The app store is a daunting marketplace filled with hidden pitfalls and misleading paths. After following this guide you will know how to carve a foothold for yourself and your app.
Finding a way into the spotlight of the featured category of the app store is an ideal goal for any development team, but will unfortunately remain unattainable for many. However, after using Apple Search Ads you’ll find a niche for your app to grow into your spotlight expectations.
Throughout this article we will talk about:
1. The features of Apple Ad Search Basic and Advanced
2. How to use Apple Ad Search
3. Tips on the App Store and App store advertising
The most important thing to remember when using Apple Search Ads is your audience and your product presentation. Here are a few key points that will help maximize conversion for your app.
With these key points in mind, let’s talk about the difference between Apple Ad Basic and Apple Ad Advanced
Say for example, your development team has developed an app and it has been on the app store for a few weeks but unfortunately you are getting few downloads.
Following the idea of a small budget,
If you and your team are not well versed on marketing strategies based on competitive pricing,
This competitive pricing is essential to ASA Basic. Your ad will compete with ads for similar apps so the app store takes keywords, relevance, and ad price into account when deciding which to show.
All in all, ASA Basic is perfect for minimal management with little monetary commitment but doesn't allow for specifications or detailed audience feedback. For more hands-on options and in-depth resources, ASA Advanced allows for much deeper insights and campaigns.
For development teams and companies that have experience with marketing and are prepared with a larger budget, ASA Advanced is the best option.
To start off:Â ASA Advanced has all the same tools and features as Basic but with more opportunities for customizability.
One of the main advantages of ASA Advanced is the ability to specify your audience
The audience feature allows you to advertise to:
Another key device of ASA Advanced is the feedback tools which give detailed descriptions of who you are reaching with your ads and how effective they are.
Additionally, you can create Ad Groups which are used to refine your ads to more specific groups by using keywords, age, location, frequency, and OS so that you can ensure you are reaching your target audience.
And finally, one of the main features of ASA Advanced is the ability to specify keywords that your users might use so your ads appear more frequently under that term. Without a doubt, this feature is the most beneficial for anyone wanting to use Apple Search Advanced.
*Note Apple Search Ads has other niche features that allow for more feedback from your ads or audience refinement but these are the main tools.
There are a few prerequisites to using Apple Ad Search:
And if you are an Advertising Agency you must contact Apple Ad Search for Special Registration
*NOTEÂ this tutorial is for ASA Advanced but many of the same steps are present for Basic.
This is an important step in your setup process. You can choose who to market to here and it is advisable to specify that you are marketing to people who searched Close Matches to your target market.
Then you must specify how much you want to spend on cost-per-tap or CPT and consequently cos-per-acquisition which is how much you pay for installation (optional for installation but recommended).
*NOTEÂ always start low when starting the cost-per-tap, you can always raise it if results are lower than expected
Make sure that you use at least 50-100 (100 is the max) keywords to describe the search terms for your app.
Note, if you want to change the range of your terms from Broad or exact, you can tap on the term and change the drop down menu or use [square] brackets to specify an exact search term.
Over the course of my research for this article a few very apparent tricks and tips made themselves apparent: