# Marketing Your App More Efficiently with Apple Search Ads — Dilip Reddy, Search Ads Optimization

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86etr70XVJU
Duration: 60 min
Language: English
Words: 10757
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/86etr70XVJU

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[0:00] hello I'm your host David Barnard and my guest today is dilip ready a data engineer turned marketer working on an Apple search ads platform called search ads optimization on the podcast I talked with dilip about the impact of Apple search ads on organic search how to save money on brand defense and why Ras shouldn't be the only thing you optimize for hey dilip thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today yeah I'm excited to be here talking about about Apple searchs yeah I I've been meaning to do an episode on Apple searchs for a long time and you know there's so many different frames of reference to talk

[0:38] about it and so there's a few people I've talked to that that I probably will still have on but a little more like kind of like growth hacky more kind of marketer focused but one of the things I'm excited to talk to you about search ads is that you're a data guy and you kind of like stumbled into marketing as a data guy so let let's just kick it off with that story like how did you get into Apple search ads as a data scientist the reason is I did computer science and like um always uh data is my go to like that's what fascinates me and

[1:11] I started Bank of America there's no like app thing and all um but over time like I joined like um unicor app companies like in 2016 and that's when the Apple sear came in um it's a because I'm a data pi as well so I manage all data sources and um design architectures I noticed Apple s is different in a way that it gives like so many data points so much of data that extreme granular including High intent keywords how they uses so reacting and it just was great and also I created my own hobby apps that don't solve any real problem but I started tinkering with

[1:55] apple set chats and in a weird way that's kind of my on and off I've been like developing algorithms and all this stuff and that's how I ended up and yeah yeah and then you you told me at one point that uh one of the things that really fascinated you about Apple search ads was that you were digging through the data one time and saw some like really high bids and some high cost for acquisition um yeah so tell me about that yeah I mean there are some categories right like Finance health and fitness um the bits are like can be like go crazy for some Market some keywords

[2:30] but they also bring in higher Revenue um that's what is interesting because if you look at in a spray and prey networks like meta everything is usually like constant you expect this and like the same Revenue performance because this not intent based it's just shooting creative across millions and hoping some will fall for it but Apple switch has the even the CPS is high I find it like you know there's something we can Tinker with and like experiment with uh because we cannot stop just because it's high CPA because they're the high intent and in a way it's a limited inventory demand and Supply so it depends on the app it

[3:11] depends on what keywords we're targeting and what kind of users we're looking for and especially for very high competitive like Finance is one thing health and fitness yeah we may see bits go really high up and CPA can go high in USA USA is one of the most expensive storefront yeah and that's the interesting thing about search ads I mean it's why Google is a what trillion plus dollar company it's said when when people go search for a specific term they're they're very clearly demonstrating intent and you know I don't remember all the different categories but there there's things like you know searching for divorce lawyer on

[3:51] Google whereas like the bids are just seem insane but if you're searching divorce lawyer you know some something something's going on in your life life and it's a lot of you know the lawyers make a lot of money on divorce settlements and so it's like they can bid really high and I think there's kind of similar market dynamics at play in the App Store where for things like finance and health and fitness where there's High intent there's High willingness to pay it makes sense in kind of a competitive bid environment that some of the keywords will get bit up and it's kind of cool that like what

[4:23] part of what got you into Apple search ads was seeing those High bids and be like wait a minute this data must be wrong but no it's like actually the data was correct it's just that you can have a return on ad spend with like a $50 CPA if it's the right keyword and the right app and the right monetization um so that's really interesting yeah and yeah the good thing about it is we can control each and every aspect at gr new L work I mean you can also like stop some keywords like bid really low so either forcing Apple to stop giving us Impressions or give more installs for

[4:58] the same uh not more installs but similar installs uh with a lesser CPA that's the best part we can we are in control of everything it's not like meta right like we don't know why the CP is going high and I can't do anything about it yeah a lot of granular control and a lot of data to to understand what's going on yeah it is a double HED SW it can get overwhelming especially if a company is running in know all 60 countries and 70 countries like thousands of keywords for each country I mean we have some solution for that and there's some kind of Campa structure you

[5:32] can set up to make it the mental Overlord much better I I want to kind of kick things off talking about trends for 2024 I mean things are always changing you know Apple introduced the brand or not I guess not brand but like the inventory on on search and they've kind of been expanding inventory over the last few years anything especially interesting in 2024 that that that it's changing in app store search ads that folks should be paying attention to a lot of apps now usually it used to be like we just run in tier one like you know us UK like Germany France and forget the rest of the world but now I'm

[6:08] noticing the trend of adding as many as countries as possible because if you think about it there's only like five six localizations that we have to like for example if there's a Spanish um you can maybe have an entire Latin America not entire but most of the Latin America with the same kind of keywords same with Portuguese German or France the way is like we identify the keyword Builder building for these localizations but you can expand to pretty much every country in the world and for extreme local language that we cannot support our Apple defaults to English anyway so expanding to more countries is what I'm

