Simple Formula to Decrease Cost-Per-Acquisition on Apple Search Ads (Part 3/3)

Coming up, I'm going to show you a simple formula that will dramatically decrease your cost per install on apple search ads and show you the best practices and the strategies to help you scale stay tuned. What is up app nation? It is Steve P. Young founder of Appmasters.com. The Place you go when you want to action. They didn't helping you grow your downloads and your revenues. And welcome to part three of our apple search ads tutorial.

First part, we showed you how to structure your campaigns and set up the exact match. In part two, we set up the two campaigns to really help you scale the broad match and the search match campaign. And in this video, we're going to tell you how to further that scale. And dramatically lower your cost per acquisition. Now let's start with dramatically decreasing your cost per acquisition. And for certain clients, this is the exact strategy that we use.

And for some clients who have already run apple search ads, this is exactly the calculation we use to decrease their cost per acquisition while still increasing their install. It's a simple formula, but here it goes. It's your ideal cost per tab is how much you're willing to pay cost per acquisition multiplied by the conversion rate. Now I showed you that this is what we seen on average for each of these campaigns, the conversion rates.

So we always start off with the averages and if you want to be a little bit. You can go in towards the upper end of this range and set up your ideal cost per tap. Right? So here I put this handy dandy, Google spreadsheet together. So let's say our cost per acquisitions, $2. Maybe that's a good starting point for you guys. Typically most big companies know how much they're willing to pay, but I would say $2, a good starting point.

If you have absolutely no data, I would say two to $3. Really? Let's just start with two, just for these patients. So here's all the conversion rates. Again, if I'm looking at these campaigns as a whole, on average, maybe I'm setting up the exact match campaign. I'm gonna go with 40% just because I want the volume and then I'll adjust and I'll show you how to adjust that. So if my cost per acquisition goal is $2, I'm going to set my average cost per tap at 80 cents.

All right. Now, once you have some data, this is where. Spreadsheet comes in handy. So I'm going to go into one of my campaigns right now. That's been running. This is the exact match campaign that we set up in part one. We have some data now, now, as you can see, I was pretty conservative. I went with 80 cents. So this was about a 40% conversion rate. So I want 80 cents because the goal was $2. Right. So that's why I have that.

As you can see. This is what apple is suggesting. So some of these keywords are super expensive. Now I need to expand it. If I really want search ads to work for me, I need to expand this keyword list to a lot more keywords than what I currently have, because these are all super. But as you can see with background noise with small spend only $2, granted I've been able to get a $1 cost per acquisition because I'm converting at a 67% rate.

Now it could be that it's because I have background noise in the title of my app it's Moonlight background noise, and that could lead to this really high conversion rate. So as you can see if I'm converting at 67%, and my goal is to. I can actually afford to pay a dollar 37. And so this is what I'll do. We'll come in here. We'll look, usually look at, and you know, we'll update the bids. Yeah. We will use Lee look at the last seven days and then kind of look at, okay, are we, which keywords are hitting our cost per acquisition goals and which ones aren't.

And this one is, and we could afford to pay a little bit more. So I'm going to update it to a dollar 34 and then hit save. So this is how we continually optimize continually manage. And in the beginning, if you are okay with the budget, if you're a bigger. I would skew towards the upper end, these conversions so that I can adjust my bids accordingly to this formula. Right. And here's the formula that we have cost per tap equals cost per acquisition, times conversion rate.

And that's what the. You can set this up. Don't ask me for the spreadsheet. It's pretty easy for you guys to set up. Okay. I did it in like two minutes. All right. Now let's talk about how to actually scale apple search ads. I believe apple search ads is actually a phenomenal marketing channel because it leads to high user retention it for subscribers, because obviously as we know who will build a billion dollar business, Based off of search intent ads off of search intent.

And that's why I'm so bullish on apple search. So, if you're ready to scale, you are meeting your cost per acquisition goals. Now your CEO, your CMO, whoever is saying Steve let's scale, this marketing channel. How do you do that? Let's go into that right now. Step number one. I know it's super obvious, but it's super important. You got to convert more users. Your cost per acquisition goal can go higher if your revenue per user per download goes higher as well.

And so this is exactly what we're dealing with, one of our clients, and I'm like, look, if we want to scale this, one of the easier ways to scale is figuring out ways to actually increase the conversion rate so that we can get more subscribers and more revenue. Download now, if you're not joining our Friday, YouTube livestreams, definitely check those out. But we've got another video coming up really soon, where we're going to break down a high converting pricing page to give you all the details on how do you convert more users.

So stating for that number to obviously add more keywords now, how do you think beyond the obvious keyword. And again, we're doing this from one of our clients, but we've got a client that helps you focus. So they play music that helps you focus. And so what we started thinking through is all right, we're at the point where we, now we want to scale our cost per acquisitions. We're hitting that mark. And what we're thinking through is maybe we can go after not just focus music and things like that, but.

