Case Study on the Effect of Apple Search Ads on App Ranking

If you've heard about Apple's new search ads and have wondered how useful they are for your mobile app acquisition strategy, we've got the data here to show you how well they can really work.

We put just under $200 of spend into advertising our cute, gamified to do list, Goalie to learn about what impact Apple's new ads would have on our category and keyword rank. Goalie had very few installs before running ads (<20 installs/day), was not ranked in any category and had no keyword rank in the top 10.

*We did update Goalie to be compatible with iOS10 during our campaign.

With $189 in spend, we more than quadrupled the daily installs we received and boosted to an all-time high hourly category rank of 431 (US productivity).



The study revealed that we also earned keyword ranking boosts across the keywords we received installs on; while non-clicked keywords did receive a small improvement in rank due to the general app download halo effect, the boost that these keywords received was orders of magnitude higher and even broke us into top 10 ranks.

Ranked, bidded keywords in our search ad campaign

Ranked, non-bidded keywords in our search ad campaign

That's not to mention the amazing cost per download results we've achieved. From our $189 in spend, we received 371 downloads for a cost per download of $.50.

Again – these results won't last for long as more advertisers enter the auction and drive up costs. Get in now while the getting is good!

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Incipia is a mobile app development and marketing agency that builds and markets apps for companies, with a specialty in high-quality code architecture and keyword-based marketing optimizations. For blog/video or speaking requests, business or press inquiries please contact us or send an inquiry to hello@incipia.co.