How to Nail ASO with Apple Search Ads

uh olga is from split metrics uh and we're going to be talking here about how to nail and we've already talked about aso how important is um so we're going to talk about how to nail aso with apple search ads so i'll go over to you oh i should give you a chance to get set up of course so uh obviously um hopefully you'll be able to go and just check your slides are working fine but if anyone has any questions in the meantime um obviously please feel free to use the q a section uh but although it's all really up to you how you want to continue yeah thanks oscar for the intro and good morning everyone hope you can hear

me and see me well um so i'm gonna share some slides just a sec um so yeah let's let's start uh so as oscar said on olga with split metrics we specialize in apple such as optimization and aso and now i'd like to talk about the dependencies between the two and share tips on how to use this paid user acquisition channel to enhance your organic aso strategy uh by the way did you know that apple such as has an average conversion rate uh more than 50 percent and the great news is that this high quality user for this acquisition channel can also be used to identify relevant high-performing keywords and visuals that bring conversions and dancing thus enhance your organic aso strategy how so let's dive into it so first of all with applesauce as you

can find the most relevant and popular keywords keywords for your app store listing should be a combination of high relevance low competitiveness and high popularity it has high search volume you can take advantage of the apple such as opportunities for finding new keywords that fit all of those criteria the first one is popularity scores search popularity level indicates how many users are looking for an app using specific keywords in apple socialize popularity scores have the form of blue dots the higher the number of blue dots the higher the popularity score but here is a tip uh you can use search as keyword popularity checker a free google chrome extension by search as hq to see search popularity numeric values and maximum possible impressions per day per keyword and what's more you may check the popularity of a particular keyword

across various top trends so my colleagues should have shared the link um in the chat to this chrome extension uh or you can just look it up and with this extension you will have even more accurate data on such popularity of keyword so that was how you can find popular keywords with the help of apple such as and what about relevance i have an answer you can discover relevant search terms with the help of discovery campaigns there are search mesh and broad mesh options in apple search ads search mesh helps discover keywords that could be missed for example search queries for competitor apps trending searches or even localized keywords and broad match is an additional option which can help you find synonyms long tail keywords and phrases related to your top performing keywords to mine keywords you should create a separate discovery campaign for each

star friend and set a comfortable budget to spend on searching your keywords the bigger the budget the faster you'll find more relevant keywords but in general it's a good idea to apply 20 to 80 rule it has to allocate 20 of your budget for the discovery campaign then create an appropriate account structure it's important to add keywords from other campaigns as exact match negatives to the discovery once you've worked on that give your campaign a couple of weeks to run this will guarantee that you collect sufficient data to analyze new search terms that apple search as matches to your ads and after that at step two analyze search term performance and identify good search terms bad search terms and terms with insufficient data so in this slide you can see a general algorithm for finding new keywords with apple search ads but you may ask me here so how can i

distinguish good search terms from the bad ones good search terms are relevant high performing keywords that make your traffic grow without hurting its quality and probably the best way to evaluate uh the quality of search terms is to look at their cost per acquisition or cpa so for example if your target cpa is five dollars then queries with downloads above zero and cpa less than five can be considered good taxer rate and conversion rate are also great signals of relevance bad search terms are irrelevant on non-performing search terms with don't which don't bring any installs and eat up sufficient amount of your budget like three times your target cpa or those that do bring occasional installs but the cpa is too high and what about search terms with insufficient data well if there are no conversions and your expense threshold hasn't been reached yet you cannot move a search

term to a good or bad category for example a search term that has spent less than three times your target cpa and hasn't brought any downloads yet another case is low volume terms terms that haven't gained 10 impressions yet so apple does not disclose them so unfortunately there is not much that can be done here finally you should add good search terms to the exact mesh ad groups remember to negate them in the in your discovery campaign add bad search terms to your discovery campaign as exact negatives and take more time to research information for search terms with insufficient data and here i'd like to share a quick pro tip there are apples such as optimization tools like searches hq by split matrix which can help automate certain tasks and optimize your ad funnel on this slide you can see some of the numerous automation capabilities that such