[6:50] noticing and and apple introduced new um geographies this year right yeah yeah Brazil um and I think six other Latin count so yeah this the best way and people are seeing some surprising results so my advice is test these countries because we can just assume oh because this country is this we should not run it there especially the effort is pretty much same it takes maybe few minutes to just copy and paste the campaigns right yeah but you don't want to just copy and paste the campaigns right you want to copy and paste and then spend a little time kind of honing it in for that market and then you know

[7:31] check your CPAs and your return on ad spend and stuff like that yeah whenever there's a new St friend my go to is start with bids like too stupidly low that will never get impressions but that's fine we can always increase it if you start bits high for a new country we don't know what is the base I can start with $10 Apple happily give me $10 bits but maybe I can get the same number of installs or 90% of installs if I bid half right so and also the trend is I'm noticing is the CP is going a bit high and I'm assuming it's also across all ad

[8:06] channels U because I don't deal with other AD channels but the data suggest CPS are going a bit High year by year so we're dealing with that so yeah it kind of makes sense because as apps get more sophisticated about monetization and really get their monetization dialed in then they can spend more and so like the market dynamics is like add as consumers get more comfortable spending as inflation causes higher prices to make more sense you know as apps work on their funnels and pay walls and all the things like we talk about on the podcast is like we're kind of creating the problem like as more apps get more

[8:46] sophisticated then they can bid higher because they're going to still get a return on ad spin even with that higher CPA so it kind of makes sense that there's just like kind of rising uh CPAs especially with the most high intent um search ads yeah I think there's also a trend of I call these apps hyperscalers it's like teu right like they B 100,000 keywords for some reason but the reason is maybe I don't know why but they must have like billions of marketing right so unfortunately it will raise up it's like a a wave lifting up all the boards kind of thing right so because U is waiting for each and every

[9:25] possible English character I'm English letter and word Hindi the it may mean that you know the CBA may be going high I'm not saying this is the reason exactly but this is a trend I'm noticing as well yeah probably contributes to it for sure yeah and there's a new search inventory came in that didn't exist before chpt is the AI everything AI yoga AI right like uh pretty much there's like entire new generation of Search terms coming so the inventory went up as well um so it's not like all like high CPA for the same inventory but also the apps like Skyrocket a number of apps released

[10:05] ironically a is making easier to create much many apps at scale as well so yeah that's the trends so far yeah yeah that's really interesting and the explosion of apps thing is interesting I mean it does seem like AI has kind of accelerated that is that you know like you said for every for every major category you might want to bid on there's probably somebody who who is either built like a more really sophisticated app or rebranded an existing app to like say it's a the AI version of it and then you know people are looking for more apps because they're thinking well hey I've been

[10:42] using this you know productivity to-do list is there like a better AI version of a to-do list that's going to make me more productive and then they go back and search whereas like maybe they weren't searching some of those terms before because they kind of had their their the app that they used it would be interesting to see the iOS new version with the built-in AI how it's going to impact a lot of apps um yeah let's see how it goes with the AI so one of the hotter topics I want to get your take on is brand defense so you know you have some people say never do brand defense

[11:17] you're just like it's extortion from Apple and Google to force you to do brand defense on SEO and ASO but what are your thoughts like can it work can it be profitable how how should you structure it if you do do it like how do you think about brand defense on apps shs yeah obviously it's a touchy subject I have some opinions but what I would do is like I asked I inquir company what is your like like what is your plan like what do you think of this because it depends on each and every company on a surface level this is what I would suggest if your app is easily replaced

[11:53] with a computor app you have to run brand the unfortunate situation here is that if you lose impression share that we cannot measure that because it's a lost opportunity we can only measure something I mean incrementality but it's a loss of um Revenue right if you think about it let's say a company is running Facebook Tik Tok um brand awareness all that touch points made that user come to the app store right before downloading if a competitor solve the exact same problem um it's a really huge risk right like we made all the hard work and now the competitors are benefiting from it there are some apps

[12:31] like with apps with network effects and like uh we know these apps cannot be replaced with on apps they do not need to run you know brand um for example maybe Bank of America app no one creates online application but there's an opportunity for like fintech apps right uh because that's their opportunity Bank of for doesn't need that but fintech can capitalize on that opportunity my suggestion is test with bidding lower for the brand keywords you'll be surprised you may be paying let's take one example an app is getting 100% impression share to be honest it's not 100 because there's never 100% imprison share let's say 90% impression share is

[13:16] there a way to measure that incrementality testing or or is does Apple actually like show you this impression share this is a best part Apple does give us impression share per search term per country so so that is one thing we can keep track of that this reason why it allows us to conduct this test is Bid lower for brand and test it out and if you retain same impression share you essentially have the cost um still getting like same impression share it is a test because we don't know how impression share can take a hit and maybe some companies are okay with 70% impression share if it reduces cost by

[13:54] 70% so it's a nice trade-off he's still retaining we still like letting go off our impressions for other competitors but we can use that budget for generic High intent and these are actual new users right and regarding Apple extrating um I mean it's not unique to Apple right like I mean it's every ad Channel there's no trademark on search DRS so yeah it's unfortunate reality of everyone has to deal with but it's also an opportunity right the impression share is an interesting way to approach it though because you're you're right it's like if if you can spend half as much money and get 90% impression share

