Welcome to the Sub Club podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in app purchases, manage customers and grow revenue across iOS, Android and the web. You can learn more at RevenueCat.com.
Let's get into the show. Quick announcement before we get to the podcast. On September 25 in San Francisco, we're bringing together 200 CEOs, CMOs and other growth leaders from some of the top consumer subscription apps in the world for the growth event of 2024. Presenters include Google's Tammy Ta, Phil Carter and Nikita Beer. We'll have workshops and one-on-one office hours with some of the top minds in the
industry, including many you've heard on this podcast. Hannah Parvaz, Thomas Pettit, Marcus Burke, Eric Crowley, Ashley Black and many more. Visit appgrowthanual.com to apply to a tendon person, spots are very limited. Or sign up to watch parts of the event live online. Hello, I'm your host David Barnard and my guest today is Dilip Ready, a data engineer turned marketer working on an Apple Search Ads platform called Search Ads Optimization.
On the podcast, I talk with Dilip about the impact of Apple Search Ads on organic search. How to save money on brand defense and why Rhoads shouldn't be the only thing you optimize for. Hey Dilip, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. Yeah, I'm excited to be here talking about Apple Search Ads.
Yeah, I've been meaning to do an episode on Apple Search Ads for a long time and you know there's so many different frames of reference to talk about it and so there's a few people I've talked to that I probably will still have on but a little more like kind of like Rhoadshacky, more kind of marketer focus but one thing I'm excited to talk to you about Search Ads is that you're a data guy and you kind of like stumbled into marketing as a data guy. So let's just kick it off
with that story. Like how did you get into Apple Search Ads as a data scientist? The reason is I did computer science and like always data is my good too like this what fascinates me and I started Bank of America there's no like app thing you know but over time like I joined like Unicorn app companies like in 2016 and this been the Apple Search Ads came in. It's because I'm a data architect as well so I manage all data sources and design architectures.
I noticed Apple Search Ads is different in a way that it gives like so many data points, so much of data that extreme granular including high intent keywords, how the users are reacting and it just was great and also I created my own hobby apps that don't solve any real problem but I started tinkering with Apple Search Ads and in a weird way this kind of my honor and off I've been like developing all the great things and all the stuff and the so ended up and yeah.
Yeah and then you told me at one point that one of the things that really fascinated you about Apple Search Ads was that you were digging through the data one time and saw some like really high bids or in some high cost per acquisition. Yeah so tell me about that. Yeah I mean there's some categories right like finance, health and fitness. The bids are like can be like go crazy for some market some keywords but they also bring in high revenue.
This is what is interesting because if you look at in a spray and spray networks like Meta everything is usually like constant you expect this and like the same revenue performance because
this is not intent based. It's just shooting creative across millions and hoping some will fall for it but Apple Search Ads that even the CPS is high I find it like you know there's something we can tinker with and like experiment with because we cannot stop just because it's high CPA because they're the high intent and in a way it's a limited inventory, demand and supply so it depends on the app it depends on what keywords we're targeting and what kind of users we're looking for.
And especially for very high competitive like finances one thing health and fitness. Yeah we may see bids go really high up and see they can go high in USA. USA is one of the most expensive storefront. Yeah and that's just the interesting thing about Search Ads. I mean it's why Google is a
what trillion plus dollar company. It's that when when people go search for a specific term they're they're very clearly demonstrating intent and you know I don't remember all the different categories but there's things like you know searching for a divorce lawyer on Google whereas like the bids
are it just seemed insane but if you're searching divorce lawyer you know some some some some going on in your life and it's a lot of you know the lawyers make a lot of money on divorce settlements and so it's like they can bid really high and I think there's kind of similar market dynamics at
play in the app store where for things like finance and health and fitness where there's high intent there's high willingness to pay it makes sense in kind of a competitive bid environment that some of the keywords will get bid up and it's kind of cool that like what part of what got you into
Apple search ads was seeing those high bids would be like wait a minute this data must be wrong but no it's like actually the data was correct it's just that you can have a return on ad spend with like a $50 CPA if it's the right keyword and the right app and the right monetization so that's
really interesting. Yeah and yeah the good thing about it is we can control each and every aspect at granular level I mean you can also like stop some keywords like bid really low so either forcing Apple to stop giving us impressions or give more installs for the same not more installs but similar installs with lesser CPA. This is the best part we can we aren't control of everything it's not like meta right like we don't know why the seat is going high and I can't do anything
about it. Yeah a lot of granular control and a lot of data to to understand what's going on yeah it is a double-edged sword you can get overwhelming especially if a company is running in all 60 countries and 70 countries like thousands of keywords for each country I mean we have some solutions for that and there's some kind of campus structure we can set up to make it the mental
overload much better. I wanted to kind of kick things off talking about trends for 2024 I mean things are always changing you know Apple introduced the brand or not I guess not brand but like the inventory on search and they've kind of been expanding inventory over the last few years anything especially interesting in 2024 that it's changing in App Store search ads that folks
should be paying attention to. A lot of apps now usually it used to be like we just run in try to run like you know US UK like Germany France and forget the rest of the world but now I'm noticing a trend of adding as many as countries as possible because if you think about it
there's only like five six localizations that we have to like for example if there's a Spanish you can maybe have an entire Latin America not entire but most of the Latin America with the same kind of keywords same with Portuguese German friends the way is like we identify the keyword builder
building for these localizations but you can expand to pretty much every country in the world and for extreme local language that we cannot support or Apple defaults to English anyway so expanding to more countries is what I'm noticing and Apple introduced new
geographies this year right? Yeah yeah Brazil and I think six other Latin countries so yeah this best rate and people are seeing some surprising results so my advice is just this countries because we can't just assume or because this country is this we should all run it there especially the effort is pretty much same it takes maybe a few minutes to just copy and paste campaigns right?
