0:08thank you thanks for guys thank you guys for coming I mean I know it's late it's very intimate I was you know if you want to recruit more people I'm down go ahead I'll wait all right let's get into it I want to take I want to be as interactive as possible I like doing stuff where you almost get to see me work because I learned better that way so hopefully you learn better that way too but this is the complete guide to Apple search ads just a little bit about me been doing that for a long time essentially you know it started in 2011.
0:45started podcasts that everybody should be listening to in 2013 and then 2014 the audience started coming to me so I ended up leaving that job running growth for a startup in San Francisco if you haven't noticed by my accident I'm from California yeah and so anyways they started coming to me that I ended up leaving my corporate job to do this full-time and now we're at Market agency focused on paywall optimization conversion rate optimization ASO ASA and all the fun stuff all right and recover this and I don't know if you guys went to this session but you know here's why I love ASA easy to set up no MMP required Apple's just kind of telling you what the hell is happening anyways easy to manage it's just math and I'll break it down in the most simplest math problems possible and then it's one of the best Roi channels from my experience now obviously every app is different so they'll take this as like
1:40go I gotta do this but it has been pretty consistent across the board okay and then I'm gonna point to the same side of that Emery had about the the singular one too so one of the top it's an alphabetical okay it's not like search ads number one it's alphabetical right cool let's get to it all right I think the the campaign structure I was talking to looking at yours too I peeked over I think camping structure is the most important I think this is what most people get wrong here's what Apple suggests no no offense to any of the ASO firms here that's what a lot of them suggest too okay so they go brand category competitor all on exact and I'll explain all these in a little more detail then you have a discovery and they have the broad ad groups Broad and search Match campaign on and I'll explain all of this what it all means but I personally believe this is my personal opinion no data back
2:35you should do it this way and I'll tell you exactly why I so have your brand that's the most important then have the exact that's like competitors everything that Apple said category competitor all right that's all under exact I'm combining it now I'm breaking out the discovery into its own campaigns the simple reason is you can only manage your budgets on a campaign level so like sometimes one of our campaigns we just set up search Match is doing really well that means no keywords Apple you do the work all right it's doing really well but if I just put it under Discovery one I'm lazy how would I see it unlike the campaign really quick screen and two how do I scale that up and so when we're trying to scale sometimes these Discovery campaigns actually help us scale faster than an exact match campaign so exact is just all the keywords that you want to really Target and the only time when I do start
3:28breaking it out is when I'm like oh you know what this keyword is really important let me break it out into its own campaign or this keyword like I'll show you examples but like we work with a big video editor app and we put everything under exact but then we pulled out our video editor keywords around video editing and put it into its own campaign so we can manage the budget there it's just about campaign mode management the daily span that's it so here the wrong way just kidding am I right all right so here's exactly why so I like to always have data with why I have these opinions all right so this is a big client I try to Mark out everything and you can see it is me up there if it's me so here generic right and you can see the spend and the cost per acquisition all these numbers and we just broke it out here because I did a CPP like Emery said and this is a big brand so it's all like you
4:23know we can really put out that's not they don't just do video editing right and so that's why we did it this way and that way I can manage like sometimes Discovery you can see the broad oh I did put this in this way but this one I did put it in the the wrong way but you can see the spend and you can see that Discovery in Broad are doing better like this sorry I called it search match but this is a discovery campaign so you can see like they're doing a lot better than the exact match campaign right and now I can really figure out oh maybe I want to spend 100 maybe you could go up to 100 maybe I want to send 75 a day so you can see that's why I like it that way because just visually it's easy I can log into Apple search ads see any campaigns that are going crazy going to those campaigns adjust those bids and then I'm out all right managing bids how are you guys doing in terms of like actually I won't get into real detail
5:20all right here's how we set up the starting bid Who start who has Apple search ads right now thank you come on this is like an internet room so and who's thinking about it right now oh everybody's starting now okay all right so I will skip over this a little bit but this is on average remember you you know you tell me if you see something different here but on average this is what we normally seen for a conversion rate now this conversion rate is very key because that's going to really determine how much you can bid for a particular keyword right so brand 70 90 exact so that's competitor generic keywords all into one 30 to 40.