[14:32] versus twice as much money to get it to 100% that extra 10% is probably not incrementally better than just spending less and getting the 90% And then something you and I were talking about was how the the search ad algorithm does tend to prefer the actual branded app where you could potentially even bid a lot lower than your competitors and still win the bid because Apple's not just going with the highest bid there is some amount of like them trying to fit the best app right yeah uh it's because of one mechanism is that kosper tap model um Apple only charges an app company if someone Taps on it if you if

[15:15] you get a million impressions with zero Taps you basically got all this free 1 million impressions so if that's the case right like if Apple just takes highest bit like teu will be showing up for a research ter but it's not the reason is imagine like if I'm a yoga app a famous yoga app and someone is searching for the yoga app of my brand a competitor may not get same level of Engagement a lot of users may see the ad and oh you know what I I don't care about it I heard about this app so I'm going to download that apple is losing too and it's also not great

[15:50] user experience right like some if if user is typing for yoga brand of XYZ they're expecting to see XYZ not So eventually Apple may like shift the terms to Brand even if you're bidding like let's say half of the computor because it there's some calculations it is also a test because it's not guaranteed outcome imagine I'm a just generic yoga app and the competitor has better way better screenshots way better messaging way better ratings um I may lose that and apple may think you know what this computor appap is actually working better more than this brand so Apple may like give the impression share um so it

[16:34] is a bit of test but yeah that's where it's ideal to monitor the um impression share and make sure we're not like tanking yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense because like yeah you're right it's like in your example earlier I think is maybe even better it's like if somebody's searching Bank of America they're probably not going to tap on an ad for Chase Bank and so Apple doesn't make money when somebody searches of America and they show Chase because people are looking for the Bank of America because they bank at Bank of America they're not searching Bank of America cuz they're looking for a bank

[17:08] they're looking for the app and so I mean it's probably the exact opposite on like SEO it's like you know if somebody's searching Bank of America online or like you know other kind of keywords it might make more sense but on the App Store specifically when somebody's looking for a very specific app Apple's not making money if people are are having to scroll past the app so yeah it makes a lot of sense so on brand defense you just you you really experiment and try and B as low as possible to maintain as much impression share as you're comfortable with to make sure you're not kind of losing out on

[17:43] the opportunities man I bet I mean that advice alone you know I don't know how how it does seem like a lot of companies you know they just kind of throw money at App Store sech CHS and don't operate in a very sophisticated way um and of course tons of them you know hire Consultants or have internal people who are really good or have agencies working on it who know these kind of things there's probably folks listening to this podcast who who don't know that and and aren't you know paying close enough attention and you may have just saved them like tens of thousands of dollars

[18:15] just go in there and lower your bed and watch impression chair I mean there's one more thing about um the RO and case studies and like one thing I noticed is a lot of case studies don't mention if it's generic or brand this brand usually has highest ORS of any kind of if think about it right like uh that's what we we made the user come to App Store and their highest intent possible um so when we seeing the revenue R I would consider brand as its own entity we treat it as we do not compare brand with any other high intent generary keywords or computer keywords or like broad match

[18:55] keywords I would treat it as two different things I do not even mix up the data as a an entire like apple strategy yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah because if your overall Roi looks amazing yes because you're cannibalizing but if you can pay half your Roi is going to look even better so that's great um we already kind of talked a little bit about the the trend in CPAs going up up up but I wanted to dig into that a little bit so we kind of talked about some of the the the high uh CPA like Finance and health and fitness and

[19:29] some of these categories that are going high what what about like low CPA are there some categories that like are opportunities some some um Arbitrage available in the App Store in in certain categories yeah even with the high competition categories like we can have some CPA we can improve CPA better by just expanding High intent and low intent keywords and bid accordingly for example yoga I know yoga if someone is typing Yoga Yoga is high intent for my app um I'm talking about yoga because it's so such a generic app so but I also know if someone is doing PES or um some kind of like maybe there a low intent they may

[20:13] not be interested in my app but it's still like some if someone is looking for health and fitness and piles maybe they're low intent but I won't be same as I would bit for yoga so I classify that as low intent that way you can expand keywords a lot and also keywords we can think of it as a it's very this where the night and day difference of performance can occur in apple search ads if I'm choosing bad keywords like have 10 keywords that are not relevant to app and bidding $10 each um we're going to have some troubles this is a human thing right like we know much

[20:50] better you can use AI CH GPT to have some ideas but the final say should be yours of okay we are using this this keyword because it's low intent and we'll bit lower and in hopes that uh we get more sus and the best part about Apple s is there are two types of keywords exit is not 100% EXA but is more like yoga for uh woman for example is that if I'm biding as exact keyword that's fine but there's another keyword type called broad match what it means is in any variations can also we can all right automat show up for me if yoga for women

[21:36] is same intent as yoga for women in 30s I know it's a long uh Tale But yoga for women I don't care what the following Search terms are because I already know yoga for women and these keywords usually are dynamic because if you look at the App Store App uh if you type yoga you'll see apple suggest some system and these change very often so the competition would may not exist for some of the ssts and that's a low hanging fruit uh run the broad but bit obviously bid lower I'm a big fan of classifying keywords and bidding different for each based on their group like brand and regarding low it's also