searches hq provides are for discovery campaigns you can use rules for search terms to avoid spending ad budget on irrelevant keywords and automatically negate negate them plus you can set up a rule to receive alerts or automatically move new relevant search terms to your exact match campaigns so now we've learned how to find keywords used as search queries by users but will they bring you conversions will they generate revenue with apple such as you can recognize keywords that are not only popular among users but also bring you real value here you'll need a mobile attribution or in other words mobile measurement partner like apps lawyer or adjust apple such as combined with mrps will enable you to analyze lower funnel metrics and estimate such critical metrics as retention and revenue so you'll be able to see how

specific keywords perform in the long run in the bottom of the funnel so i've already mentioned that there are tools for apple such as management that embrace apple social's native functionality features for automation and optimization and integrate with mmps so searches hq by split metrics is exactly this kind of tool it has an all-in-one dashboard that provides you with both apple such as metrics combined with mmp's data plus flexible filters and bulk management capabilities it helps you analyze and optimize the whole media buy-in funnel and getting back to the keywords that generate conversions and revenue so based on information from your mmps you can view that you can view in searches hq you can identify relevant high-performing keywords that bring revenue driven actions like subscriptions and purchases and thus make your aso strategy data

driven and value based and once you've identified such keywords that bring your conversions and what's more generates revenue you can rest assured that your keyword choices are based on data and so you may add them to your metadata and by metadata i mean not only title subtitle and the keyword set but you can also add your top performing keywords to the first screenshot as well just make sure to a b test that beforehand but that's not all with apple such as you can not only find the best performing keywords but also identify visuals that work for the benefit of your app's conversion rate um in apple such as there is a free inbuilt tool called creative sets that provides you with an opportunity to run a b testing experiments and with screenshots and app reviews to improve the tax rate and the install rate

first the thing to remember when customizing creative sets note that uh screenshots will save the order in which they were uploaded to app store connect however you are free to make some tweaks and thus test those screenshots that are usually not displayed in search and are hidden on your project page so you you can see some of the ways that you can use creative sets in apple search ads first you can test screenshots below the fold like screenshots one two four three four six and so on you could also test planned features imagine that you're going to add a few features to your mobile game you can create screenshots that would reflect new features or characters configure custom creative sets and see whether the conversion rate is higher or lower with ad variations that include these screenshots based on this information you'll find out if users are interested in these features and decide if you should add them you

can also re-engage all the users by promoting cool newly added features or characters in your game via custom creative sets search strategy you can display core features and align them to keyword things like empire building aspect versus war and battle aspect within one game so as you already know users see only the first three screenshots on your of your app and search results and on your products page as well and with creative sets you can reflect all of your core features on custom screenshot sets and leave none of them unnoticed uh you can also adjust your app to each target audience like mobile games screenshots was a male character for women with female character for men and vice versa so that's how you may use creative sets in apple such as for the benefit of your organic um asl strategy uh however be careful there are a number

of limitations uh that come to the surface if you compare this tool to a fully flat fledged mobile a b testing platform like split metrics uh in first in conscious to split metrics with creative sets you cannot test the whole app store product page like a icon title and other important elements second your visual assets cannot work can work in different ways for paid ad campaigns and in organic search results um sergi cannot apply the results you gained uh by testing creative sets in apple such as environment to your product page and ads on google play as user behavior in two stories can be different um also you cannot run an unlimited number of tests simultaneously as the number of creator sets is limited and while split metrics and other a b testing tools are widely used for a mobile app idea validation you cannot utilize creative sets for

that purpose uh to finish up i'd like to highlight uh some other ways you can use apple search ads there are a lot of ways and strategies to try and these are just a few first brand protection and the legal way to run ads on your competitors brand keywords the so-called brand offense second finding new app ideas app promotion at the pre-launch stage or pre-order using apple such as right after launch to increase the app visibility on the app store and re-engagement strategy let's dwell a bit on the third point because not everyone is familiar with this app promotion before is released so intrigued uh there is a pre-order pre-order option on the app store which is also available on google play and called pre-registration there