5:5920 to 35 percent on those so I'm less conservative on those Discovery campaigns but I'm going to be more aggressive on the exact match campaigns and here's how I determined the cost per tab so Apple you pay per tab that's why conversion is so expensive so critical because if people are tapping on your ad but not installing it then you're going to pay a boatload on this so your ideal cost per acquisition is a simple math formula it's just customer tab is simple math it's just your ideal cost per acquisition multiplied by your conversion rate for that particular keyword yeah so I have this handy dandy spreadsheet that I put together and then you can see that just makes it easy for me so when I'm adjusting bids I just pull this up what's the client's ideal cost per acquisition what is the keyword converting at and I just quickly adjust the bids and that like when working with client this is what I go to first and
6:55foremost usually they're bids are like five dollars seven dollars there's no real Rhyme or Reason but when I'm first setting up the campaign this is how I set it up I might be a little bit more aggressive so let's go back here real quick right so on the exact match I might just put it started at 50 and then Broad and surge match I might put that at 40 just so I can get some data going because usually I'm cheap and I'll start at like 20 but sometimes you get no data and so I rather have a little bit more data spend a little bit and then pull back after I get some data all right cool tricks and one of the things I want to do towards the end was just show you how it set up a campaign how do I do keyword research I was going to ask if anybody wanted me to audit their search ads just invite me I'll take a look but it is recorded So unless Ben agrees to not publish it then we'll just skip over that part so Emory
7:48talked talked about this custom product pages here and we created them now I've had mixed results anybody love custom product pages okay anybody seen mixed results yeah all right you still love it though yes okay I like that anybody can subscribe Pages no okay all right so we did a custom product page and I think the one time it one time it did work was when we pulled out video editor and put it on its own campaign and like that campaign had a custom product page because this was generic we're all branding right the company branding but then we went after video editor that's what really worked because we had no whoops not a different slide in here but we literally had no spin on video editor in when it was just the normal search ads like you know normal App Store page because it did nothing about video editing it had some stuff but when call out video editor that's when it really helped out
8:50okay the other cool thing is competitor terms do work right so it's the same client you can see some of the even like non-english keywords work pretty well so I try to put the spin right and you can see the spends pretty decent cost per tap is really low now our ideal cost per acquisition we're now four to five dollars but you can see how much I actually put as a Max bid and how much it actually I was paying for so this is the few times you can do Apple's suggested they'll usually be in this column suggested bids is these competitor terms now it feels like a generic term like video editor or whatever it was don't unless you're willing unless the math works right that CPT time CPA multiply by conversion unless the math works there don't do it you're going to end up if Apple's suggesting five to ten dollars for that for that keyword you're likely going to pay five to ten dollars for that keyword
9:44for generic terms but for competitors this is when it actually does work doesn't always work here we had to adjust the bids right here right because the cost per acquisition was a little bit too high but it does work for competitive terms here so what we do is we go aggressive we just monitor it on a daily basis and then we adjust based off the data okay got some broad pages and we had to pull it out because you're going to let me use the slide he's like no I'm gonna have this line so they're gonna it I'll use it like this then so that's this is what I love about these custom product pages and this is why I said this because I was like look if you're gonna go after tick tock right well then call out Tick Tock we've actually seen when we did a product page optimization for one of our clients it was like calm stress feel better all that stuff right all the good emotions and then we change it to number
10:31one let's just say meditation out number one meditation app did everything better actually the right phrasing was like calm stress with theist meditation app so essentially it's the AdWords trick from back in the day you know Hannah you're probably 10 at the time but it was when you would call out the keywords during AdWords the PPC campaign do you call out the keyword that you're bidding on and you bold it and you had this little trick so same trick here with custom product pages in my opinion if you just call out the keyword that you're trying to really aggressively go after the tap the tap the rate should go up the conversion rate sheets go up too that's why I really like this slide I mean I did one better look this is for Chrome Opera ditch the basic ah I have to use this one but I get to use this one for myself and then here's Firefox fire the fox here too okay now I believe that has less than let's say 50 ratings
11:28everybody's got some fun okay who's got less than 100. less than a thousand all right you guys everybody's killing it right you guys are buying all right I have to have the party all right so here's what we did here's how you can instantly because I believe with the Apple search ads that ratings the number of ratings matters more than the actual average rate now the average rating can't be like crap like if it's above 4.1 then you're doing pretty well okay so how do we scale this so I did this back in the day where I would open my app and ask for a rating right that didn't work and so I we have a YouTube channel and stuff and so we have a community people tell me Steve you know that doesn't work I've been saying do it on second open because 25 of your first opens come back only 25 that means they love you already right so just doing a second open it's the first thing they see they're like no