[22:19] very Dynamic even with the high competition some keywords may not have any competition at all and there's like think of stock market there's like so so many so many people trying to buy stocks and we cannot predict what's going to happen so this is where you know we try to have as many as Rel keywords and we expect some may go down in impression share some may go up orall we just see Improvement in performance so is that how um broad match works I'm a little naive here I have not unfortunately I mean you and I were talking about like I actually want to start running half

[22:52] store search ads campaigns for my weather app I've been holding off because I'm like I don't know if they're going to be profitable and like it is tough in a category like weather and but so I'm a little naive to exactly how all of this works but maybe that's good because I think a lot of the the folks who listen to a podcast like this don't necessarily like day in day out run campaigns so it's helpful to kind of Define some of these terms and describe in a little more detail how some of this works so broad match if if you do a broad match for like yoga for women will

[23:20] it broad match anything related to yoga for women or or does it still have to have like yoga and women in the search terms like how how dangerous is it to set a broad match will it just like pull any random stuff in there there app yes it just just because we said your yoga for women it doesn't mean that Apple may apple may show for totally unrelated if it thinks that if Apple algorithm thinks for example pelaton if Apple thinks Pelon is related to yoga for our ad we may be paying for pelaton keyboard but the good thing is we can even track this there's a the report called Search terms

[24:00] report it's better to occasionally check you know this report and make sure okay all our spending is going to the right kind of keywords usually the search Terps is not perfect Apple only shows search Terps if they're if you spend enough and if you get enough Impressions but that's fine that's what we want anyway right we don't need like thousands of Search terms report so then in this case like if if you have a yoga app and you see in the report that it's bidding for pelaton and and it's a high bid and you're not getting good at Roi do do you go in there and then

[24:32] specifically say don't bid on pelaton so the good thing about that is we can track which keyword is causing Pon to causing or app to show for Pon usually I just go in there and T it down to really stupidly low that either we get really really cheap like installs or app we force Apple to notch or add I'm not a big fan of removing keyboards too much often um yeah these are Dynamic Trends right let say I have a yoga for and apple is showing pelaton search down for this U for my app this week it doesn't mean that it's going to keep doing that

[25:06] forever right like maybe next month that might be my most profitable keyword if I just remove that keyword I just lost my opportunity um forever but if I bit low and I can re retry it later two three months and see how is it performing um I think yoga for is not a great example for broad but you can think of a as uh let's take weather since your app hopefully I'm not giving away weather app Secrets uh imagine we bding we just don't know anything about Apple sear CHS but we know our app is about weather so you can run on weather as exact it means

[25:42] that any variation weather like we show the ad and we pay high for that let's assume we did not do any keyword research we don't have any keyword list uh if you also bid on Broad of the same so we are running two keywords basically Apple may show weather map weather information weather alerts as far as we concerned those are also relevant for for us right so and you can go to the multiple levels like Now weather alerts we can bid on weather alerts because Apple showed Oh there's a weather alerts keyword now the we do the same thing we add weather alerts as except and also Broad and our hope is

[26:24] that if someone is searching for wether alerts Philadelphia it still relevant because Mac still relevant and if someone is searching whether alerts Los Angeles um same thing so that way like you can that's why I'm I'm a big fan of maintaining a relevant keybo list because this is onetime action right like once we add weather alerts we're not going to unless the app changes entire business model and the name and the functionality it's really rare that the keyword is going to be applicable for work yeah that's a good point though cuz like for my app it would actually be the opposite so we would start with

[27:03] weather as a broad match and we would probably see that WEA alerts is a very low intent keyword because we actually don't have alerts in the app it's something we actually want to add to the app so then what you're saying is what we would do then is put weather as broad match when we see weather alerts come in and it's um not creating a great Roi even if maybe it is driving downloads because people don't realize the app doesn't do it but then they get into the app it doesn't do it leave a bad review they uh don't buy or they cancel the free trial or whatever um so then we

[27:33] make WEA alerts a exact match and then we bid really low because maybe we still get impressions and maybe we still make some money but we want that specific keyword to be super low price but then when I add the feature then we already have some relevancy for it and then I can bump the bids back up right in this case like when we are sure this a particular keyword is really badly performing and it's consist over and over again he can actually add it as negative keyword basically what we're saying to Apple is anything that says with alerts yeah take me out I'm not I'm

[28:08] not in the game so that's actually much better uh but we need to be absolutely sure that this keyword is never going to be a good fit um I noticed some um advice that yeah just remove negative any keywords that don't generate Rue in first week that is really not great strategy in my opinion because everything is dynamic right like some competitors may be biding high this week they may a drop off tomorrow it's all Dynamic that's why I'm a big fan of Apple search it gives us a lot of data to validate and test our hypothesis yeah in this case if you know this keyword is a bad news yeah we just

[28:49] add it as negative keyword one time thing and we never have to worry about it again so is that is that how exact and Broad match work so I I mean a lot a lot of people who like work in in the industry or constantly managing these things will know that but I'm sure there's a lot of folks listening who don't and then honestly even the people who work in this day and day out could probably learn some of the intricacies about how it does and doesn't work uh from you as much as you've managed This and like work with so many different folks over the years so um so yeah how