But you don't want to just copy and paste the campaigns right you want to copy and paste and then spend a little time kind of honing it in for that market and then you'll check your CPAs and you return on ad spend and stuff like that yeah whenever there's a new store friend my go-to is
stored with bits like two stupidly low that they'll get impressions but that's fine we can always increase it if you start bits high for a new country we don't know what is the base I can install it $10 Apple happily give me $10 bits but maybe I can get the same number of installs or
90% of installs if I bit half right so and also the trend is I'm noticing is the CPAs going a bit high and I'm assuming it's also across all ad channels because I don't deal with other ad channels but the data suggest CPS are going a bit high or year by year so we're dealing with that so yeah it
kind of makes sense because as apps get more sophisticated about monetization and really get their monetization dialed in then they can spend more and so like the market dynamics is like as consumers get more comfortable spending as inflation causes higher prices to make more sense
you know as apps work on their funnels and paywalls and all the things like we talk about on the podcast it's like we're kind of creating the problem like as more apps get more sophisticated then they can bid higher because they're going to still get a return on ad spend even with
that higher CPAs it kind of makes sense that there's just a kind of rising CPAs especially with the most high-intent search ads yeah I think there's also a trend of I call these apps hyper-scalers it's like table right like they bid our 100,000 keywords for some reason but
the reason is maybe I don't know why but they must have a billions of marketing right so unfortunately it will raise up it's like a wave lifting up all the boards kind of thing right so because demo is bidding for each and every possible English character I mean this letter
and word in the dictionary it may mean that you know the CDMA be going high I'm not saying this is the reason exactly but this is a trend I'm noticing as well yeah probably contributes to it for sure yeah and there's a new search inventory came in that didn't exist before charge deputy is the
AI everything AI yoga AI right like pretty much there's like entire new generation of search terms come in so the inventory went up as well so it's not like all like high CPA for the same inventory but also the apps like skyrocketed number of apps released ironically AI is making easier to
create many apps it's good as well so yeah this the trends so far yeah that's really interesting and the the explosion of apps thing is interesting I mean it does seem like AI has kind of accelerated that is that you know like you said for every for every major category you might want to bid on
there's probably somebody who who is either built like a more really sophisticated app or repbranded existing app to like say it's AI a a a version of it and then you know people are looking for more apps because they're thinking well hey I've been using this you know productivity
to do list is there like a better a a version of a to do list that's going to make me more productive and then they go back in search whereas like maybe they weren't searching some of those terms before because they kind of had their their the app that they used it would be interesting to see the
a is new version with it built in AI how is going to impact a lot of apps um yeah let's see how it goes with the AI so one of the hotter topics I want to get you to take on is brand defense so you know you have some people say never do brand defense you're just like it's extortion from
appling google to force you to do brand defense on SEO and ASO but what are your thoughts like can it where can it be profitable how how should you structure it if you do do it like how do you think about brand defense on apps research ads yeah obviously it's a touchy subject I have some
opinions but what I would do is like I asked a I an inquired company what is your like like what is your plan like what do you think of this because it depends on each in every company on a surface level this is what I would suggest if your app is easily replaced with a computer app you have to
run bank the unfortunate situation here is that if we lose impression share that we cannot measure that because it's a lost opportunity we can only measure something we incrementality but it's a loss of um revenue right if you think about it let's say a company is running Facebook TikTok uh brand
awareness all that touch points made that user come to the app store right before downloading if a computer sold the exact same problem um it's a really huge risk right like we made all the hard work and now the computers are benefiting from it there's some apps like with apps with network effects
and like we know these apps cannot be replaced with another apps they do not need to run you know brand for example maybe bank of a great app no one creates an online application but there's an opportunity for like fintech apps right because that's their opportunity bank of
a good doesn't need that but fintech can capitalize on that opportunity my suggestion is test with bidding lower for the brand keywords you'll be surprised you may be paying let's take one example an app is getting 100% impression share to be honest it's not 100 because there's never
100% impression share let's say 90% impression share is there a way to measure that incrementality testing or is this apple actually like show you this impression share this is a best part apple does give us impression share per search term per country
so that is one thing we can keep track of that this reason why it allows us to conduct this test is bid lower for brand and test it out and if you retain same impression share you essentially have the cost still getting like same impression share it is a test because we don't know how impression
share can take a hit and maybe some companies are okay with 70% impression share if it reduces cost by a 70% so it's a nice trade off you still retaining we still like letting go of our impressions for other competitors but we can use that budget for generic high intent and these are actual new
users right and regarding apple extorting I mean it's not unique to apple right like I mean every ad channel there's no trademark on search terms so yeah it's unfortunate reality of every one has to do with but it's also an opportunity right the impression share is an
interesting way to approach it though because you're right it's like if if you can spend half as much money and get 90% impression share versus twice as much money to get to 100% that extra 10% is probably not incrementally better than just spending less and getting the 90% and then