12:28Steve that works okay but if you do it after onboarding if you guys have pay walls if you do it after paywalls it works better right so that's that's kind of cool so here's one client where we do this in we added the review prompt after a paywall now his paywall is a hard payroll hard payable just means no X on the actual so it's only people who activated trial you can do that that way too right so you know people activate a trial they probably want to test out your app and all we did on the very next screen was show them the review prompt the default app store review prompt okay so here's what happened to the numbers okay and I'm gonna numbers numbers guy November 4.3 don't pay attention here divert your IC here 4.3 32 reviews December 4.3 51 reviews January 4.5 313 ratings it's all the numbers right I put this together in spite of this guy I was talking to he's like Steve that would not work what happened what your average
13:33ratings would suffer blah blah blah blah blah and I was like bro enough people have told me that it works fine I'll pull the data and I'll show you that it works so thanks William all right also you might be thinking hey he probably just got more downloads well yeah he did but look at the average rate the number of ratings he got over downloads just shot up from 1.3 1.3 to 4.5 so you got more ratings on average per download and you got a higher average you rating is that ratings or reviews because how could someone you review an app if they haven't used it right no these are ratings so they're not written reviews they're not written reviews yeah okay they're ratings but when they ask for the rating I asked for review as well it does the prompt the default Darren sorry the default prompt will say you read it you read it and then you can write a review too okay can you go back to the review afterwards
14:33when someone could I mean Rich do you know but could they like update their review pretty easily or they have to go yeah you can ask for even maybe two or four weeks or something that's what I do okay that's what I'm all about community so anyways like look with reviews I do think the same thing as rich like most people won't write a written review unless they're like extremely happy or extremely angry right most people just now I've noticed back in the day that written reviews would help out ASO in your keyword rankings but not so much these days okay that's it so I wanna if it's valuable we can set up the campaign otherwise and frankly we'd call it a day and just start the party so you can find out here find out more about me youtube.commasters please trying to get to like 50 000 if I can right 26 right now so thousand not Subs okay literally so you can find me out more here but show of
15:49hands please it's not that hard of an Ask would you like me to set up a campaign I'm gonna open up my Apple search ads I've got my friend Owen okay cool thanks Hannah I need that thank you and you really needed that all right this is my boy Owens app as you can see well no iPhone that's one yeah don't worry mate I got you check it out all right wordpal so if I'm doing Apple search ads sorry Simon I'm gonna go to follow and I'm gonna go to workout and then I'm gonna go vocabulary so I'm gonna literally do this I like this and Emery I'm gonna put the main keyword that he's been he's he's going after so I'm gonna assume it's this this is all my assumptions no oh no you don't have to share intimate details if you don't want to it's all my assumptions it's in the title so I'm like he's gonna go after this keyword okay so I'm gonna look at this couple apps what I like to do from a keyword research perspective is I like to find
16:54the app with the lease rating because I feel like they must be doing something right that they're not Owen it's you I'm just kidding so I'll just pick one of these like vocabulary builder right and I'll click the little I icon because I love this goes into the Apple search ad stuff now search ads.com from mobile actually they have the same tool they can suggest too so and then I'm gonna pick out certain keywords what do you think Owen vocabulary like see I'm doing a lot of keyword research quite there I'm sure make sure I get no crazy text coming in all right there we go all right thank you Hannah for being so chatty all right I'm gonna just start with three all right so you want to really do all of this what I found is I have case studies on this but if you rank for acute you want to really Target keywords that at least have 30. now Emery did say like sometimes five does work the search
18:04score of five and so play around with that but like I don't know if there's enough volume I have to test out the five keywords I'm testing that out thank you and then vocabulary builder is the main one so I'm gonna definitely put that in there right and so these are the let's just say Owen's gonna probably have a hundred keywords that he's going after but these are the keywords that we're gonna go after right now so this is my campaign don't mind sharing some of this stuff so I'm gonna create a campaign I don't have access to Owen's app but you're gonna have to link your Apple search ads and then essentially when I set up the exact match campaign all these keywords are going to be on exact match right pretty simple and then I think I'm gonna do the broad match one just because I think that's a little bit more complicated exact match everybody understands exact match right saw not over there okay so
18:46search results state I'm gonna call this Broad I'm gonna give it a 50 daily budget I'm gonna call this Broad oh and you got an ideal cost per acquisition holy crap that is hard bro all right so I'll set it up so maybe I'll start at E3 cents no no this is a broad match so I'm going to start this 68 cents right and then I'm gonna turn this off because it's broad I'm gonna have search match on in its own campaign right then I'm gonna add these keywords so here's what I like to do
19:38okay 68 cents perfect hit save now here's what you also got to do is hit add negatives so you can add this to the campaign level but I usually just have one campaign one ad group so I'm gonna put on that group level I'm gonna paste the same keywords and then I'm gonna put this on exact match then here you know this is where you can do custom product pages obviously I don't have any right here and then if you want you can then just make sure that you don't get re-downloads now I used to do this where I'd make it for everybody all new all users depends on your app right like if you don't want re-downloads if you don't want to Target people who have installed your app and then deleted it then don't right but for some clients we do keep this all users most of the time if you want to be cheap like me just put new users and you'll be fine and then you hit start campaign all right so for a search Match campaign