[29:20] how does broad match work yeah the goal for us when you when we using broad match is to Capt like exponential number of Search terms that are still relevant to our app and added benefit is usually for these keywords these are so dynamic they change every week they may be low in popularity um so they will our computors may not be bidding really so so we've talked a bit about fluctuation but one of the biggest fluctuations is is seasonality it's like you know I'm sure January 1 all the Search terms related to health and fitness are Bid to crazy and and that's to be expected um but any

[30:01] other things you think people should be watching out for seasonality wise or or how does that impact CPAs and and how should you be preparing and structuring your campaigns for seasonality so you don't end up like you know paying too much but also so you don't miss out on the opportunities when there maybe are high higher Roi searches when maybe you are bidding lower even when there are higher uh intent people coming in yeah I mean for you us stor friend like the Thanksgiving is the usually the highest competitive space it's the same similar phenomenon like a wave lifting up all the VES kind of things so even if it's

[30:38] nothing even if our app it has nothing to do with shopping we may see our CPA you know going up bit High even summer time is like usually for like it depends on kind of apps like from some categories the summer is actually the cheapest CPA for some reason you can think of this as cool if I'm education app and usually the best time period to test any new app is I mean if you're if someone is thinking of um trying out Apple CHS is during February till summer this is kind of a a kind of weirdly low energy in the you know competition competitive space um because the January

[31:23] high is gone and now things are coming back um but it depends on the app too right like um if I'm if my app is dealing with something with U for example flights like flight tracker obviously like um I can't benefit much uh because there not Peak Travel season um yeah those are the seasonality trends and and some of them are counterintuitive too like I was actually talking to Ryan Jones from flighty recently and he was saying how surprised he was that holiday travel is such a like you I thought I I I think the conversation was related to me saying oh you must do like really good business in

[32:04] the summer he's like no actually like the summer is fine but the holidays is where people are like way higher intent like traveling more care more about delays and stuff like that and so some of these like seasonal Trends are probably counterintuitive and like even you're running your app thinking oh you know let's take all Trails for example it's like oh well the summer is going to be peak season Maybe but are there are there ways that that you kind of I mean pretty much you just need to be watching week in week out are there but Are there specific ways that you track these campaigns to make sure that that you're

[32:40] not missing out on either potentially bidding lower kind of when when CPA maybe drift lower or bidding higher when there's actually higher intent people coming in how how do you manage that on a day and day out basis it depends on the like how our app category how the competition is um for some apps like it depends on what our competitors are doing because when I'm saying competitors I'm not talking about exact clu competitors I'm talking about any app that are bidding heavily and for a long time for our primary keywords High intent keywords it depends on that for day in day out usually we should not we

[33:18] just keep in mind that hey this is expected and we can look over the good thing is it should correlate with Organic traffic as well so we can just come back to AB connect and check last 2 years what's our Trend and we can expect similar um in apple SE I'm not a big fan of changing bits by the seasonality because uh like I said it's like stock market right it's everything is dynamic we cannot predict that we'll get impression share of this keyword but we can see the results and act on it I mean there a best thing about data right like we don't have to make any assumptions we

[33:53] can see the data and act accordingly so so what you're saying is a better the better tactic is just to watch the keywords and so if you're getting a higher Roi on a specific keyword no matter the seasonality that's when you would experiment with increasing the bid and then when if you see Roi drop then that's when you experiment with lowering the bid and you kind of like you you should just be doing this as like standard practice anyway not necessarily focused on the seasonality when I say watch keywords means um it's like conscient process right like um imagine I'm running an apple Church campaigns for for my company and I just go in

[34:30] every day every week once in a while and I just be according to what I'm seeing it doesn't matter maybe Germany is the least performing campaign it doesn't matter what season right I just yeah you know what I'm not going to spend too much budget so let me bit lower for the entire ad group maybe um us is least performing but Germany's best performing in December for some reason I don't know because these are all external factors we cannot analyze like why it happened we can just react what we're seeing based on like past 15 days or past 7 days so and and speaking of Roi H how do

[35:07] you think about Roi because you know you're you're not always going to be able to get I mean the ma the magic is like a plug in a keyword and like 150% Roi in seven days and then you spend a million dollars a month and you're just making money hand and foot but that's not how it actually works in the real world but so how how do you first measure Roi and then how do you think about Roi yeah um imagine um I'll take we'll take an example of a a regular generic app with 7day free trial and some let's talk about my app so if I start running

[35:43] because I am going to start running weather uh uh App Store search ads on different weather terms and so I'll and I'll probably be talking about this over time on the podcast of like you know what's worked and what hasn't for me so yeah a weather app so I start running ads for my weather app so we'll use that as hypothetical what is the free trial is there a free trial 7even days 7 Days perfect here's the thing about Revenue in apple SE ads Apple search ads by default doesn't give Revenue uh doesn't show Revenue like unlike meta you know uh Google ads but there's some ways that you can

[36:15] use mmps um like other platforms and get the information and Link it up and revenue cat yes yeah Reven does a great job like linking up keywords and um ad groups and you can use that information to analyze my recommendation is like um do not go in there expecting a hard number as Revenue goal and if it doesn't hit uh take the entire Channel down because these are really Dynamic and there are so many things that we can improve on um for example like if you it's it's totally different of Revenue if you if I Google right now what is a good R the usual wisdom is 4 400%

