If you ever had the experience of running AdWords campaigns for iOS apps you know that their effectiveness was always vastly inferior to those for apps in Play Market. Of course both AdWords and Play Market are under Google’s umbrella, and Apple is not that keen on playing ball in enemy’s territory. Thus in October 2017, Apple announced the launch of its own effective advertising service for the app store. Hence App Store Search Ads.
Setup
First, you need to register an ad account with your new or existing Apple ID. After confirming your registration, just fill out a form with your company’s address and other contact information. Now your ad account is ready for creating the first ad campaign.
Ad Campaign Creation
Choose the app you want to advertise with the help of a drop box, which allows searching by app name, Apple ID or its URL in iTunes.
Name your ad campaign, select the total budget (all the way up to 20 Million Dollars), and then indicate the words that should NOT be used for targeting in your ad campaign (your ads will not be shown to those searching for these selected words). When adding new words you will automatically see their popularity level and how often said words appear in the search queries.
Give a name to your new Ad Group, and then select for which devices the ad is valid (iPhone, iPad, or both). The storefronts country option is selected automatically, and as of now, the Search Ads service is available in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and Switzerland.
The next step is to set the cost per tap, which is the main cost criteria within Search Ads, where you pay every time someone taps on your ad. The rates can be as low as one cent, or as high as one thousand Dollars. At the end of the day, the priority of the ads shown will be determined by the app rating in the store, its download history, and reviews, as well as the cost you set per tap. This is pretty similar to what Google has with AdWords.
Off to targeting! A nifty Search Match option just lets the system chose the most appropriate target audience for you. It is based on several algorithms that determine the most relevant potential users for your app. Search Match does not require any additional tweaking and really makes targeting work a breeze.
Now you have to choose several keywords, just like with AdWords. The system will analyze your app and will actually give you a list of recommendations to choose from.
You can also use any third-party service for the job. As for the target audience, you can play around with the traditional options, like:
- Who will see the ad (all user, or only those who without your advertised app);
- Their sex and age;
- Their location – it’s the entire country by default, but you can be more specific.
After that, the system will create a preview of your potential ad as it will be shown in search results. You will see something like that –
If you are happy with the results, all you need to do is add your payment details and you are all set!
As is usually the case, Apple came up with a simple but really efficient tool for the promotion of your mobile dating apps within its search results. Even the most advanced and complicated ad campaigns shouldn’t take longer than 15 to 20 minutes to set up and launch. Anyone can handle it, but SkaDate Dating Software team is more than happy to assist you if you need any help with the job.
