Structure campaigns

Build a campaign for multiple countries and regions

Apple Search Ads Advanced offers you the option to focus search results, Today tab, Search tab, and product pages campaigns on a single country or region or many. How you structure your campaigns depends on your strategy and goals. We recommend the following:

You may want to limit your campaign to a single country or region if:

  • You want to run ads in larger markets that require dedicated budgets or have unique objectives, attributes, and so on.
  • You want to understand the value of a particular country or region.

You may want to consider setting campaigns up for multiple countries and regions if:

  • Your goal is ease of management.
  • You want to optimize according to attributes like customer value, language, global region, or sales center location.
  • You deem customer value to be the same across more than one country or region.
  • You have regional sales teams, lines of credit, or financial centers.
  • It’s your first time running paid campaigns in the markets.

Tip: Save time by duplicating campaigns.

If you have a campaign that’s already performing well in one country or region, it may be eligible to run in another. Use our duplication feature to save time and copy campaigns, ad groups, search results keywords, and other settings. Keep in mind that search results campaigns can only be duplicated as search results campaigns and Today tab campaigns can only be duplicated as Today tab campaigns. Search tab and product pages campaigns can be duplicated as either Search tab or product pages campaigns.

Create an optimal campaign structure for Apple Search Ads Advanced search results campaigns

The way you structure your Apple Search Ads Advanced search results campaigns can impact performance, reporting, and your ability to scale. To set campaigns up for success, we recommend that you separate them by keyword theme or strategy. To start, it’s a good idea to create the following four campaign types:

  • Brand campaign focused on customers searching for your app or company name. Keywords in this campaign type will help your ad appear for searches directly related to your app and brand. All keywords should be set to the exact match type.
  • Category campaign focused on customers searching for nonbranded terms that describe your app’s category and what your app does. Keywords here can help you reach a wider audience of customers interested in your app or its genre. Keywords should be descriptive of your app and set to exact match.
  • Competitor campaign focused on customers searching for apps similar to yours, within the same or a related app category. Keywords here can help your ad show for queries that are more narrowly focused on your type of app. All keywords should be set to exact match.

  • Discovery campaign focused on reaching a wider audience and mining for popular search terms to add as keywords. Within this campaign, you’ll use broad match keywords and Search Match to automatically match your ad to relevant search terms. You’ll want to create two dedicated ad groups:

    - A broad match ad group that includes all the keywords from the other three campaign types but with the match type set to broad and Search Match off

    - A Search Match ad group that doesn’t include any keywords but has Search Match on so that your ad can be matched to relevant searches on the App Store

In some cases, you may want to separate campaigns according to their budgets. For example, if you’re expanding into new markets, you may want to separate campaigns by country or region to manage each one’s budget in a particular way. Within these types of campaigns, you can create four different ad groups to focus on the four keyword themes listed above: Brand, category, competitor, and discovery.