[36:57] what they mean is like okay if you spend $100 you need you expect $400 coming back but that is uh not for app um there not that wisdom is not for app marketing because for simple reason we have subscriptions right like we and also all this uh 400% R is golden metric is for like for example if I'm selling T-shirts yeah there's a metric I can follow on but because if I'm a person who buys my t-shirt will never buy the same t-shirt next month um but app there's a important metric called time to break even what it means is it's fine even if you don't get 100% RS in the

[37:42] first week I mean obviously if you get that that's good but even if you get like 40% or 50% ORS it's actually not bad result because we can still improve on add more keywords we can fine tune and also there is a we can check our LTV right and because we're bidding for high intent we know that these users are perfect users of our app so we can expect we can improve the in app like experience to make sure they don't turn and they if you have monthly subscription hopefully because if you think about it cohorted or mean we only spend that let's say we spend $3 for

[38:24] that install for that user who started this free trial and they did convert in that case we only spent $3 one time for that user and that's it but the revenue is like hopefully our app is better and like not like this not huge turn we can keep on the revenues keep coming in so um there's a time delay we just have to keep track of it um and so then every app developer has to kind of decide from a cash flow perspective from a long-term business perspective I mean I was talking to one person who you know because you you hear so much in the industry of like oh you know what's

[39:01] your 7-Day Ras what's your 30-day row you know are you getting row positive in 90 days like what's a metric and I was talking to somebody who has like really great organic traffic so their their business is just spinning off cash and so their metric was 365 day rows so their their metric was can I spend today and at least get to 100% by the first annual renewal and for a lot of businesses that can make sense like if the cash flow makes sense if you're wanting to like really grow and then the cool thing like you're were saying is like those people who renewed that first

[39:40] year you get to Raz positive in 365 days which again it's crazy it's hard to float that if if you know for a lot of companies but then like a bunch of those people are going to new the next year and the next year after that and so it's an Arbitrage opportunity to grow faster now if you have the cash and you have some level of confidence in those renewals um that you're going to start stacking those cohorts sooner and sooner that that's actually why I want to start advertising for my weather op as soon as possible and I'm kind of kicking myself for not starting is I should at least be

[40:13] H picking up the lwh hanging fruit and maybe this is kind of the message for those of you who aren't currently doing it and even for those of you who are and maybe could even spend more than you currently are is that I mean this is Magic of the subscription app um model is that that LTV is not capped even if you have a average LTV for most apps who are reasonably retentive whatever average you calculate today is likely to just keep going up o year after year after year after year uh I mean I was looking at my own app and seven years in I still have 20% of people who

[40:52] subscribed within the first month so seven years still have 20% of people and so if I can stack more of those cohorts Now versus stacking them later even if I'm not getting 100% Ras on day seven if I can afford the cash to do that and expand the business it's going to pay dividends in the long run but you just got to make sure you you have some level of retention and confidence in that and then you have the cash and the risk tolerance to go ahead and invest more heavily yeah obviously the the C is that we have all the basics uh sort out what

[41:28] I mean is the install to free trial ratio the free trial to conversion ratio but this is nothing to do with apple SS right um the goal of Apple SS is bring in new users uh we have to like uh improve those inapp conversion rates anyway ourselves um regardless if you run ASA or not and one more thing about Ros is Ros should not be the primary metric um it should be combination of Revenue and rs for example we can think of two apps let's take meditation let's take hits space and Comm these are imaginary numbers um so don't sue me imagine hits space and and Comm both are

[42:05] running Apple CHS and headspace is spending let's say uh a million dollars and their their R is 75% RS but Comm is spending $2 million with 65% RS on the paper it looks like head space is doing much better right like um because it's getting 70% within like first 30 days or whatever but in long term the Comm is actually very positioned to lead because at the end of the one year they both are going to have 100% RS anyway according to their LTV metrics but Comm generated double the amount of Revenue that headspace even though there's a RS is not great for the com app so it is a combination of

[42:50] Revenue and R and if we don't consider Revenue our competitor will and they will eventually like bid higher of whatever the RS we're getting currently is going to suffer because now they're going to bid higher for the our positive RS keywords so yeah revenue is the one of the major number as well because the sport we want right like well and the other thing that Revenue takes into account that you that's hard to factor in is that there is some organic lift when you're running ASO I know this is another kind of controversial topic and uh I know you have some high hypothesis around the impact but the the reality is

[43:30] there's some impact um whether your hypothesis is correct or you know tons of people in Industry are like oh it's going to be magic like run as ASA and then your ASO is going to be amazing but so what what's your hypothesis on the impact of Asa on ASO I would call it conspiracy theory I would not even call hypothesis because that's such a take it with grain of bucket with bucket of salt this is why I love having you on versus like a growth hacker cuz a growth hacker would have just been like oh yeah 100% this is how it works you're like you see

[44:00] the data day in and day out you're like this is even a hypothesis because you want to have a level of confidence in in the answer but yeah what do you think because honestly you probably you your conspiracy theory is probably better than a lot of folks who speak confidently about this my theory is that download Volume correlates with Organic ranking it's one of those Trend that it doesn't matter what app it's always correlates with a such a strong efficiency the second factor I think is this is where the conspiracy theory part come in even at the keyword level imagine we have we are having same