something you and I were talking about was how the the search as algorithm does tend to prefer the actual branded app where you could potentially even bid a lot lower than your competitors and still win the bid because apple's not just going with the highest bid there is some
amount of like them trying to fit the best app right yeah it's because of one mechanism is that cost per tap model apple only charges an app company if someone taps on it if you if you get a million impressions with zero taps you basically got all this free one million impressions so
if that's the case right like if apple just takes highest bid like Tim will be showing off for your research term but it's not the reason is imagine like if I'm a yoga app famous yoga app and someone is searching for the yoga app of my brand a competitor may not get same level of
engagement a lot of users may see the ad and oh you know what I don't care about it I heard about this app so I'm going to download the apple is losing too and it's also not great user experience right if some if a user is typing for yoga brand of xyz they're expecting to say xyz not
so eventually apple may like shift the terms to brand even if you're bidding like let's say half of the computer because it there's some calculations it is also a test because it's not guaranteed outcome imagine I'm a just generic yoga app and the computer has very way better screenshots way
better messaging way better ratings I may lose that and Apple may think you know what this computer app is actually working better more than this brand so Apple may like give the impression share so it is a bit of a test but yeah this way it's ideal to monitor the impression share and
make sure you're not like tanking yeah yeah how it makes a lot of sense because like yeah you're right it's like in your example earlier I think it's maybe even better it's like if somebody's searching Bank of America they're probably not going to tap on an ad for chase bank and so Apple
doesn't make money when somebody searches Bank of America and they show chase because people are looking for the Bank of America because they bank at Bank of America they're not searching Bank of America because they're looking for a bank they're looking for the app and so I mean it's probably the
exact opposite on like SEO it's like you know if somebody's searching Bank of America online or like you know other kind of keywords it might make more sense but on the app store specifically when somebody's looking for a very specific app Apple's not making money if people are having to scroll past
the ad so yeah it makes a lot of sense so on brand defense you just you you you really experiment and try and bid as low as possible to maintain as much impression share as you're comfortable with to make sure you're not kind of losing out on the opportunities man I bet I mean that advice
alone you know I don't know how it does seem like a lot of companies you know they just kind of throw money at app store search ads and do operate in a very sophisticated way and of course tons of them you know higher consultants or have internal people who are really good or have
agencies working on it who know these kind of things but there's probably folks listening to this podcast who who don't know that and aren't you know paying close enough attention and you may have just saved them like tens of thousands of dollars just go in there and lower your bid and watch
impression share I mean there's one more thing about the ROIS and key studies and like one thing I noticed is a lot of case studies don't mention if it's generic or brand this brand usually has highest ROIS of any kind of if think about it right like that's what we we made the user come
to app store and they're highest intent possible so when we seeing the revenue always I would consider brand as its own entity we treat it as we do not compare brand with any other high intent generic keywords or computer keywords or like broad match keywords I would treat it as
two different things I do not even mix up the data as a an entire like Apple Search I strategy yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah because if you're overall ROI looks amazing yes because because you're cannibalizing but if you can pay half your ROI is going to be better so that's great
we already kind of talked a little bit about the trend in CPAs going up up up but I wanted to dig into that a little bit so we kind of talked about some of that the high CPA like finance and health and fitness and some of these categories that are going high what what about like low CPAs are
there some categories that like our opportunities some some arbitrage available in the app store in certain categories yeah even with the high completion categories like we can have some CPA we can improve CPA better by just expanding high intent and low intent keywords and bit accordingly
for example yoga I know yoga if someone is typing yoga yoga is high intent for my app I'm talking about yoga is because it's such a generic app so but I also know if someone is doing pilates or some kind of like maybe there's a low intent they may not be interested in my app but
it's still like someone is looking for health and fitness and pilates maybe they're low intent but I wouldn't be the same as I would be for yoga so I classify that as low intent that way you can expand keywords a lot and also keywords we can think of it as it's very this way
the night and day difference of performance can occur in Apple Search ads if I'm choosing bad keywords like half 10 keywords that are not relevant to app I'm bidding $10 each we're going to have some troubles this is a human thing right like we know much better you can use AIH adgpt to
have some ideas but the final save should be yours of okay we are using this keyword because it's low intent and we'll bit lower and in hopes that we get more sedicions and the best part about Apple Search ads is there are two types of keywords except is not 100% exact but it's more like
yoga for a woman for example is that if I'm bidding as exact keyword that's fine but there's another keyword type called broad match what it means is any variations can also we can all right automatically show serve for me if yoga for women is same intent as yoga for women in 30s
I know it's a long tale but yoga for women I don't care what the following search terms are because I already know yoga for women and these keywords usually are dynamic because if you look at the app store app if you type yoga you'll see Apple suggest some search terms and these change
very often so the competition would may not exist for some of the search terms and there's a low hanging fruit run the broad but bit obviously bit lower I'm a big fan of classifying keywords and bidding different for each based on the group brand and regarding low it's also very dynamic
