Within your Apple Search Ads Advanced campaigns, you can use Creative Sets for more ad variations that align to your ad group keyword themes or audiences. Each set includes screenshots and app previews you select from your App Store product page.
Creative Sets enables you to leverage additional App Store assets to create more ad variations. These will run in addition to the current image and text ads that Apple Search Ads automatically creates for your app. You can have up to 20 ad variations per ad group with Creative Sets.
Align relevant groups of screenshots and app previews to specific ad group keyword themes or audience refinements such as gender, age or location.
Apple Search Ads intelligent automation optimises to show the creative achieving the strongest customer response.
Creative Sets uses the screenshots and app previews from all available assets on your App Store product page. Learn more about optimising your App Store product page.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when using Creative Sets:
Think about how you want to use Creative Sets and ensure that the screenshots and app previews are included when you update your App Store product page.
If you change an asset on your product page, Creative Sets may be impacted. If assets are removed, any set leveraging those assets may be paused if the removal causes it to fall below the required minimum.
Make sure you have the following on your App Store product page to make a new set:
Assets are displayed in the order they were uploaded to the App Store. Regardless of the number of assets within a set, the order of assets selected will be what appears in your account from left to right.
iPhone example: If you have a set with four assets – ABCD – possible ads would be combinations of ABC, ABD, ACD and BCD, but CBA isn’t a valid combination.
You can add your first set when starting a new campaign or anytime after that in the Creative Sets dashboard within your ad group. Use the Add Creative Set button.
Choose screenshots and app previews – up to 10 screenshots and 3 app previews per display size. The list you see will include all available assets on your App Store product page, and you’ll need to select the following to make a new set:
Selections are available only for displays that meet the minimum number of localised screenshots and app previews. Possible options include the iPhone 6.5” display, iPhone 5.8” display, iPhone 5.5” display, iPhone 4.7” display, iPhone 4” display, iPad 12.9” display, iPad 10.5” display and iPad 9.7” display.
You can choose to not select assets for a certain display size. The Apple Search Ads default ad will appear instead.
Note that once you’ve added images and app previews to a set and you’ve saved it, you can’t make any changes to your selections. But you can change the name of your set, choose to pause it in the Creative Sets dashboard or create a new one.
For example, if you have a travel app that covers flights, hotels and car hire, you could use Creative Sets to focus on a specific offering. Here’s how:
For example, if you have a shopping app, you could show a screenshot or app preview featuring women’s fashion to a female audience, and men’s fashion to a male audience.
This will help provide greater clarity around performance.
You may also want to create separate ad groups for iPhone and iPad, as ad formats and performance on the devices can vary.
For example, if you have a travel app and wanted to see if a Caribbean hotel image performed better than a Hawaiian hotel image, you’d:
Both ad variations would run against the default ad image. Because you consistently used the same number of assets for each theme, it will be easy to see which ad variation performed the best in your reporting.
To share an existing set:
You also have the choice to share Creative Sets when you duplicate ad groups or campaigns. Only relevant sets will be shared. For example, a set built for an iPhone device can’t be shared with an ad group where iPad has been selected as the device. And, the campaign you’re sharing the set with must promote the same app.
Creative Sets ad variations are app-specific and language-specific. So, the sets in your original ad groups and campaigns will only be shared if your new campaign uses the same promoted app and countries and regions. If these selections are changed, Creative Sets may not be shared.
Note that if you edit the name of one of the sets you build with Creative Sets in an ad group, it will change across all the ad groups that share that set.
A default image and text ad is automatically created for you using the first few screenshots and app previews on your App Store product page. To ensure best results, default ads will always run in addition to Creative Sets and can’t be paused or removed. Default assets are displayed in the order they were uploaded to the App Store.
Assets selected for the default image ad vary depending on the type of assets available in landscape and portrait orientation. For example:
Only display sizes that meet the minimum number of required localised screenshots and app previews are available for Creative Sets. They include the iPhone 6.5” display, iPhone 5.8” display, iPhone 5.5” display, iPhone 4.7” display, iPhone 4” display, iPad 12.9” display, iPad 10.5” display and iPad 9.7” display.
If you don’t want to select assets for a certain device display size, the default ad will always appear for it.
Each of your sets can be found under its associated ad group in the Creative Sets dashboard. The dashboard is available regardless of whether you’re using Creative Sets. You can activate, pause, remove or add more sets there.
Performance data for Creative Sets and default ads is available at the ad group level, also in the Creative Sets dashboard. Key metrics, along with a breakdown of text and image default ads, will be available.
This happens when you haven’t uploaded the minimum number of required assets on your App Store product page across all device sizes. The default ad will appear instead. This may result when a change to an asset has been made to your App Store product page. For example, a screenshot may have been removed or replaced.
There may be a few reasons you can’t find an asset when building a new set.
Insufficient number of assets. You haven’t uploaded a sufficient number of creative assets to your App Store product page. Minimum requirements by device:
iPhone
Portrait:
3 screenshots
1 app preview and 2 screenshots
Landscape:
2 assets
iPad
Portrait:
2 screenshots
1 app preview and 1 screenshot
Landscape:
2 assets
This happens when you’ve already added 20 sets, the maximum allowed, to an ad group. Remove some sets before trying to add more.