Copy Our $85,000/Month Apple Ads Strategy

Coming up, I'm going to share with you the exact Apple Ads setup where we're [music] spending over $70,000 a month and seeing positive ROAS. Stay tuned. >> [music] >> What is up App Nation? It is Steve P. Young, founder of appmasters.com, the place you go when you want action-packed content related to helping you grow your app downloads and more importantly those revenues. And today, I really wanted to break down Apple Ads, sort of a refresher. It's been a moment since I talked to you about Apple Ads.

In this video, I want to reveal the two campaigns that are working out really, really well for us including a secret campaign. But, I'll tell you about that a little bit later. All right, without further ado, let's get into my favorite thing to do, a screen share. All right, before we begin, I really want to emphasize this. Distribution above all is the most important thing, especially in this age of AI where you can pretty much build anything your little heart desires or your big heart desires.

Distribution is going to be the key factor in anything you do cuz everything else you can fix once you've unlocked distribution. Now, I know distribution and monetization go hand-in-hand, especially if you're running paid ads because the more you can make from a monetization perspective, the more you can spend from a distribution perspective. So, they're going to go hand-in-hand, but if I had to pick one, I'm going to pick distribution first because I can't monetize if I don't have downloads. So, moving on, talking about distribution, let's really talk about when you're just starting out, all you really have to do is find product market fit and channel market fit. So, what channel makes the most sense for your particular app? Now, Apple Ads ASO, if people are searching for it, it's a great way to pull people in. All right, that's what we're going to be focused on. But, you really just need to focus

on a couple of channels, because we've seen it time and time again, whether it's our own apps or our client apps, they've been able to reach up to 5 million MRR with just one or two channels. That's it. Right? You only need one or two channels to unlock real significant growth. You don't need to focus on all of them. And so, we're going to try to break down all these channels for you in future videos. We have a lot of content on ASO, but today we're going to really focus on Apple Ads. Okay. Before we begin, I want to really tee up why I love Apple Ads, all right? This is AppsFlyer's report. I pulled it from here, the AppsFlyer performance index. This is a 2025 edition, and I've seen from other sources, too, that Apple Ads is one of the best sources of traffic. Here, I've selected gaming. You can see number one is Apple Ads.

And I've only selected iOS, because you're not watching this if you're running Google, right? Apple Ads doesn't make sense for you. For non-gaming, same thing. Apple Ads number one. All right, non-gaming all categories, that was global. Let's say all categories North America. Apple Ads. So, Apple Ads outperforms all the different channels. Meta, right here, Apple 11 for gaming. Meta for non-gaming. In the US, we got Spandex, and then Meta. So again, you only need one or two channels, and I always start off, especially for most apps, there is search volume for most apps. And so, for most of apps, like Apple Ads just makes complete sense.

Okay. Here's other reasons why I love Apple Ads. Easy to set up. You don't need an MMP. If you want an MMP, you can do it. You can also use RevenueCat, and I'll kind of save that for a different video to set up and use custom product pages to measure the revenue. So that's the easiest way. It's easy to manage just math and one of the best ROI channels. I just proved that to you. All right, here's why I'm even more bullish because Apple sees something here.

Obviously, they just released specially in the US and UK. I believe those are the two countries. I don't know if it might be other places too. But the first result right here. So when you search for meditation, the first one is an ad. This is the organic result. So this is technically number one, right? But you don't show up as number one and the third result is an ad. And according to all my stats since 2013 when I started this entire journey, the stats say that the top three search results get over 90% about 90% of all the clicks with the majority going to the first result. So and I've even heard it from people who were like, "Steve, how come you said you're number one for this keyword meditation? We're not number one. We see Headspace." And I was like, "Dude, that's an ad. I don't control that."

He's like, "Oh, I didn't realize it was an ad." So actual developers, actual app founders actually did not know that this first result was an ad, all right? So just keep that in mind. That's why I really love it. The more placements the actual the better it is in my opinion for most app founders. All right, more social proof for you guys. Here's one client that we're we're spending about 85,000 last month and I wanted this for you cuz some people will talk stuff. Right? Give their opinions and it's not backed by data, all right?

I want to always show you guys data. So this was literally last month, May of 2026 where we spent over $85,000 or close to $85,000 for a client and we're ROAS [snorts] positive. Still a client of ours, all right? Here's another client we're spending about $12,000 a month. And I couldn't fit the date in, so I apologize, right? With this same campaign setup. And here's one of our apps where we're spending about $7,000 a month last month and we're doing about 30 to I mean, according to RevenueCat, we're about 40,000 MRR, right? So, this is proof that Apple Ads does work for us, for our clients, and can scale as well.

All right, and I want to kind of highlight this real quick with the 85,000. Most of the spend is in the US. We have a little bit in Canada, a little bit in Canada here, but most of it is in the US, right? That $85,000 spend. For us, this is all US. All right. Here's more proof for you guys. So, this is one of the clients that we're working with, and I wanted to pay basic plus campaign is our own internal made-up campaign that we have, and I only share that in our App Founders community, but today we're going to talk about this max conversion campaign, or if you want to be one of the cool kids, call it max con, right? And I wanted to highlight that it is ROI positive. And we've scaled this much bigger, but in April we started small and then we grew in May.