even with the high competition some keywords may not have any competition at all and there's like think of stock market there's like so many so many people trying to buy stocks and we cannot predict what's going to happen so this is where you know we try to have as many as
really many keywords and we expect some may go down in impression share some may go up or all we just see improvement in performance so is that how broad match works I'm a little naive here I have not unfortunately I mean you and I were talking about like I actually want to start running after search ads campaigns for my weather app I've been holding off because I'm like I don't know if they're going to be profitable and like it is tough in a category like weather and but so I'm
a little naive to exactly how all of this works but maybe that's good because I think a lot of the the folks who listen to a podcast like this don't necessarily like day in day out run campaign so it's helpful to kind of define some of these terms and describe in a little more detail how some
of this works so broad match if if you do a broad match for like yoga for women will it broad match anything related to yoga for women or does it still have to have like yoga and women in the search terms like how how dangerous is it to set a broad match will it just like pull any random
stuff in there there Apple yes it just just because we said your yoga for women it doesn't mean that Apple may Apple may show for truly unrelated if it thinks that if Apple algorithm thinks for example, the electron if Apple thinks the electron is really to yoga for men our ad we may be paying
for the electron keyword but the good thing is we can even track this there's a report called search terms report it's better to occasionally we check you know this report and make sure okay all our spending is going to the right kind of keywords usually the search terms is not perfect Apple
only shows search terms if they're if we spend enough and if we get enough impressions but there's fine this won't be one anyway right we don't need like thousands of search terms report so then in this case like if if you have a yoga app and you see in the report that it's bidding for
peloton and and it's a high bid and you're not getting to ROI do you do you go in there and then specifically say don't bid on peloton so the good thing about that is we can track which keyword is causing peloton to causing or in app to show for peloton usually I just go in there and
tone it down to really stupidly love that either we get really really cheap like installs or app we force Apple to not show red I'm not a big fan of removing keywords too much often these are dynamic trends right let's say I have a yoga for men and Apple is showing peloton search term for
this for my app this week it doesn't mean that it's going to keep doing there forever right like maybe next month that might be my most profitable keyword if I just remove that keyword I just not my opportunity forever but if I bid low and I can retry later two three months I
and see how is it performing I think yoga for men is not a great example for broad but you can think of as a let's take weather since your app hopefully I'm not giving away weather app secrets uh imagine we are bidding we just don't know anything about Apple search ads but we know our app
is about weather so you can run on weather as exact it means that any variation weather like we show the ad and we pay high for that let's assume we did not do any keyword research we don't have any keyword list if you also bid on broad of the same so we are running two keywords basically
Apple measure weather map weather information weather alerts as far as we concerned those are also relevant for us right so you can go to the multiple levels like now weather alerts we can bid on weather alerts because Apple showed oh there's a weather alerts keyword now that we do the same
thing we add weather alerts as exact and also broad and our hope is that if someone is searching for weather alerts for the deal for you it's still relevant because Matt is still relevant and if someone is searching weather alerts Los Angeles um same thing so that way like you can
that's where I'm a big fan of maintaining a relevant keyword list because this is one time action right like once we add weather alerts we're not gonna unless the app change the center faces model and the name and the functionality it's really rare that the keyword is gonna be
applicable forever yeah that's a good point though because like for my app it would actually be the opposite so we would start with weather as a broad match and we would probably see that weather alerts is a very low-intent keyword because we actually don't have alerts in the app it's something
we actually want to add to the app so then what you're saying is what we would do then is put weather as broad match when we see weather alerts come in and it's um not creating a great ROI even if maybe it is driving down lows because people don't realize the app doesn't do it but then they
get into the app it doesn't do it they leave a bad review they uh don't buy or they cancel the free trial or whatever um so then we make weather alerts a exact match and then we've been really low because maybe we still get impressions and maybe we still make some money but we want that specific
keyword to be super low price but then when I add the feature then we already have some relevancy for it and then I can bump the bids back up right in this case like when we are sure this a particular keyword is really badly performing and it's consistent or an organ
he can actually add it as a negative keyword basically what we're saying to Apple is anything that says weather alerts yeah take me out I'm not I'm not in the game so this actually much better uh but we need to be absolutely sure that this keyword is never gonna be a good fit um I noticed some
uh advice that yeah just remove negative any keywords that don't generate revenue in first week that is really not great a strategy in my opinion because everything is dynamic right like some competitors may be bidding high this week they may not drop off tomorrow it's all dynamic
that's one big fan of Apple said jazz it gives us a lot of data to well date and the store hypothesis um yeah in this case if you know this keyword is a bad news yeah we just added as negative keyword one time thing and we never have to worry about it again so is that is that how
exact and broad match work so I mean a lot a lot of people who like work in in the industry are constantly managing things we'll know that but I'm sure there's a lot of folks listening who don't and then honestly even the people who work in this day and day out could probably learn some of
the intricacies about how it doesn't doesn't work from you as much as you've managed this and like work with some of the different folks over the years so um so yeah how how does broad match work yep the goal for us when you when we are using broad match is to capture like
