization, attribution data can be extremely useful.

Instructions for connecting your attribution partner with SearchAds.com is also available on our help page. Once you integrate your MMP, you are ready to begin your SearchAds.com Journey!

For this post, let’s assume that we are promoting a gaming app. It is a multiplayer game that includes in-app purchases and offers paid subscriptions that provide in-game advantages. Let’s go through some of the key features of SearchAds.com and understand how they can help us to promote our app.

Choosing Your Keywords

As we have previously covered in our Top Apple Search Ads Mistakes post, not doing proper research on keywords can decrease the effectiveness of your campaign considerably. SearchAds.com provides some intuitive solutions for your research process.

Let’s assume that Call of Duty is one of our potential competitors. By using the Keyword Auction Insights tool, we can gather information about their Apple Search Ads activities.

We can see that they are currently bidding on 461 keywords in the United States. We can quickly access the search volume for keywords along with the app’s organic ranking for them. Perhaps the most important metric on this dashboard is the Impression Share. For the keyword “pubg”, we can see that Call of Duty is getting 91.9% of impressions. Additionally, other apps with major portions of the impressions are also instantly visible. This process can be done for individual keywords rather than specific apps as well.

If you are running Apple Search Ads, you have to pay attention to your ASO as well. These two components are basically inseparable. For an efficient campaign, you need well-performing strategies on both aspects. That is why we provide Organic Keyword Rankings on our SearchAds.com dashboard. Here, we can view the keywords that our competitors are ranking for, enabling us to implement those keywords in our ASO strategy.

Here we can see the keywords that Call of Duty is organically ranking for. Keywords are sorted depending on their search volume. We can see that “pubg” has a really high popularity score and Call of Duty is ranking second for this keyword. They are also ranking for their own brand keywords.

From these dashboards, you can easily add the keywords you choose to your keyword cart and start bidding for them immediately. Using keyword tools can be extremely helpful both for your paid strategy as well as your metadata selection.

MobileAction provides the best keyword tools in the industry. By combining the data provided by MobileAction with SearchAds.com, you can scale your campaigns in the most efficient way possible.

Setting Goals

Goals will allow us to observe our ROAS, as they will reveal the revenue that we generate from keywords. This way we can optimize our strategy to lower our costs or to increase revenue. This is mainly done through focusing our efforts on high performing keywords while reducing our spend on keywords that are not efficient.

The goal that you want to create depends on the characteristics of your app as well as your expectations. As our game includes paid subscriptions and in-app purchases, we can use goals to track these objectives.

Goals will also allow you to create automation rules which will allow you to manage your campaign more efficiently. Automation rules will be discussed in the next section.

You can create goals from the Goals tab. First of all, we will choose the app that we want to set a goal for. Because we want to track how many users purchase a subscription plan, we will choose subscription purchase as our goal. After naming this goal, we can finish creating it and start tracking it immediately. We can also add a separate goal for users who start a  free trial.

After we create our goal, we are able to track the performance of our campaigns from the Ads Manager tab. You can track goals from the app level to the keyword level. This way we can fine-tune our campaign to meet our goals.

Automation

Automation Tools are one of the most powerful features of SearchAds.com. Especially for User Acquisition managers who value their time, automation tools are indispensable.

For example, let’s say that we have fifty keywords for a certain campaign. For keywords that do not get any impressions, we want to increase our bids until our keywords start getting impressions (assuming that the keyword is related to our app). Through automation rules, you can apply this process to entire campaigns.

As you can see, our condition is set as Impressions being lower than one. If this condition holds, the action we specified will be executed. In this case, we want to increase our bids by 15% as long as the condition is true. The maximum bid is set at $3 to limit spendings. You can also set notifications. In this example, we will receive email notifications when an action is taken. This way, if our keywords stop getting impressions, their bids will be increased automatically until they start performing.

We can also add an automation rule for our under-performing keywords. As our primary goal is to profit, we need to make sure that we are not spending too much money on acquiring a user (which exceeds the revenue they will bring). For this example, let’s say that we can justify spending up to 10 dollars per acquisition but not anymore.

As you can see, we set up an automation rule that will check for keywords that exceed $10 per acquisition. For such words, we chose to decrease the bid by 15%. Either exact amounts or percentages can be chosen for your bid changes.

You can set automation rules that depend on goals or metrics that are relevant to your campaign or app. You can also use our new templates feature to access predefined automation rules. Now that we set up our automation rules, we will have more time to go over and develop our strategy as the amount of manual work we need to do has been significantly decreased.

Funnel Tracking

Another new feature, the Funnels Page, allows users to see user movement from impressions to in-app goals. This way you can compare ad groups with different targetings and draw insights regarding their performance. You can toggle different metrics to change their visibility.

Our gaming app has quite the revenue generation process. We start by getting impressions, then installs, some users get a free trial and some of these free trials turn into paid subscriptions. Through funnel tracking, we can have an understanding of the metrics throughout the whole process.

As we mentioned, our primary goal is to gain subscriptions. We can see that 611 installs resulted in 103 trials for this particular ad group. 59 of these free trials turned into paid subscriptions. Thus, approximately 10% of installs turned into subscriptions for this ad group.

We can compare this data with other ad groups to understand their performance. If an ad group that is targeting 25-35-year-olds is resulting in more subscriptions compared to an ad group that targets the 55-65 age range, we can increase our efforts on the younger group.

Or perhaps one ad group in our generic campaign might be outperforming other ad groups. We can increase our optimization efforts for this group to increase our impressions and hopefully, our revenue.

We Are Here to Help

The purpose of SearchAds.com is to make campaign management easier and more effective. Combining an ad network as effective as Apple Search ads with SearchAds.com will allow you to increase your reach while also reducing your workload.

Integration of your MMP data will give you complete control over the user acquisition and retention process, allowing you to optimize each of your steps. Hopefully, this post provided you a basic understanding of our dashboard and how it can help your mobile user acquisition. We also have a post on Apple Search Ads best practices, for those who want to improve their user acquisition model.

For any other inquiries, please feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]. If you would like more information about the power of our tools, we invite you to schedule a free demo with our growth consultants!