All right. So, that's one client. Here's another client where we are spending all that money, and you can see our basic plus was doing decently, right? Almost ROAS positive. And then the max con was ROAS positive here and here. And here, it started to get a little bit negative, but we're going to tweak it. And so, we need to figure out whether how much we can potentially spend. Maybe the spend needs to be closer to 15,000 for it to be ROAS positive, right? But you can see the cost per installs are very, very low.

And sorry, these are pounds, but this should be dollars. $3 $3 and then $3.50 is probably too much. So, we probably need to bring it down close to the $3 range for us to be ROAS positive. And these are numbers that you should know, right? What is your break-even cost per install or your RPI, revenue per install? You should know those numbers, right? Some people look at LTV per install. Some people, if you're really bootstrapping and you need to really pay attention to every dollar, you need to look at revenue per install cuz you can't wait for that LTV to kick in.

All right. So, here's the max conversion campaign, and I'm going to show you how to set it up as a demo. So, let's do it together, okay? Here's my demo Apple Ads. I'm going to create campaign here. So, follow along with me. I'm going to pick my app. So, I'm going to put my green noise app that we have. Okay. Perfect. And we want to do search results. Obviously, we'll start in the United States. Continue. And then you can call it whatever you want. So, I might just call it max con or max conversion, but max con _US.

And then usually I like to put a little start date. So, you might just put 2026 06 just to remind yourself when it actually launched this campaign. You're going to select max conversion right here. Here is where you enter in your ideal cost per acquisition. So, this is what I meant by revenue per install. You should kind of know your break-even rate. Now, if you're just starting out, start with just like a three or $4. It's good enough to get going. If your app can't survive with a $3 cost per install, you might not have a good enough business to run paid ads, okay? So, I would start with a three to $4 range. The app that I just showed you for our app, we're getting about a five to $6 revenue per install, and it you can see from our clients with the ROAS like it's around that $3 range where it's about break even. So, I'm going to probably start at 350.

You can set a daily budget. Apple recommends setting a daily budget about 30X of the target cost per install. So, I'm going to put 100 and then you'll see you need to be at about 30X. So, they'll tell you. Now, you don't necessarily need to do this. So, we've actually heard from Apple as well. You can start off as low as 50. They'll still give you that warning, but it's fine. You can start off with that. But, if you got a little bit of budget, go ahead and just match Apple.

Okay. Now, Apple has this automated ad group. Now, you can't do anything with this. This is Apple's proprietary system of running ads. So, you kind of just have to leave it as is, but here's one thing I definitely want you to do is create an additional ad group. So, I'm going to go ahead and do that. We're going to leave search match on here, and this would be anything related to your particular app. So, I'm obviously just going to call it the screen noise. And then I'm just going to put in a few keywords. You really just need the most traffic keywords for your particular niche, right? So, for us it's going to be green noise, green noise free, and that's probably it, right? Like there's not much more to this app than this. So, I hear green noise, green noise, green noise.

Mhm, maybe color noise, maybe not. Green noise for better sleep, free green noise. I'm going to stay away from white noise cuz we're just not going to be there for this. And then I've got this all set up, and I'm going to hit save. Great. Here, I want to specifically only target new users. Now, if you're just trying to go branding and you can do all users, you want to do that, go ahead and do that. But, I'm just going to specifically target new users right here. Demographics, here's one thing I want to point out.

Do not put anything here. Anytime you try to target female, male, age range, Apple's impressions are very, very much limited. Because Apple is so gung ho about privacy, they shot themselves in the foot, and we can't get good targeting, demographic targeting here. So, I would just leave that leave this all normal, and the only thing I'm changing here is new users. The last thing I want to point out is if you are an education app, or you're starting to see some interesting numbers from the iPad version of your app, you might want to differentiate iPhone and iPad. Okay? You might want to do that here, but not necessary, so I'm just going to leave that as well. And here's where you can do your CPP. So, if you have a CPP set up, right, you got to submit it. We've got a few right here.

This allows you to track it. So, I'm going to pick this one. This has ASA, I already named it US, and you can say ASA or green noise. Right here. And I'm going to hit save. So, this will allow me to sort of track the revenues coming from this particular ad group. Now, as you may have noticed, I could not have done it with the automated ad group. So, unfortunately, half the revenue is going to be lost in this, and you'll probably need an MMP, or the simple option is just to track your revenues and your spend, knowing that you only have one or two channels, right? That's the simple way, and other founders have done it, too. For my app in particular, that's all we're doing.

Because we haven't run meta, we're only running ASO and Apple ads, it's easy for me to kind of see how much I make last week, and I'll show you those numbers in a future video, and how much I spent last week. That's all I'm tracking, week over week spend, I'm adjusting my Apple ad spend based off of what I'm seeing from those numbers. Okay. So, I've got this set up, and I'm all set, and I can hit create. And we're off and running.