exponential number of search terms that are still relevant to our app and added benefit is usually for this keywords because these are so dynamic they change every week they may be low in popularity um so they will our competitors may not be bidding really so so we've talked a bit
about fluctuation but one of the biggest fluctuations is this seasonality is like you know I'm sure January 1 all the search terms related to health and fitness are bid to crazy and that's to be expected um but any other things you think people should be watching out for seasonality wise or
or how does that impact CPAs and and how should you be preparing and structuring your campaigns for seasonality so you don't end up like you'll pay too much but also so you don't miss out on the opportunities when there may be our higher higher ROI searches when maybe you are bidding lower
even when there are higher intent people coming in yeah I mean for us store friend like the Thanksgiving is usually the highest competitive space it's the same similar phenomenon like a wave lifting up all the books kind of thing so even if it's nothing even for app it has nothing to do
with shopping we may see our CPA you know going up with high even summer time is like usually for like it depends on kind of apps like for some categories the summer is actually the cheapest CPA for some reason you can think of this as cool if I'm education
app and usually the best time period to test any new app is I mean if someone is thinking of trying out app searchers is during February till summer this is kind of a kind of really low energy in the you know competition competitive space because the January highs gone and now things
are coming back but it depends on the app too right like if I'm if my app is dealing with something with for example flights like flight tracker obviously like I can benefit much because there's not be travel season yeah these are the seasonality trends and some of them are counter intuitive too
like I was actually talking to Ryan Jones from flighty recently and he was saying how surprised he was that holiday travel is such a like I thought I think the conversation was related to me saying oh you must do like really good business in the summer he's like no actually like the summer's fine
but the holidays is where people are like way higher intent like traveling more care more about delays and stuff like that and so some of these like seasonal trends are probably counter intuitive and like even you're running your app thinking oh you know let's take all trails for example it's like
oh the summer's going to be peak season maybe but are there are there ways like that you kind of I mean pretty much you just need to be watching weekend week out are there are there are there specific ways that you track these campaigns to make sure that that you're not missing out on either
potentially bidding lower kind of when when CPAs maybe drift lower or bidding higher when there's actually higher intent people coming in and how do you manage that on a day and day out basis it depends on the like how our app category how the competition is for some apps like it depends on
what our competitors are doing because when I'm saying competitors I'm not talking about exact close competitors I'm talking about any app that are bidding heavily and for a long time for our primary keywords high intent keywords it depends on that for day in day out usually we should not
we just keep in mind that hey this is expected and we can look over the good thing is it should correlate with organic traffic as well so we can just come back to apps to connect and check last two years what's our trend and we can expect similar in app searchers I'm not a big fan of changing bits
by the seasonality because like I say just like stock market right like you say everything is dynamic we cannot predict that we'll get impition share of this keyword but we can see the results and act on it I mean there's a thing about data right like we don't have to make any assumptions we can see the data and act accordingly so what you're saying is a better the better tactic is just to watch the keywords and so if you're getting a higher ROI on a specific keyword no matter the seasonality
that's when you would experiment with increasing the bid and then if you see ROI drop then that's when you experiment with lowering the bid and you kind of like you you should just be doing this as like standard practice anyway not necessarily focused on the seasonality even as a watch keywords
means it's like a constant process right like imagine I am running an app searcher just campaigns for my company and I just go in every year every week once in a while and I'll just be according to what I'm saying it doesn't matter maybe Germany is the least performing campaigns it doesn't
matter what season right I just yeah you know what I'm not gonna spend too much budget so let me bid lower for the entire ad group maybe US is least performing but Germany's best performing in December for some reason I don't know because these are all election factors we cannot
analyze like why we can just react what we're seeing based on like batch 15 days or batch 7 days so and speaking of ROI how do you think about ROI because you know you're not always going to be able to get I mean the magic is like oh I'm plugging a keyword and like 150% ROI in seven days and then
spend a million dollars a month and you're just making money hand in foot but that's not how it actually works in the real world but so how do you first measure ROI and then how do you think about ROI yeah imagine I'll take will take an example of a regular generic app with 70-footile and
some let's talk about my app so if I start running because I am gonna start running whether app search ads on different weather terms and so I'll and I'll probably be talking about this over time on the podcast like you know what's worked and what hasn't for me so yeah a weather app
so I start running ads for my weather app so we'll use that as a hypothetical what is the free trial is there free trial seven days seven days perfect here's the thing about revenue in Apple search ads Apple search ads by default doesn't give revenue doesn't show revenue like unlike metal you know
Google ads but there's some ways that you can use MMPs like other platforms and get the information and link it up and revenue cat yes yeah revenue cat does a great job like linking up keywords and ad groups and you can use that information to analyze my recommendation is like
do not go in there expecting a hard number as revenue go and if it doesn't hit take the entire channel down because these are really dynamic and there's so many things that we can improve on um for example like if he it's totally different of revenue if he if I google right now what is a good