the idea is that if you enable this option users will see your app among search results and another pages before it's live and will be able to pre-order it they will just click the get button and on the day of launch they'll receive a notification letting them know that your app is available so leveraging a pre-order or pre-registration feature will bring you a number of benefits and on the app store you can run apple search ads for your app available for pre-order this this will provide you with even more eye-opening insights that you could leverage before a launch so uh this was just a fraction of how you can use apple such as for the purposes of app store optimization you can find out more on split metrics blog or youtube channel and i'll also be glad to answer any questions so there should be some time left for this i guess

and with me here uh for the q a part i also have my colleague natalie ostopovich a b testing expert so yeah um she she should jump in if you have any questions around testing visuals great stuff thank you very much and uh hello guys uh so yeah we um i just want to try and get my head around it so i think the split metric stylus is the the a b testing side of things is really fascinating i think the use of uh of these tools to be able to really or your keywords are likely you know needing to be again fascinating i just um i think i've got the right link but it'd be useful if somebody could check uh for the chrome extension i put that into the text chat so uh hopefully that's useful so um how much uh awareness do you think people have out there in terms of knowing how to find the right terms and

how to be able to integrate that with their use of their paid acquisition is that something you think people understand deeply or is it you think it's fairly new um sorry i i just to make it make sure that i understand the question could you please uh repeat that sure i was just saying how well do you think people understand the importance of targeting their aso and integrating that with their use of paid user acquisition is that something you think people understand or is it new um well i think it is quite new for some people and not everyone apple search as is still quite um like a young paid acquisition channel right so not everyone is using it um and that's why i chose this topic for this talk and we've also done a webinar on this uh same topic recently because we just want to promote this idea that you can

you know use this great user acquisition channel that has this high conversion rate and um brings you high quality users because they have high intent when they're searching uh for some searching some terms on the app store and it's great that you can also use this as a source of data on the relevance of keywords on the popularity of keywords and um yeah use this for aso purposes so we we think this is a great topic and kind of trying to promote that yeah and i think it's interesting particularly to be able to have a chrome tool where you can actually just start playing around and seeing what words are working which ones are not likely to work that popularity i think is kind of a key measure and i actually wonder whether you know frankly i'm thinking about using it myself to regardless of apple or not just to see if i'm using the right terms in the store pages that we're creating for our own games um yeah but this this chrome extension it works

combined with apple such as native dashboard so you you still have to have this native dashboard and run some campaigns to be able to to check the numeric values for keyword popularity yeah i think that's that's really the key thing isn't it it's like trying to find the sort of balance and i mean where i was coming from is actually you know we're always looking for ways to try and test things um you know and any any tool that's available to us to be able to sort of explore what the data could could be like is always useful um so we've got a question here from uh asd [Music] what does it normally cost to get a campaign together using apple search ads you know what is there sort of a typical value i've got a minimum value you mean like a budget tools yeah like a budget yeah uh well um we would recommend starting with probably a few thousand uh like just to get enough you know text data

and um downloads data and if you also want to evaluate like the keywords from revenue standpoint uh you'll need to like pour more budget there right um so yeah this depends on like what what metrics you're trying to evaluate to just evaluate like the upper final matchup probably like a couple of thousand would be enough but if you would want to like have have more insights you would need like more budget for sure no i mean it's always the case you always want more budget but it's always trying to find out what the minimum threshold i think is a i mean one of the things i think is really interesting is when you're doing experiments to try and test particularly try and work out the viability of where in the the ad testing process you are so i mean obviously if you're the hyper casual end and you're doing the very first release of the game you don't want to spend more than a couple hundred dollars so you're probably not going to be doing something like this you're going to need to make sure the game is valid and solid

before you start using this technique but it feels to me like this is a really smart way to go from that early testing into something a bit more robust when you already know the game is settled when you already know the game is you know has potential and then what you're now trying to do is optimize its performance is that a fair summary yeah probably yeah that is a fair summary so thanks for that you know some people say that um apple ads as a channel may have a a little bit like higher cpi's cost per installs compared to other channels but in the end uh this brings you more quality users with higher retention rates and like higher lifetime value so um yeah so you'll you'll need to know that um yeah you'll be investing in this channel and it will pay off so that's an interesting one so i'm going to be i'm going to be really cruel

and ask you to give us some numbers you probably won't be able to but i'm going to try i mean if you're going to compare say something i'm saying i'm going to try and use i'd know classic facebook ad versus a maybe a a video ad versus apple search ads is there a kind of like baseline expectation in terms of cost per install versus return on advertising spend have you got any metrics that you can share to give people an expectation of how these these compare you know at split metrics we do this annual um like data analysis and we are um provide uh after that analysis we provide benchmarks on the average cost per install and it costs cpas like cost per acquisition and cost per tax um and we publish this um benchmarks apple such as benchmarks reports annually so uh the girls like my colleagues they should um

share the link in the chat um and everyone can go and download that report and it will certainly give some ideas i think hannah has just done that so uh we can make we can make sure that gets shared and i think that's that's really the key thing it's like i think with all these um processes it's always important to understand you know your sources uh and what that does for the purposes of um you know not just how much it costs to get the individual install but how much the lifetime value of those players are going to be i also think it's interesting from the point of view of understanding more about those players and what they need i mean as a game designer i'm interested in what players want and you know how do we make sure that the experience matches their expectations and exceeds that and i think you know unless we understand more about the audience it's hard for us to do that but i think in this particular case what you're i think also showing us it's just how important it is to understand how we get those people

over the line and you know to get that store design correctly so we're communicating the right messages how much information do you think there is uh available before you kind of create your store to be able to make sure you get the right messages for the audience is this tool for um you know the keywords enough or is there other sources of data you think people should be looking at to help make sure that you're targeting the right thing for the game well you certainly should uh do uh the research before that um and with a um apple search ads you can get like uh a feel of um like whether you're actually targeting the right keywords right because you might be targeting them and they might bring you tabs but they do might not bring your installs in the end and revenue so um yeah you need to do uh the research beforehand but i'm probably not like the best expert to

talk about this like i said we had um anna's talk earlier talking about kind of how important research was she did a great case study showing how uh they work through particularly though i think i think what you and anna have both kind of been highlighting for me anyway it's just the importance of being willing to do tests and i think that's why that question earlier was so important about what the minimum price point would be because in order for us to do multiple tests we want to keep the cost of those tests as low as possible don't we uh yeah so with any any particular strategies you can think you know you can share with us about how we experiment using those keywords and still keep the price low um keeping keeping the budget low right yeah yeah uh well i wanted to think about that um probably we should

um around the search mesh option with a low budget and we should really be careful there because you know it can't can be matching you to all kinds of stuff to irrelevant terms as well so you need to be really quick there and doing the um analysis and jumping in to negate any irrelevant terms right um and um yeah so you you can like if you're worried about this um this aspect you should um you can just start with a low budget and with low bids and you can um day by day you can increase this a little by little until you get enough data and in in the position to that there is another strategy when you start with like okay like with good bids strong bids uh the cost per tab basement and by this way you will get uh enough game data to analyze um and to work with more quickly for

sure but you know you might have wasted some money on on some irrelevant keywords right so yeah there are oh it's never a waste it's just learning it's the cost of learning yeah yeah you can put it like that there was always this joke the uh well not joke there's always this people used to say that you know half the money i spend on advertising is wasted i i just don't know which half i've never bought into that i've always thought that the key point is if you're using data effectively if you're using your kind of you know research properly then it's not wasted money because it's all about learning and i think as long as we're adopt you know we're taking that mindset as a team to continuously learn and continuously improve and systematically choose the right things to change i think that it drives us to much more successful outcomes in general would you agree yeah i'm sure sure great great greatly put

okay olga and and thank you very much guys for uh your your talk that was great stuff