Now, the next campaign I want you to set up is called a SCAG campaign or it's SCAG for short, single keyword ad group. Now, the whole reason why people started doing this was because RevenueCat could only do it at a certain level. Like, certain MMPs could only get attribution not at a keyword level, but only at an ad group level. And so, people started getting smart and saying, "Okay, well, to get the keyword level specific data, I'm just going to have one keyword in a single ad group."

So, it's that simple. All right? So, I'll give you an example. This is one of our apps that's doing about 40K MRR. I'm showing you our spend from last May. We spent 6,000 and these are all SCAG campaigns. So, I actually bought this app, right? And I wanted to continue to keep it the same way as the sellers. And so, they were able to really find success for this app just using the SCAG campaign. So, I was like, "Okay, I'm just going to replicate that." Now, I've been trying to get the cost per install a little bit lower. This is still right where we're ROAS positive. So, we're making about $6 per install here. But at the same time, I want to be closer to that $4 range. So, I'm adjusting the bids here. But all these ad groups have just one keyword in there. So, pretty simple to set up and I'll show you exactly how to do that right now.

All right, we're back into our demo Apple Ads account right now. I'm going to pick the same app, green noise. Okay, search results again. United States again. Continue and then I'm going to hit manage bids. So, I'm going to call this SCAG US. Again, I'm going to put the date, 2026 05, just so I remember 06. Just so I remember when I initially launched this. So, here daily budget, you know, anything you want, you can afford. This is just going to be the single keyword stuff. So, I'm going to put this as green noise.

Down the max bid, this is the suggested, right? So, I'm going to just start off with about 350. I want my max bid to be very close to my ideal cost per acquisition in the very beginning because I want to get that data. I can always adjust down and I'll show and I'll share a simple formula to adjust down, but right now, I need it to be as close just to get some spend, okay? Because this is a SCAG campaign, I'm going to turn search match off, which was on before.

And then I'm going to put in the one keyword that is there. So, I'm going to write green noise. I'm going to hit it as exact. So, this is all exact, okay? As you remember, the max con campaign was all broad with search match turned on. All right, so that's more of a discovery campaign setup. SCAG is going straight after. Now, you can run both campaigns parallel to each other. Frankly, we're running our basic plus, which is very similar to max con, at the same time as max con, all right? So, you can run both campaigns at the same time and you'll find equal success and that's what we're doing with our app. I've seen better results from our max con because I've told max con, "Hey, I only want a three 350 cost per install." All right? But, I'm still running SCAG because I want them I want the algorithm to decide, "Hey, where you're going to actually show my ad, which campaign you're going to pick." I'm going to let the algorithm

do its thing, right? I'm not going to force it. So, I'm running both of these campaigns for our app that's doing about 40K MRR, okay? So, I'm going to hit save here. Great. So, I've got green noise. The one keyword is green noise. Again, I'm just only going to target new users. Just some of the things I like to do. You can tie this to a custom product page again if you want. I'm going to leave it as default, but you can just tie it right here, okay?

For the sake of it, I'm done. I'm going to create this campaign. And we're done. So, I'm going to go back into this campaign. I'm going to create another ad group just so you guys have this, but you can see green noise right here. And then green noise with exact bid. Right? So, it's one single keyword. That's it. So, for example, if I wanted to bid on green noise app, like the different variations of green noise. And if you want to know what the different variations are, just literally search for it on your App Store, green noise, and pick the auto fill.

So, I'm going to pick green noise app here. Again, I'm going to keep this at close to my range, 350. Turn that off. Add the green keyword. I want to see what comes up. Green noise. Apple, come on. What's that? Cool. Again, we want this as exact match. Hit save. Pick new users again. And then I'm not going to tie it to CPP, but I can because for the demo, I'm going to hit save. Boom. We're done. Again, these type of campaigns you only need about, I would say, anywhere from 5 to 10 keywords. I wouldn't go too crazy with that because it becomes difficult to manage, but this is it. And this is what we've set up for our app as well.

All right, that is it. Those two simple campaigns can take you a very long way. Now, if you need help with scaling your Apple Ads campaign, reach out to us at appmasters.com. We'll manage it all. If you want to be a solo [music] founder and do it all by yourself, well, go check out appfounders.co where we've got a community of over 100. Very Some are just starting out, some have found success, but over a hundred app founders where we share our basic plus campaign.

Very similar to MaxCon, but we kind of are running both at the same time for one of our clients. So, AppMasters, where we do it for you, appfounders.co, where you learn from us and you do it yourself. All right? And in our next video, I'm going to kind of discuss how to do attribution, [music] all the different ways to do it through an MMP, obviously, that's one of the easier ways, through a CPP, and through RevenueCat, as well. All right, if you got any questions or you like this video, leave a comment, hit that like button, you know, do all that stuff that YouTube loves, and share it with a friend. All right, this community continues to grow because of folks like you sharing our content with the rest [music] of the world. Okay, until next time, I'll see you on the next video.