20:31it's going to be a little bit different we're going to do the same thing here but we're not going to have any keywords whatsoever okay so we're gonna have search Match turned on the bids are going to stay the same obviously we're calling this search match and then everything else is the same it's that simple right so you want those names yeah I almost heard that when you do new users it decreases a lot the volume because of the last thing because it only targets users who are not with the limited tracking is that what do you think yeah it is that's right personalized as all need to be you know enabled for the user for them to see that ad so if you enable that the only thing that doesn't look you know come over that is a device type so you can do iPhone targeting or iPad targeting that's not going to limit it anything else is going to eliminate it right now opt-in rate is standing around like 22 so that's the potential use of
21:34space that you could show it to I think it depends honestly like I I did we used to set up with new users all the time and I moved over to all users just because and one of our clients was like it was a paid app by the way that we're running this and he's like hey let's just do new users so it kind of made sense for him to only be targeting new users versus like you know other users so I generally do all users but just in case you want to just start you know I'm cheap man like I like to sorrow slow and steady slow and steady I'm okay with not getting everybody mate that's it you guys got any questions give me give me like why should I pay for somebody that is going to search for and download My Brand anyways okay so you're basically like just don't bid on from that much I think some clients I work with clients I think it really depends like honestly I'm like cares like that's what I feel like right
22:36like if you really care I personally wouldn't bid on my brand because I think most people who search for my brand are looking for me and they're gonna tap on me right but some people really care about their brand and they're like no I want to be that first placement and so if you're that person then go crazy if you're like me and I'll be like I'd rather not pay and I'll pay I will say that I did talk to a friend of mine now he is in the app space but he's not like a hardcore app marketer like all of us here he's like Steve how come we're not number one for our keyword I'm like bro that is an ad that's not us so you know I think it's more it's I feel like it's more of an emotional solution or you know I base it on emotions versus data let's say another brand name uh Equalization but you're already rank for one or two or let's say third place and when you uh I think it's worth it still if you like it already on the first
23:33replacement yeah you still should run a campaign yeah it's about how much budget that you have so yes you're going to be facing cannibalization if you're ranking for number one tour well number one or two not so much as three um but yeah this is more about the budget thing the thing that you could look at is like compare keywords that you're doing the performance that you're getting out of it that's what you're you know the competitor is not getting out of their organic it's how you can see that from the number of professions that they're getting right so if that is so important to you yeah go ahead and do it if it's not that much important when you're a little bit more wisely for stuff that you cannot get any traffic on organic Pizza yeah you gotta use the mic bro okay so Apple search is is there to convert a search so the way we approach it is we look at times where a brand is maybe advertising
24:23on TV so there's going to be higher search volume so at those times you're going to convert more of your TV ads so it makes sense to align your Apple search brand campaign with high volumes of search so the brand is doing TV we would say have Brandon protect it yep no we'll pass it around it's all good yeah as you can see like obviously brand does work like going after competitors so like there's an argument to be made to go after your branch you gotta wrap the mic for Easter Frazier thank you very much um any information about the today tab today tap ads all right because I can speak honestly right like I hate it I think it's I think it's BS I think it's super expensive like unless you got what kind of budget you're working on like is it over ten thousand over thirty thousand a month fifty thousand under 10 where yeah you're shaking your head underfit over exactly okay look if you got massive
25:25amounts of budget to spend and you just wanted Drive brand go and do it but it's going to be expensive like it's very hard to make it work with if your cost per acquisition I shouldn't keep showing this slide let's show this slide if your customer acquisition is your goal is like oh and 1.5 it's not gonna work for you but if you're like a big massive brand and you're like Brandy's important for us then go for it like I think it's more of a branding play because and you can't it's a today tab for the Browning thing your competitors also have volume so so known as I'm an alternative I guess there's another placement this uh other users suggested or downloaded you know below the product what about this one I mean you want to share it no okay okay that is more interesting to me because then I feel like it's more targeted there's a product page here let's pull it up for those who aren't so I'm gonna hit cancel that's more
26:30interesting to me than the today tab I just don't I think look it's a my clients it's just you know like Simon you might be different Fraser it might be a little bit different too you guys are working with big clients my clients are like startups so we don't F around we just we need to show results and we need to go I don't have branding budgets that these guys do right like all right bro okay so here the today tab this is the today tab right it's loading and then the search tab pretty horrid but then the product pages down here that's where you'll show up with similar apps so that's where it's pretty interesting anybody else shall we go party then all right thank you guys so much