[44:35] amount of downloads there's not much huge change in the download volume but you start running for weather app Apple search ads let's say whether radar maybe is one of the feature of your app yep that's a great keyword for my app yeah so whether radar you imagine your current organic ranking is maybe Sony or something as soon as you start running Apple search for that particular weather radar system and our app generate some installs you may see the organic ranking go really high maybe even reaching top 10 or top 20 just the skyrocketing within but the download Volume is same that's my conspiracy theory that maybe

[45:18] App Store considers Apple search as keyword as part of App Store um and now even the App Store algorithm can see that oh you know what this weather app is totally relevant to weather radar because users are clicking on it and using it um and don't why but then why wouldn't it change the download Volume if you go from like if if I start advertising for weather radar and I go get go from I'm probably like 200 in that search currently so I go from 200 to 20 um why would download Volume not change I'm only talking about that particular keyboard it's an imaginary hypothesis that we are running Apple

[45:59] search for only that keyword let's assume our um daily download is like 100 units in us and we started running that keyword for two installs a day I'm giving an example maybe at the end of the week the download Volume is not that high like 100 versus 102 installs but the organic ranking for every other keyword May remain same but for this particular keyword what we running in haet chats we may may see a kind of organic ranking uplift but like I said take it B bucket of salt it may not happen I don't recommend spending a lot of budget just for that purpose because it may happen it may not happen and yeah

[46:40] it does seem like Apple's search algorithm although it's still frustrating it doesn't feel like that still especially great at it um but it does seem like it's gotten more more sophisticated over the years so the people who who think there's going to be a onetoone response in taking us certain action might be surprised and like you said yeah it's it's a lot of money to put on the line with when any kind of algorithm like this there's no not a a level of certainty on it while we are on the topic the downar volume ARG going rank uh the theory is that it is kind of

[47:12] like a chicken and egg issue for especially for new apps or apps that are actually best in the class better than all the competitors but the competitors will be always number one in that case do not treat Apple as a like a there's a channel we should never run on because this may be the better option because as long as your app is better than competitors and they're ranking number one even then you can actually get high intent as long as we talked about the basic arap conversion ratios are basic um this these all great if that's the case like you don't even need like to

[47:51] run um million install campaigns you can just Target those High intent we're not going to get quantity um but we'll get the quality users and as long as we scaling up a revenue why does it matter how much if you're ranking number one or not I'm talking about apple J obviously it matters that we rank number one but sometimes it's nextra impossible for some keywords we can never rank number one right yeah I know that makes sense and speaking of scaling that's actually something I wanted to talk to you about um and that that's kind of the the challenge with App Store search ads is that even though it can be an incredible

[48:28] source of really high intent downloads the the kind of what everybody in the industry talks about is like well that's great but it's not scalable so how how do you think about scalability in app store search ads scalability I mean obviously it can we cannot compare Apple SS with meta campaigns or Tik Tok campaigns because it's um it's Apple verus ores um we are looking quality versus quantity um in my opinion the best way to scale is to adding more keywords High intent low intent like segmented by it um and adding broad match keywords that will literally like be exponentially increasing your um awareness and more countries by default

[49:15] um that's a easy way to scale and just monitor campaigns and emplo some kind of u a workflow like campaign structure should be in a such a way that it's easy to maintain them I'm not a big fan of like creating hundreds of campaigns for one country um because you only have one competitor set of keywords right like we cannot have multiple competitors um we don't need to run different different ad groups um yeah the bottom line is adding more keywords relevant keywords the more relevant the better they are um and adding more there's always competitor share that we can improve and brand is thing as we talked about it is its own

[49:59] thing we do not consider brand as our uh because brand is kind of steady flow right like I mean it's a good thing the brand Impressions go up but that's how I scale yeah but then what are what are the Ian do you see I guess it's just going to be so contextual right it's like for a health and fitness app it's like if they're willing to spend the money it can be a massive Channel because there's ton of high intent people coming and searching relevant keywords but then if you're in a niche a really small Niche where like you're really only relevant to very small

[50:30] number of searches then you're going to hit the wall sooner right so it's just it's just very contextual of like when you're going to hit the wall but then you don't know that that you've really hit the wall until you've done the experiments with broad match and experimented with the bidding and like tried stuff right yeah and apple is one of those things where the competitors are kind of can dictate what we can do next for example imagine there's a weather app and imagine there's for some weird reason there's no weather app in apple searchs ever running Apple searchs uh your app is the only one that

[51:06] has Apple Sears in that case your CPA will be like probably in cense in us your R can Skyrocket but that's like a dream scenario but imagine you like you have like 25 weather competitors weather app competitors in United States unfortunately it means that for the same number of installs your CPA probably like is 10 times now but the good thing is competitors also Dynamic just because they're bidding for a keyword doesn't mean that Apple considers them relevant same phenomenal brand as well if you're your competitor running same witha radar keyword and for some reason your app is performing better and apple can see that even if you're beaing half of your

