Practitioner pattern · Dilip Reddy (Founder of Search Ads Optimization, a platform for managing and scaling Apple Search Ads)
Group search ad keywords by how interested searchers are, and bid differently per group
Guest's main way to scale search ads; overall performance improves, no numbers
Workedapple-search-ads
What they did
Keep one relevant keyword list, classified into groups (brand, high-intent generic, low-intent, competitor, broad) with different bids: e.g. for a yoga app, 'yoga' is high intent, 'pilates' low intent and bid lower. Pick keywords yourself (ChatGPT only for ideas). Run each core term as both exact and broad match; broad match catches changing long-tail variants that competitors often don't bid on. Check the search terms report occasionally to see where spend goes; when broad match surfaces a relevant term (e.g. 'weather alerts' from 'weather'), add it as its own exact + broad keyword. Scale by adding relevant keywords, broad match and countries, with a simple campaign structure rather than hundreds of campaigns per country.
What happened
Some keywords lose impression share, others gain, but overall performance improves.
- Stage
- Scale (scaling)
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Marketing Your App More Efficiently with Apple Search Ads — Dilip Reddy, Search Ads Optimization“I'm a big fan of classifying keywords, and bidding different for each based on the group, like brand”
“There's a report called search terms report. It's better to occasionally check, you know, this report, and make sure, okay, all our spending is going to the right kind of keywords.”
“Now, then we do the same thing, we add weather alerts as exact and also broad”
“in my opinion, the best way to scale is to adding more keywords, high-intent, low-intent, like se- segmented by it, um and adding broad match keywords”
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