always the usual wisdom is for 400 percent what they mean is like okay if he's spent $100 you need you expect foreign dollars coming back but that is a not for app uh that's not that in this dumb is not for app marketing because for simple reason we have subscriptions right like we and also all this uh 400 percent or is golden metric is for like for example if I'm selling t-shirts yeah there's a metric I can follow on but because if I'm a person who buys my t-shirt will never buy same t-shirt
next month um but app there's a important metric called time to break even or it means is it's fine even if you don't get 100 percent or is in the first week I mean obviously if we get that that's good but even if you get like 40 percent or 50 percent or is it's actually not bad result because
we can still improve on add more keywords we can fine tune and also there is a we can see check or LTV right and because we're bidding for high intent we know that these users are perfect users of our app so we can expect we can improve like in app like experience to make sure they
don't turn and they if you have monthly subscription hopefully because if you think about go what it always mean we only spend that let's say we spend three dollars for that install for that user who started this free trial and they did convert in that case we only spend three dollar one
time for that user and that's it but the revenue is like hopefully our app is there and like not like there's not huge earn we can keep on that revenue is keep coming in so um there's a time delay we just have to keep track of it um and so then every app developer has to kind of decide
from a cash flow perspective from a long-term business perspective I mean I was talking to one person who you know because you you hear so much in the industry of like oh you know what's your seven-day relapse what's your 30-day relapse you know are you getting relapse positive in 90 days
like what's a metric and I was talking to somebody who has like really great organic traffic so their their business is just spinning off cash and so their metric was 365 day relapse so their their metric was can I spend today and at least get to 100% by the first annual renewal and for a
lot of businesses that can make sense like if the cash flow makes sense if you're wanting to like really grow and then the cool thing like you're saying is like those people who renewed that first year you get to row as positive in 365 days which again crazy it's hard to float that if you know
for a lot of companies but then like a bunch of those people are going to renew the next year and the next year after that and so it's an arbitrage opportunity to grow faster now if you have the cash and you have some level of confidence in those renewals um that you're going to start stacking those
cohorts soon and soon that that's actually why I want to start advertising for my weather app as soon as possible and I'm kind of kicking myself or not starting it's like should at least be picking up the low hanging for and maybe this is kind of the message for those of you who aren't
currently doing it I've even for those of you who are and maybe could even spend more than you currently are is that I mean this is magic of the subscription app model is that that LTV is not capped even if you have a average LTV for most apps who are reasonably attentive whatever average
you calculate today is likely to just keep going up year after year after year after year I mean I was looking at my own app and seven years in I still have 20% of people who subscribed within the first month so seven years still have 20% of people and so if I can stack more of those cohorts
now versus that game later even if I'm not getting a hundred percent rowers on day seven if I can afford the cash to do that and expand the business it's going to pay dividends in the long run but you just got to make sure you you have some level of retention and confidence in that and then you have the cash and the risk tolerance to go ahead and invest more heavily.
Yeah obviously the the caveat is that we have all the basics sorted out with what I mean is the install to free trial ratio the free trial to conversion ratio but this is nothing to do with Apple search right the goal of Apple search is bring in new users we have to like improve those
in app conversion rates anyway or so regardless if you run ASA or not and one more thing about ROS is ROS should not be the primary metric it should be the combination of revenue and ROS for example we can think of two apps let's take meditation let's take headspace and calm these are imaginary numbers so don't sue me imagine a headspace and calm both are running Apple search ads and headspace is spending let's say a million dollars and their ROS is 75% or is but calm is spending
two million dollars with 65% or is on the paper it looks like headspace is doing much better right because it's getting 70% or is within like first 30 days or whatever but in long term the calm is actually very position to lead because at the end of the one year they're both all going to have
100% or is anyway according to their TV metrics but calm generated double the amount of revenue that headspace even though there is always is not great for the calm app so it is a combination of revenue and ROS and if you don't consider revenue our company will and they will eventually
like be dire or whatever the risk we're getting currently is going to suffer because now they're going to be higher for their our positive RS keywords so yeah revenue is the one of the major number as well because the sport we want right well and the other thing that revenue takes into
account that you that's hard to factor in is that there is some organic lift when you're running ASO I know this is another kind of controversial topic and I know you have some hypothesis around the impact but the reality is there's some impact whether your hypothesis is correct or you know
tons of people in this tree are like oh it's going to be magic like run ASA and then your ASO is going to be amazing but so what's your hypothesis on the impact of ASA on ASO I would call it conspiracy theory I'm not even called hypothesis because that's such a take it with grain of bucket with bucket of salt this is what I love having you on versus like a growth hacker because a growth hacker would have just been like oh yeah 100% this is how it works you're like you see the day to day
and then day out you're like this is even a hypothesis because you want to have a level of confidence in the answer but yeah what do you think because honestly you probably you're conspiracy theory is probably better than a lot of folks who speak confidently about this my theory is that downward