[51:48] computer Apple will still prefer your ad guess Apple has to make money too right like they can just show the other app if it's not getting too much of uh traction yeah yeah that's interesting and then and so then part part of what you're saying is like even even if you are super Niche and you're like oh it's going to it's going to tap me out really quick go get those keywords because they're going to be so cheap so if you're if you're at a niche and you're not running Apple search ads you're probably leaving money on the table because there probably are some high intent low traffic keywords that still

[52:22] you're just printing money if you can pick those up yeah the we just need to adjust our expectations like we can't have like a million dollar day one you know Meta Meta kind of you know Blitz but if it have our expectations set and yeah and the interesting thing too is like even though meta you can theoretically scale even for for a niche app like you'll saturate that kind of Ideal customer profile and so yeah you can Scale near infinite on meta but you might not Scale profitably near infinite because is similar like as you start bidding higher and as you start saturating your market and those High

[53:03] intent users that you're going to be able to to get to then your cost ER are going to go up too because now you're now you're ending up with medium intent people and then low intent people so like nothing's truly infinitely scalable unless you're I mean like I guess these like T teu and stuff like that like when anybody is truly a potential customer there are like you can't scale to a level that that a lot of app can't but most apps aren't that so and one of the interesting thing is that how ad channels can behave differently for the same app obviously there any mature app

[53:37] company will be using multiple ad channels at the same time meta and apple searches and Google whatnot the difference is that Apple SES is relatively easier channel to maintain the reason is we don't have to create this influencer videos make it quirky like and there's a thing called fittig imagine you probably notice is that if you're using Instagram and US seeing same ad every day like it it it something will sit in and will never it's actually create May create a version to the app um but Apple Searchers we don't have that problem right because we're targeting new user looking exactly for that keyword so the

[54:16] ad fitting is not a really huge thing there is some display formats like search tabs or to dat tabs they but it's not like that extent of Instagram where we see like u 10 ads of the same app in the row and it's not that great experience and it's easier to scale because we're not dealing with creatives apple such as creatives is our whatever the screenshots we have metad right so and the keywords we don't change keywords right like it's always the same keywords we may add it we may I mean we may pause them or we may bit lower but a weather radar until the your app exist in the

[54:55] App Store the weather rad or is always be relevant we don't need to think creatively and it's great for people like us uh who are developers because we don't have to worry about like creative videos that you know catch people's attention yeah speaking of of creative and appstor screenshots and stuff though um how has product pages and being able to send specific keywords to specific product pages started to change the game because you you there is a a certain level now where you can experiment a little more with you know quote unquote creative on the App Store because you can create a separate product page for

[55:33] these different kind of use cases um have you seen that help accounts you know scale and get to better robots those are good problems to have because if you're considering a keyword specific custom prodct Pages it means that we already maximized whatever the impression share and we are reaching let's assume like there's a shopping app and they maximized 80% of impression sh for all generic terms um where custom product pages can move the needle is let's assume there is a Tim is running a ad for Thanksgiving and it's like a monthlong feature right but timu wants it Thanksgiving in the title and subtitle and screenshots but they can

[56:20] create its entire custom product page just for Thanksgiving and have Thanksgiving all across only for United States and they can use it um to scale up those Thanksgiving people who are creating why I'm saying Thanksgiving it should be Black Friday right Black Friday DS and yeah that way like you know Timo can scale up those keywords and in a indirect way I have also like custom product pages for AB testing this a one easy way to like simply Implement AB testing let see and you can even use similar uh Search terms like for example bid for have the United States states for our default product page and use

[57:02] utilize the new custom product page we want to test and see which one performs better and just compare each um there shouldn't be much difference between East Coast and West Coast anyway or you can also try ad scheduling which means during the first half of the day you can use it but I'm not a big fan because the day time of the day May dictate for example like if I'm if I'm a yoga app I may be look in the morning right so um so the geographical separation might be a good place to test yeah interesting all right well it's been so fun chatting today but we do need to to wrap up as as

[57:38] we do is there anything else you want to share or or anything you want to to tell the audience yeah um for new apps uh use apple SS as kind of customer Discovery thing and you can I mean you don't have to spend daily purges like like hundreds of dollars you can even get 5 six installs a day spending $10 $20 but use that as high intent and use them as a because you want to Target high intent users and improve your app and check this out our platform is designed to scale Apple suggest profitably SC searchat optimization.com um and find me on LinkedIn and ask me any questions and

[58:18] I'm always happy to talk about Apple search chats awesome and as I've kind of been wrapping up these podcasts too um if you have specific questions instead of hitting them up on LinkedIn where only the two of you can talk uh feel free to do it on uh on the sub Club community so we'll we'll po post this podcast on subcl Club Community um you can respond to that or just just tag dilip um so that your questions can be um beneficial to the the rest of the community as well yeah I I I was checking out your uh company and it and again it's really cool that you started

[58:51] this from a data perspective um and and you know it's it's clear that you've you know built these the algorithms to to make it so much easier for folks to um to do a lot of things that we talked about today um to manage those bids to uh automate some of that as well um so yeah it looks like a really cool platform and uh something I'm going to be checking out myself yeah sounds great awesome thanks for joining me and thanks for sharing all these great nuggets with folks thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can

[59:28] also stop by chat. subclub docomo our private community [Music]

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