Apple Search Ads Multiple Ad Placements - Workshop Review

Delving deeper into the captivating world of Apple Search Ads, Team Newton hosted their first-ever live Apple Search Ads multiple ad placements workshop on the platform’s Multiplacement Ad Strategy. Apple Search Ads (ASA) experts, Rati Mehra – Senior Associate Director | Global Lead – Newton & Vishal Singh – Senior Customer Success Manager, Newton, hosted an insightful session to break down the various functionalities of ASA’s multiple ad variations and their placements. 

In this quick read, we will cover the key takeaways and highlights from the workshop.

Setting the Context – Why an Apple Search Ads Multiple Ad Placements Workshop?

The session started off with Vishal taking the audience through the market trends accelerating the growth of Apple Search Ads as a premium user acquisition tool. There are approximately 1.46 billion iPhone users globally, and the number just keeps growing every year. While the United States does dominate in terms of Apple device market share, a fast-emerging Apple device hotspot is Asia Pacific region.

India, Singapore, and the Philippines alone have a market share of approximately 21 million premium, high-spending iPhone users. Apple Search Ads become a useful channel to reach out to the region’s high-quality audience to foster app growth and scale. Statistically, iOS users have been shown to record higher average revenue per user and also contribute to improved ROAS. In 2022, in-app purchase revenue in iOS grew by 40% as compared to Play Store’s 9% increment. Apple Search Ads platform, driven by matching ads to users’ search intent, regularly records approximately 60% average tap-to-install rate for ad appearances.

To make the best use of the platform, app marketers have to navigate across multiple functionality levels like keywords, campaign structure, setting up ad groups, optimizing ads for right placements and of course, the analytics. This can get quite overwhelming and that’s where Team Newton comes in to simplify Apple Search Ads for app marketers looking to crack the App Store success formula. Full funnel integration makes it even more easier to track success at a wholistic level. 

Apple Search Ads Multiple Ad Placements Workshop – Key Takeaways

What are the ad placements offered by Apple Search Ads?

Apple Search Ads provide 4 critical touchpoints to engage your audience with your paid content. 

• Today Tab: Over 600 million App Store visitors start their weekly App Store journey, from this page. 
• Search Tab: Catch your audience’s attention right when they are just about to download an app
  
• Search Results Page: Automated ad placement for users looking for apps in your category
• Custom Product Pages: Curated ads to appeal to specific sub-segments of your targeted user profile
  

How to decide on the right placements to choose for your Apple Search Ads campaigns?

Once you have your campaign objectives clear, it’s an easy task to figure out the best suitable ad placements for your brand.

• Today Tab: Drives wide audience reach, improves app’s visibility and brand awareness; best suited to drive contextual ads, directing users to custom product pages linked to Today tab ads
• Search Tab: Position your brand in front of your target user profile right when they are about to search for an app
• Search Results Page: Leverage Apple’s automation techniques to place an ad and garner impressions and conversions from relevant audience groups that were initially not targeted
• Custom Product Pages: Precision targeting on the basis of geographies, demographics like language and online interests

What is a Custom Product Page?

Essentially Custom Product Pages are curated creative sets focusing on different themes, audience sub-groups or app features to maximize ad impact. They are like product landing pages within App Store, that can be customized to the preference of specific target audience segments. 

Custom Product Pages are usually linked to Today Tab ads – there’s no keyword play here, so figuring out the right creative combinations is important to improve the effectiveness of your app’s user acquisition campaign.

How to make the best use of Custom Product Pages?

With Custom Product Pages, app advertisers can generate up to 35 automated product landing pages for improved contextual advertising within the App Store ecosystem.

• Custom Product Pages (CPP) are fed their content through app creatives, app titles, subtitles, descriptions, and metatext uploaded in App Store Connect. To ensure good quality CPPs are created, continually check and update your App Store Connect assets.
• Be firm about the content that you would like to push out via CPPs – utilize this functionality to promote new feature launches, new shows, or engaging content additions to the app or even special in-app events like a sale, a seasonal offer, or user delight activities
• Leverage video content to be part of your CPP creative set to utilize the media space on giving more useful information about your app to consumers
• Ensure your basic assets that feed CPPs are always updated, fresh, and in line with the industry trends, and user expectations of your category.

What are some of the best practices to keep in mind to ensure your ads appear exactly where and how you want them?

That’s where your keywords, creatives, and clarity of campaign objectives come into play.

For keywords: Apple Search Ads offers three main keyword match type variations – exact match, broad match, and search match. The type of keywords to leverage are brand, category, related, and competitor keywords. This is a topic in itself, so to know more about keyword choosing & optimization, visit our article detailing all you need to know about Apple Search Ads keyword match types. A clean list of high-performing keywords, with the right targeting options is crucial to secure the best ad placements for your campaigns. 

For creatives: App screenshots, app previews, and promotional texts are three categories of content that work to make good creative sets. For app previews, a 500MB video of 15-30 seconds duration in tH.264 & ProRes (HQ only) formats work best. When uploading screenshots, double-check pixel sizes, and if they need to be scaled for different screen sizes of iPhones. 

We have also compiled the key takeaways of the Apple Search Ads Multiplacement Ad Strategy workshop in this downloadable PDF. In case you are looking to connect with the Newton team for any doubts or clarifications to make the best use of ad placements for your campaigns, feel free to connect with the team.

As the team learns more about Apple Search Ads, we are regularly publishing app advertising content to help app marketers navigate the premium user acquisition platform better. If you would like to get regular updates about the latest insights on Apple Search Ads, follow us on LinkedIn.