volume correlates with organic ranking it's one of those trend that it doesn't matter what app it saw this correlates with a such a strong efficiency the second factor I think is this with the conspiracy theory part coming in even at the keyword level imagine we are having same
amount of downloads there's not much huge change in the donor volume but you start running for whether app Apple search ads let's say whether radar maybe is one of the future of your app yep that's a great keyword for my app yeah so with a radar you imagine your current organic
rankings maybe 70 or something as soon as you store running app search ads for that particular whether radar or search term and or app generate some installs you may see the organic ranking go really high maybe even reaching top 10 or top 20 just the skyrocketing within but the
downward volume is same that's my conspiracy theory that maybe app store considers Apple search as keyword as part of app store and now even the app store algorithm can see that oh you know what this whether app is totally relevant to whether radar because users are
clicking on it and using it and don't know why but then why wouldn't it change the downward volume if you go from like if if I start advertising for whether radar and I go get go from I'm probably like 200 in that search currently so I go from 200 to 20 why would download volume not
change I'm only talking about that particular keyword it's an imaginary hypothesis that we are running app search ads for only that keyword let's assume our daily download is like 100 units in US and we started running that keyword for two installs a day and giving example maybe over
end of the week the downward volume is not that high like 100 versus 102 installs with the organic ranking for every other keyword may remain same but for this particular keyword what we're running in the opposite search we may see a kind of organic ranking uplift but like I said take a bit
bucket of salt it may not happen I don't recommend spending a lot of budget just for that purpose because it may happen it may not happen in yeah it does seem like apples search algorithm although it was still frustrating it doesn't feel like that for still especially great at it but it does seem
like it's gotten more and more sophisticated over the years so the people who who think there's going to be a one-to-one response in taking a certain action might be surprised and like you said yeah it's it's a lot of money to put on the line with when any kind of algorithm like this there's
not a level of certainty on it while we're on the topic the dollar volume organ rank of the theory is that it is kind of like a chicken and egg issue for especially for new apps or apps that are actually based in the class better than all the competitors but the competitors will be always
number one in that case do not treat apple search as a like a there's a channel we should never run on because this may be the very option because as long as your app is better than competitors and they're rank in number one even then you can actually get high intent as long as
we talked about the basic or in-app conversion ratios or basic this all great if there's a case like you don't even need like to run a million install campaigns you can just talk to this high intent we're not gonna get quantity but we'll get the quality user send as long as we're
scaling up our revenue why does it matter how much if a rank in number one or not I'm talking about app procedures obviously it matters that here rank number one but sometimes it's next to impossible for some keywords we can never rank number one right yeah that makes sense in speaking
of scaling that's actually something I wanted to talk to you about that that's kind of the the challenge with App Store search ads is that even though it can be an incredible source of really high intent downloads the kind of what everybody in the industry talks about is like well that's great but it's not scalable so how do you think about scalability in App Store search ads?
scalability I mean obviously we cannot compare apple search ads with metal campaigns or TikTok campaigns because it's app it's apples versus oranges we are looking quality versus quantity in my opinion the best way to scale is to adding more keywords high intent blue intent
like segmented by it and adding broad match keywords that was literally like we exponentially increasing our ofiness and more countries by default that's an easy way to scale and just monitor campaigns and employ some kind of workflow like campaign structures should be in a such a way that
it's easy to maintain them I'm not a big fan of like creating hundreds of campaigns for one country because you only have one competitor set of keywords right like we cannot have multiple competitors we don't need to run different different ad groups yeah the bottom line is adding more
keywords relevant keywords the more relevant the parent they are and adding more there's always competitor share that we can improve and brand is something as we talked about it is it's something we do not consider brand as our because brand is kind of steady flow right like I mean it's
a good thing the brand ambitious go up but that's always cute yeah but then what are the I mean do you see I guess it's just can be so contextual right it's like for health and fitness app it's like if they're willing to spend the money it can be a massive channel because there's
ton of high intent people coming and searching relevant keywords but then if you're in a niche really small niche where like you really only relevant to a very small number of searches then you're going to hit the wall sooner right so it's just it's very contextual of like when you're
going to hit the wall but then you don't know that you've really hit the wall until you've done the experiments with broad match and experimented with the bidding and like tried to that for right yeah and apple search is one of those things whether the competitors are kind of
can dictate what we can do next for example imagine there's a weather app and imagine this for some of your reason there's no weather app in apple searchers ever running apple search ads your app is only one that has apple searchers in that case your CPA will be like probably in
cents in US your ore skin skyrocket but there's like a dream scenario but imagine you're like you have like 25 weather competitors weather app competitors in the United States unfortunately it means that for the same number of installs your CPA probably like is 10 times now but the good thing is
competitors also dynamic just because they're bidding for a keyword doesn't mean that apple considers them relevant same phenomenon brand as well if you're your competitor running same weather radar keyword and for some reason your app is performing better and apple can see that even if you're
