Customers secure their devices.
Norton 360 drives expansion.

To better manage budgets and optimize bidding for performance, the team at Gen, together with their agency Chong + Koster, set up separate Apple Search Ads campaigns in every market they entered. They also localized their keyword strategy for each country or region, better capturing local language and audience nuances. With discovery campaigns and Search Match, they were able to quickly find new, relevant search terms, automatically expanding keyword coverage.  

Brand campaigns captured audiences actively searching for Norton-related terms and helped the team stay competitive across markets by protecting their brand keywords. “Apple Search Ads not only is a compelling channel that produces substantial volume at favorable costs, it also gives us the invaluable ability to test quickly, monitor performance in real time, and understand search keyword volume in a variety of markets,” says Gen Mobile Marketing Manager Matthew Moore.

The Gen and Chong + Koster teams monitored performance closely, at both the campaign and keyword level. To optimize for efficiency, they looked beyond just installs and tap-through rates to valuable in-app events like trials and subscriptions. “It has been a game changer to be able to understand performance down to the keyword level. We can now take these performance insights from Apple Search Ads and increase budgets and bids on the campaigns and search terms that are working as well as remove what’s not driving valuable results,” says Moore.

To better highlight key Norton 360 app features and engage potential subscribers, the Chong + Koster team created ad variations based on custom product pages set up in App Store Connect. These custom ads aligned creative with top-performing keyword ad groups, making their Apple Search Ads more relevant to different user interests. For example, they highlighted images aligned to the “antivirus” theme by showcasing tools for individuals to protect their devices from viruses — one of the app’s most popular features.

When potential customers tapped on the ad, they landed on a custom product page that matched the ad creative — creating a seamless experience. “With ad variations, we were able to improve performance on every possible metric, from cost-per-install to cost-per-trial to return on ad spend and revenue,” says Gen Lead Online Business Marketing Manager Ryan McInerney. “This is a big win and represents the largest volume of nonbrand campaign traffic we’ve captured globally for this app.” The team plans to continue testing ad variations across markets and languages, better capturing the attention of different audience groups with highly relevant creative.