Apple Search Ads Launches New Countries on 4.25.17

Great news from Apple for Search Ads managers!

Apple Search Ads are now slated to go live in additional English-speaking markets, including Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Campaigns for these new countries (referred to as "storefronts") will go live on April 25th, at 10:00am PDT, but can be created now.

Other improvements to Apple's Search Ads platform include a new role (campaign group manager), as well as the ability to duplicate entities. These updates were also rolled out in a new notification menu from Apple, located in the top-right hand corner of your search ads account.

One very important detail to note is that a campaign's storefront cannot be changed once it is set live. This is a very disappointing detail, not just because this is not a common limitation of auction-based ad platforms like Facebook or Adwords. 

First, this requires new campaigns to be set up in order to expand to other countries, which prevents beneficial historic performance data to benefit the new campaigns.

Second, this prevents advertisers from running campaigns across multiple countries, thus promising even more convolution and clutter in your Search Ads UI (especially given the inability to delete campaigns or filter by active).

Third, as pointed out by Thomasbcn, Apple does not provide a campaign duplication option; that said, ad groups can be duplicated, multiple at a time, within campaign groups, making the process tedious, yet not incredibly tedious.

Per Apple: "Your app will be promoted in the storefront selected for this campaign. Note that the storefront cannot be changed once you have created your campaign"

The Bottom Line: Apple adds more ad inventory for global apps by adding three new markets (AU/NZ/UK). Start creating your campaigns now to prepare for launch on April 25th, 2017! The downside is that campaigns cannot run across multiple storefronts, and a campaign's storefront cannot be changed once set live.

That's all for now, folks! Be sure to bookmark our blog, sign up to our email newsletter for new post updates and reach out if you're interested in working with us.

Incipia is a mobile app development and marketing agency that builds and markets apps for companies, with a specialty in high-quality, stable app development and keyword-based marketing strategy, such as App Store Optimization and Apple Search Ads. For post topics, feedback or business inquiries please contact us, or send an inquiry to hello@incipia.co.