Apple Search Ads and paid search tactics

'Proof of pay': ship a real app with a simple onboarding and a hard paywall showing one offer, submit every price you want to test up front, and run Apple Search Ads at the same daily spend (~$1K/day to learn fast; far less works over a longer period). Change only the lifetime price, walking it up: $4.99, $9.99, $29.99, $49.99. Read results directionally (day-one revenue per user), not for statistical significance. If you can't get past ~$4.99, drop or change the concept.

Created an Apple Ads max-conversion campaign targeting all countries except the US, with a few top-of-funnel keywords and a $2 target cost per install. Checked impression share by country and which countries produced paying users (India: impressions, no purchases; Netherlands, Canada, UK: impressions and sales). Cross-checked with Mo's Astro-based Claude skill listing keyword volume by country: Netherlands had the same popularity (~55) as the US but difficulty ~17 vs 60-something. Then stop the worldwide campaign and create a Netherlands-only campaign with more budget.

Max conversion campaign with three ad groups: (1) broad match with search match left ON, only 5-10 of the highest-traffic keywords in your niche, very high max cost-per-tap; (2) exact match with the same 5-10 keywords and the same very high CPT; (3) Apple's auto-created group that mines your metadata (cannot be removed). Set the target cost per install in campaign settings (e.g. $2); Apple tries to hit that CPI regardless of the high max CPT.

'App Store 2.0' (2016, announced by Phil Schiller): subscriptions opened to all apps; commission on a subscription drops from 30% to 15% after the first year; app review sped up from 7-14 business days to 24-48 hours; App Store Search Ads launched as a paid acquisition channel; old and low-quality apps purged.

After in-house generalist marketing hires didn't work, contract one expert per channel: Meta ads, Google ads, Apple Search Ads, lifecycle marketing. Started with consultant Sylvain (Growth Gems), introduced by RevenueCat, who brought in other experts. Contractors sit in Basecamp and post a weekly report with numbers; the COO and founder review them weekly and decide what to change.

Maintain ~50% organic / 50% paid installs; paid spend (ASA as the main channel, plus Google search and Bing) keeps organic rankings going; only fund a channel at ~2-3x ROAS; don't go too far on paid.

Use Google Search campaigns (not Google App Install campaigns, which attributed badly post-ATT) plus Bing search. An in-house attribution engine imports conversions into the networks nightly. Bing: low CPCs, rising volume, small but profitable.

Phase 1: ASA exact-match high-intent keywords plus some broad-match discovery for cleaner attribution and less creative noise; phase 2: move to Meta for scale (ASA volume is limited by search). ASA has since been stopped for the Bible app.

Budget is mainly bottom-up: each channel is its own growth engine. For Google search (biggest channel): strong ad copy, localized to all geos, high-converting landing pages, then scale 10-20% week over week. At each step ask what the next bottleneck is: first funnel optimization, then localization, and so on. Meta handled similarly with quantity plus quality of creative.

Run two tracks at once: earned-media launches (about monthly per team, more than once a quarter) targeted to the right channels (all channels, email, LinkedIn or not), plus a steady paid UA engine. Earned attention feeds ElevenLabs branded search, the first paid target, and makes paid ads convert better because people already know the brand.

Little brand marketing: mainstream press (e.g. Vogue) brought downloads that neither converted nor retained. Instead they focus UA and store presence on existing intent: App Store and search engine queries like 'second phone number', 'temporary phone number', 'private phone number' and the Burner brand name, backed by a mature UA program with many creative variants. Competitors bid on the Burner keyword to cannibalize brand searches.

In 2017, Google Ads trials converted to paid at ~15% vs ~40% on organic and Meta. Identified reasons Google-sourced trials weren't converting and sent Google a different, filtered trial signal.