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Advanced | Campaign Management

Understand bids

How bid insights work

To help you stay competitive, make more educated bidding decisions, and optimize your campaigns, Apple Search Ads provides bid insights at the campaign level within the All Keywords dashboard and the ad group level within the Keywords tab of your account. These insights are updated on an ongoing basis as long as your campaign runs, and they can be downloaded along with other metrics as a CSV file.

Suggested bid range appears alongside each existing keyword and indicates our suggestion for where your maximum cost-per-tap (max CPT) bid should fall to incrementally increase the likelihood of your ad showing. The suggested range is based on our assessment of multiple factors, including how customers have responded to your ad and other advertisers’ ads on this same keyword, your bid history for this keyword, and other advertisers’ bid histories for it.

Bid strength is displayed as a red, yellow, or green bar associated with each keyword. It indicates our assessment of the competitiveness of your bid. Bids at the stronger end can help your ads reach a greater portion of your target audience than those at the weaker end.

  • Weak bid strength (red) means your bid isn’t competitive in relation to other advertisers’ bids. Your ad has a relatively low likelihood of being shown.
  • Moderate bid strength (yellow) indicates an opportunity to improve your bid’s competitiveness and increase the likelihood of your ad being shown.
  • Strong bid strength (green) means your bid is well positioned among other advertisers in the marketplace.
  • No indicator will be shown when there is insufficient data for us to suggest a bid range or measure bid strength, the keyword has been paused, the ad group or campaign is on hold, or your current bid is already aligned with our recommendation.

Suggested bid range and bid strength are our recommendations and assessments to help you incrementally increase the likelihood of your ad showing. They’re not a directive for how much you should bid, and are not a bid floor or ceiling. These indicators may vary over time and among different advertisers.

Considerations for optimizing bids

We recommend creating a tiered bidding strategy across your ad groups. This enables you to apply your most aggressive bids to important exact match keywords, strong bids for similar keywords in broad match that may also work well, and more moderate bids for new queries that may be discovered by your Search Match campaign.

When to raise a bid

Here are a few scenarios where you might want to raise your max CPT bid:

  • Search Match is matching your ad to relevant terms that are increasing conversions for your app.
    You can test raising your max CPT bid to see if it gets you more impressions.
  • If you have a bidded keyword that’s delivering conversions below your CPA goal.
    Consider making incremental increases to your bid on that keyword, with the goal to gain more impressions and conversions within your CPA target. You can use our suggested bid range as a guide.
  • You’re not seeing many impressions for popular keywords.
    Assuming your app is relevant for the keyword, it’s possible that you’re being outbid by other advertisers interested in showing their ad for that term. Raise your bid for specific keywords to see if you can gain more impressions and conversions. Again, you can use our suggested bid range as a guide.

When to lower a bid

Here’s a scenario where you might consider lowering your max CPT bid:

  • If you have a keyword that’s delivering taps, but low conversions at a CPA higher than your goal.
    Lower the bid to keep your CPA down. You may still win some impressions, but may see fewer impressions for that term.

Note that adjusting your max CPT bid for a specific keyword overrides the ad group default max CPT bid for that keyword. The ad group default max CPT bid will still apply to new keywords that are added to that ad group.

How to change a bid

You can change bids in a few different ways.

Change the max CPT bid for an entire ad group

To adjust a bid, follow these steps:

  1. From your Campaigns dashboard, click the campaign with the ad group default max CPT bid you want to change.
  2. On the Ad Groups dashboard, click the amount in the Default CPT Bid column.
  3. Enter your new amount in the highlighted field.
  4. Click the checkmark to confirm.

Change the bid for an individual keyword

To adjust a bid, follow these steps:

  1. From your Campaigns dashboard, click the campaign with the ad group containing the keyword and bid you want to change.
  2. Click the ad group within the Ad Groups dashboard.
  3. Find the keyword within the Ad Group Keywords dashboard.
  4. Click the amount in the Max CPT Bid column.
  5. Enter your new amount in the highlighted field.
  6. Click the check mark to confirm.