Slack. So what are some other productivity apps that would lead people to this particular app and we're running test campaign. So it's really using the search ads console to add more keywords, using all the keyword research tools that I've provided to think. Okay. Beyond these obvious keywords, what else can I go after? So these could be keywords that you're obviously not using in your ASO. Step number three. And that's why step number one was so important is you got to increase your cost per acquisition goals, which allow you to.

Using that formula just presented increase your cost per tab. It's the easiest way. As you can see some of those keywords that I was targeting for my particular app, we're not seeing enough of visibility. So if you want more visibility than it is increasing that, and what will end up happening is because if you have, let's say hundreds of keywords in a certain campaign, As you start optimizing, right? Certain keywords will start getting a lot more visibility.

And so you start adjusting that cost per tap, maybe it's up or down. And then what ends up happening is you'll hit the sweet spot where your ideal cost per tap meets your ideal conversion rate, which allows you to hit your ideal cost per acquisition. And then the other keywords in that campaign starts seeing more visibility. And that's what we're seeing with one of our clients in that particular exact match. Number four, add more geos.

So think about all the other countries that you're converting really high in and then create campaigns. Now I, again, especially if it's for a top 10 geo, I like to have one campaign per geo that way on a campaign level, I can see how well each geo is converting, but it's pretty easy to set up and I'll show you that a little bit, but adding more geos is super simple. All right, now let's. We want to target a different geo.

Here's what we're going to do. We're going to do this for all the campaigns that we have set up for the U S but I'll just do it for one of them. We're going to hit this. We're in tap on exact, and then we're going to duplicate, let's say I wanted to go target Canada, so I'll put can, and then we're going to adjust this Canada. Everything else should be equal. Now, sometimes you want to adjust the maximum cost per tap because certain countries will actually have a lower conversion rate.

And that's what we're starting to see actually, too. But this is the most simple way. So you say, okay, include all this stuff, check mark, all this stuff. And then this is what apple starts says is that campaign status, this schedule set campaign status to pause after duplicating. That's fine. So we can do that. And then we'll hit. Now you can see our Canada campaign and then we're just going to hit activate boom. We're off running.

That's it super simple. You want to do that for your search match and your broad match campaigns. Number five is actually setting up a retargeting campaign. Now, again, that is super simple to do, and I'll just show you quickly on how to do that. And what I typically like to do for retargeting campaign is use my exact match. Campaign. And then instead of targeting new users, we're going to target returning users. All right. We are in our ad group setting.

This is actually my exact match, but let's say it was I did. I duplicated the whole thing. I duplicated it in the U S and now I'm going to rename this to retargeting so forth in this customer types, instead of new users, we're going to say you can even do users of our other ads. Or returning users, right? So those will be two different campaigns and that will help you to scale. This is a retargeting campaign you can do returning users, and we've actually seen pretty good success with one of our clients for a retargeting campaign.

Or if you're trying to cross promote your campaign would be called cross-promote dash us. You can hit this setting users of other, my other. So super simple to set up. And lastly, it's that new search tap campaign for apple. Now we've seen very limited success with this campaign, but if you're a bigger company and you're really looking to scale because you're maybe not capping out on your daily budget, everything else is going well and you want to get more visibility, then that's where the.

Search tap campaign would come into play. So this is the search tab campaign. Just to give you an example, here's where your ad would show up. So unlike the search campaign, which is right here, when people search for a certain keyword travel journal, all that stuff, and then your ad starts showing up the search tap campaign is when users go into the search tab and then they're looking for, you know, they're about to search on something and then they see your ad, right?

So this is more like a Facebook ad, but there's targeting features aren't very advanced yet. So unlike a Facebook ad where you can see, you know, I want to target these types of people. There's no real targeting yet for this search tab. So that's why the cost per acquisitions are pretty high for this particular campaign. Now I do believe that apple will probably allow. To target certain type of audiences with this search tab.

It only makes sense, but for the time being, I haven't seen so too much success with this search tap campaign, because obviously you're hoping people see your ad and you're paying per impression here. You hoping people see your ad and then obviously download your app. It's a great way to scale. And I've seen a lot of full rates. So every time I actually go into the search app, I'm seeing that there's always an ad in there.

So apple is. Getting a lot of people trying out this particular campaign, but I think until apple provides us with a little bit more targeting features, I wouldn't really run any tests on it. We've just seen really high cost per acquisition for this. All right guys, that's it. This three part series on apple search ads. Hope that was valuable. If I miss anything, please leave it in the comments below. Let me know how I can help you with your apple search ads campaign.

And if you're interested in working with. Letting us manage all your campaigns along with your ASO for one low monthly price. We'll go check out@masters.com and you'll see all our pricing on there. We'll make it super affordable. And we've got a lot of good case studies up there. So go check out masters.com. If you're interested in working with us and make sure you hit that like, and subscribe button really does help us out a lot.

I appreciate it. All right, until next time, I'll see you on the next video.