bidding half of your competitor apple will still prefer your ad because apple has to make money to write like they can't just show them other app if it's not getting too much of traction yeah that's interesting and then and so then part of what you're saying is like even even if you are
super niche and like it's gonna it's gonna tap me out really quick go get those keywords because you're gonna be so cheap so if you're if you're a donation you're not running apple search ads you're probably leaving money on the table because there probably are some high intent low traffic
keywords that still you're just printing money if you can pick those up yeah that we just need to adjust our expectations like we can have like a million dollar day one you know metal metal kind of you know blitz but if we have our expectations set and yeah and the interesting thing too is like
even though meta you can theoretically scale even for for a niche app like you'll saturate that kind of ideal customer profile and so yeah you can scale near infinite on meta but you might not scale profitably near infinite because it's similar like as you start bidding higher and high as
you start saturating your market and those high intent users that you're going to be able to get to then your costs are gonna go up to because now you're now you're ending up with medium intent people and then low intent people so like nothing's truly infinitely scalable unless you're I mean
like I guess these like teemoon stuff like that like when anybody is truly a potential customer there are like you can't scale to a level that a lot of apps can't but most apps aren't that so and one of the interesting thing is that how ad channels can behave differently for the same app
obviously there are any mature app company will be using multiple ad channels at the same time meta and apple search and whatnot the difference is that apple search is relatively easier channel to maintain the reason is we don't have to create this influencer videos make it quirky like and
there's a thing called fatigue imagine you probably noticed that we're using Instagram and you sing same ad every day like it even it's something we'll set in and we'll never you know it's actually create make create a version to the app but apple searchers we don't have that problem right because
we are targeting new user looking exactly for that keyword so the ad fatigue is not a really huge thing there's some display formats like search tabs or today tabs they but it's not like that extent of Instagram where we see like 10 ads of the same app in the row and it's not that
great experience and it's easier to scale because we're not dealing with creatives apple searchers creatives is our whatever the screenshots we have meta data set right now and the keywords we don't change keywords right like it's always the same keywords we may add it we may I mean we
may pause them or we may be lower but a weather radar until the your app exists in the capital the weather radar is always be relevant we don't need to think creatively and it's great for people like us who are developers because we don't have to worry about like creative videos
to catch people's attention yeah speaking of creative and apps or screenshots and stuff though how has product pages and being able to send specific keywords to specific product pages started change the game because you there is a certain level now where you can experiment a little more with
you know quote unquote creative on the app store because you can create a separate product page for these different kind of use cases have you seen that help you accounts you know scale and get to better our our row ads those are good problems to have because if you're considering a keyword
specific customer product pages it means that we already maximized what are the impressions here and we are reaching this is you like there's a shopping app and they maximized 80% of your relationship for all generic terms where custom product pages can move the needle is let's
assume there is a demo is running ad for Thanksgiving and it's like a month long feature right but they move once it Thanksgiving in the title and subtitle and screenshots but they can create its entire custom product page just for Thanksgiving and have Thanksgiving all across only for
United States and they can use that to scale up those Thanksgiving people who are creating wine saying Thanksgiving should be black Friday right black Friday news and yeah that way like you know Tim who can scale up those keywords and in a indirect way I am also like custom
product pages for a B testing this is one easy way to like simply implement a B testing and see and you can even use similar search terms like for example bid for half the United States for our default product page and use utilize the new custom product page should be one to test and
see which one performs better and just compare each there shouldn't be much difference between East Coast and West Coast anyway or you can also try ASCII Dueling which means during the first half the day you can use it but I'm not a big fan because the day time of the day may dictate for example
like if I'm if I'm a yoga app I may be looking in the morning right so the geographical separation might be a good place to test yeah interesting all right well it's been so fun chatting today but we do need to wrap up as as we do is there anything else you want to share or
anything you want to tell the audience yeah for new apps use Apple Search as kind of customer discovery thing and you can I mean you don't have to spend daily budget like like hundreds of dollars you can even get five six installs a day spending ten twenty dollars but use that as high
intent and use them as a because you want to target high intent users and improve your app and check this out our platform is designed to scale Apple Search as profitably school search ads optimization.com and find me on LinkedIn and ask me any questions and I'm always happy to talk
about Apple Search ads awesome and as I've kind of been wrapping up these podcasts too if you have specific questions instead of hitting them up on LinkedIn where only the two of you can talk feel free to do it on on the subclub community so we'll post this podcast on subclub community
you can respond to that or just just tag dillip so that your questions can be beneficial to the rest of the community as well but yeah I was checking out your company and again it's really cool that you started this from a data perspective and you know it's clear
that you've you know built these the algorithms to make it so much easier for folks to do a lot of things that we talked about today to manage those bids to automate some of that as well so yeah it looks like a really cool platform and uh something I'm going to be checking out myself
yeah sounds great awesome thanks for joining me and thanks for sharing all these great nuggets with folks thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community