Case Study: Apple Search Ads for Shoe Store App – Increasing Installs and Reducing CPA

The Goal

We aimed to increase installs in Apple Search Ads within the current budget.

The Solution

RadASO always starts by launching two ASA campaigns – Discovery and Exact.

1. The Discovery campaign focuses on expanding the semantic core and finding new relevant search terms. The Apple system automatically selects the words it deems contextually relevant to show the app. This is a search match enabled campaign with no pre-selected keywords, but we can opt to exclude the app from showing up for certain minus-words (from the Exact campaign).
2. For the Exact campaign, we create a separate group for each exact match keyword. Initially, all Exact campaign search terms are in the Data collection mode, which essentially involves the process of collecting statistics to draw upon later. Then, after gaining 1000 impressions or 30 taps, we shift the queries to go into Regular mode in their respective groups: Common term, Competitors brand, Our brand (and others, if necessary).

After conducting a detailed analysis for INTERTOP, we discovered that Discovery campaigns had stopped bringing in new relevant search terms. Therefore, we decided to turn off the Discovery campaign and distribute the budget among other groups.

Since buying the maximum quantity of impressions by brand remains a high priority for clients, we increased the budget for Our brand and Competitors brand. We also reduced the budget for groups with high installation costs, namely Data collection and Common term.

The Results

Compared to the previous month, we obtained 12.3% more installs and reduced the cost per install by 12.31% with a virtually unchanged overall budget.

Change in results by metric for September 2021 compared to August 2021:

‍Expenditure – advertising budget (decreased by 0.6% in September compared to August).
Impressions – number of impressions (increased by 7.92%).
Taps – number of taps (increased by 11.72%).
Installs – number of installs (increased by 12.3%).
TTR – conversion from impressions to taps (increased by 0.2%).
CR – conversion from taps to installs (increased by 0.35%).
Installs/Impr – conversion from impressions to installs (increased by 0.16%).
Avg CPT – average price per tap (decreased by 11.36%).
Avg CPA – average cost per install (decreased by 12.31%).

Dynamics of predicted impressions for key search terms (based on their popularity):

Dynamics of Search Ads Popularity (SAP) for branded search terms:

Dynamics of costs and installs by ASA:

The chart below shows a comparison of advertising budgets. In September, compared to August, the budget decreased by 0.6%.

Distribution of advertising budgets by a group for August and September:

The graph below shows a comparison of the number of installs. In September, compared to August, we obtained 12.3% more installs.

Number of installs by groups for August and September:

Below is a graph comparing the number of impressions. In September, compared to August, we obtained 7.92% more impressions.

Impressions by groups for August and September: