Apple Search Ads(ASA) is one of the most effective marketing strategies to acquire users for your apps. ASAs are shown above the App Store search results. It helps people discover your app on the first spot in App Store and match customers with your app at the right moments.
However, not all users who have seen the ads of your app will tap, download, launch, sign up and finally reach the lowest part of the acquisition funnel——subscribe or make a purchase, which is the final goal of ASA.
So how to improve your apple search ads with funnel analysis to get the most valuable users that will finally reach the bottom of the funnel, and generate revenues for your apps? To get the answer, we must first know what the key factors are that influence your ads' visibility.
For anyone who is just starting out, our Beginner's Guide to Apple Search Ads may help.
Two Key Factors to Get Your ASA Visible
Apple says on its website “Whether your ad shows over other advertisers bidding on that same query is determined by the combination of your app’s relevance to the search query and the amount of your bid.” From this saying, we can see that the key factors to ASAs’ visibility are keyword relevance and bid.
Keyword Relevance
Apple is committed to creating an optimal user experience. So they will definitely not show your ASA to users if your keywords are not relevant to users’ inquiries, no matter how much you bid. Elements that would impact keyword relevance are the search inquiries, the keywords you choose to bid, the metadata of your app, the product page detail information in the app store and also the historical tap-through rate, which indicates how many users have seen your app and tapped on it.
Bid
A bid is the maximum amount of money that you are willing to pay for each click on your ASA, also known as Cost Per Tap. If you are bidding on the same keywords as your competitors and the price you offer is higher than theirs, then you will win the auction.
How to Improve Apple Search Ads with Appflow.ai Funnel Analysis
As we may all know, Apple does offer us related metrics, like impressions, taps, and downloads. However, these metrics can not determine how effective your ads campaign is. That's why we need funnels to generate a more comprehensive picture of subscribers from paid channels, to help identify the most effective keywords and bids, make smarter marketing budget allocations, and finally improve ASAs.
Appflow.ai, a mobile subscription measurement tool, can help us with the creation of funnels here. Now let’s talk about how to improve Apple Search Ads with Appflow.ai’s funnel analysis.
1. Appflow.ai’s Funnel Analysis Measures the Performance of Each ASA Campaign
Appflow.ai’s funnel analysis supports integrating with ads platforms, like Apple Search Ads, and attribution tools, like Adjust or Appflyer, and measuring the performance of every ASA campaign by generating a funnel, with important events you choose to display and detailed data and changing percentages between each layer of event. This enables you to understand how well your ASA campaign behaves and what values a specific campaign brings you.
By comparing different funnels of the ASAs campaigns in appflow.ai, you can understand which campaign brings the highest conversion rate. The result can help you reallocate your ads marketing budget.
For example, when you find out that there is one ASAs campaign that has the highest conversion rate, check on the campaign for details to find out which keyword it contains and what the Cost Per Tap is. If you find that it is the right campaign to promote your app, take down the keywords for future campaigns and increase the bid properly for that particular keyword. In this way, you can improve your Apple Search Ads.
Funnel Analysis is on Appflow.ai's Free plan. Create a free appflow.ai account (with no credit card required) and start free Apple Search Ads attribution today.
2. Increase Installation Rate Using ASO Based on Funnel Analysis
Appflow.ai shows the install number from each campaign clearly on the funnel. Actually, the install number is a small indicator of your ASA campaign success.
So, when you notice low installs in your ads campaigns, there must be something wrong. You should review your product page and update your store listing with more convincing messages and creatives as they are the last factors that decide on users’ installations. Craft app titles, descriptions, and metadata with the most proper keywords that will entice users to install.
3. Better Onboard Users and Improve ASA’s Conversion with Funnel Analytics
Every app, if carefully planned, may design an ideal user path to onboard new users. But how to measure the effectiveness of your designed user onboarding process, or say, will users follow the desired path?
Appflow.ai’s funnel analysis can help here. It allows app owners to track custom events, which can then be used as events to be displayed on the funnel.
For example, if you have a dating app, you want to onboard sign-up users, so you will guide them to make a match and then send messages. In this case, the custom events you will want to track are making a match and sending messages.
After appflow.ai receives the events, it allows you to choose from the event list and generate the funnel for you. So you can clearly know how many users have signed up, how many sign-up users have made a match and how many users have sent messages.
If the number of users who signed up and made a match is lower than it should be, reconsider the onboarding process, maybe the timing is not right or there are some technical bugs.
Try to fix the issue and nudge the most potential users, who click on your ASA and decide to install your app, to finish onboarding and begin using your app. In this way, you can not only improve the user onboarding experience but also make the best of your ASAs campaign as the conversion rate will be higher.
Final Take Away
Apple Search Ads is an effective way to target your apps directly to users who are searching in the app store. In order to improve ASAs, we need to know how users are performing in our apps using funnel analytics.
However, Apple seems not to offer all the data enough for us to create funnels from a certain campaign or keywords. So we need help from mobile measurement tools, such as appflow.ai and attribution tools, like Adjust and AppsFlyer. These tools will give us a holistic view of all the data and create a funnel for us to refer to. And finally, we can optimize our Apple Search Ads with funnel analytics.
Appflow.ai’s funnel analysis is totally free up to $10K/MTR. Create an account and try it now!
How to Improve Your Apple Search Ads with Funnel Analysis
