Apple Search Ads Advanced gives you tools to efficiently drive app downloads or reengagements. You can use them to define when your ads may be seen and by whom. Keep in mind that if you narrow your audience too much, you’ll reduce the potential impressions for your ads.
Apple Search Ads Advanced defaults to showing your ads to customers who use the device types your app is compatible with. You can also choose to show your ads only on iPad or iPhone, or set different bids and audience criteria by device.
After running ads for a few weeks, say you notice the tap-through rate and conversion rate of people viewing your ad on iPad is higher than on iPhone.
Consider creating an ad group specifically for iPad users. This can help you optimise your campaigns by setting a max CPT bid that will maximise your impressions and reach with iPad users.
Apple Search Ads Advanced supports location refinement within each country and region. If your app serves only certain areas, this feature ensures you don’t waste your budget showing ads for searches occurring outside those areas.
Note that location refinement capabilities are currently available in the following countries only:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, UK and US.
You can refine your audience at the ad group level by these customer types:
This is the default customer type when you create a new ad group. To provide your ads with the maximum reach for relevant App Store searches, it includes all prospective, former and current customers of your app.
This customer type maximises the number of your conversions that will come from first-time downloaders of your app.
This customer type enables you to reengage customers who have previously downloaded your app. The customers who see your ad may have had the app in the past but have since deleted it, may have it downloaded on another one of their devices or may have it currently on a device. Downloads in the first two scenarios would show up as redownloads in your reporting. If customers already have the app, they’ll see an [OPEN] button. If the app isn’t present on the specific device they’re using, they’ll see a redownload icon.
App redownloaders can be a valuable audience to target. Setting up your Apple Search Ads campaigns to include Returning users can help you optimise potential for both downloads and in-app spend.
Use this customer type to cross-promote your app to users of other apps you own.
For ads with specified audience criteria to run, audiences must have more than 5,000 customers. If the audience minimum isn’t yet reached, you’ll see your ad group on hold and a message informing you that the audience is below the threshold. Once the minimum audience size is attained, your ad group will automatically start running.
Gain insight into how many of your installs are new downloads or redownloads of your app to better understand customer behaviour and inform your marketing strategies. Redownloads occur when a customer downloads your app, deletes it and downloads the same app again following a tap on an ad on the App Store, or downloads the same app on an additional device.
You may still see some redownload conversions when using the “New users” setting due to the following:
Apple Search Ads offers transparency into aggregated counts of installs (downloads) from devices with Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) On or LAT Off:
Insight into LAT On install counts can help you more fully understand the effectiveness of Apple Search Ads campaigns in acquiring or retaining customers. Due to Apple’s Privacy Policy, LAT On user data cannot be passed through the Apple Search Ads Attribution API used by mobile measurement providers (MMPs), so the number of attributed conversions reported by your MMP may be lower.
From the Campaigns dashboard, you can view LAT On and LAT Off install data fields by clicking “Edit columns”.
For Campaign Management API users, the LAT On and LAT Off, and New Downloads and Redownloads install data fields are available in the Campaign Management API via the reporting endpoint.
You can refine your audience by age and gender with Apple Search Ads Advanced. No ads will be shown to customers whose Apple IDs are registered to minors under 13 years of age, or whose accounts are registered as Managed Apple IDs. The youngest audience age you can target in most of the world, including the US is 18. In Canada and Korea, it’s 19 and in Japan, it’s 20. If you run a campaign across multiple countries and regions, you’ll see 18 as the youngest targetable age, but ads will only serve to customers who are the appropriate age as defined by their country or region. Ads for apps with a 17+ rating will also only be served to appropriately aged customers.
If you select “All Ages”, you may reach users under 18 years old. However, Apple Search Ads doesn’t target only users under 18 years old. Again, no ads will be shown to customers whose Apple IDs are registered to minors under 13 years of age, or whose accounts are registered as Managed Apple IDs.
Note that when you apply age and gender refinements, you automatically exclude customers with LAT turned On. Those customers aren’t sharing that level of detail with Apple Search Ads, even if they’re the exact demo you’re looking to capture.
You might overlook interested customers, limiting your impressions and ultimately, your conversions.
When viewing your reports by age, metrics are grouped into the following preset age groups: 18‑24, 25‑34, 35‑44, 45‑54, 55‑64, 65+. This means that you may see impression results that appear to be for a wider age range than you selected. But we target only the ages you specify within each group. For instance, if you select 18 to 38, your report shows impressions in the ranges 18‑24, 25‑34 and 35‑44.