What is Apple Search Ads?
Apple Search Ads — renamed Apple Ads in 2025 — is Apple’s own advertising platform for the App Store. You bid on what people search for, and your app appears above the organic results.
Updated
Around seven in ten App Store installs begin with a search. Apple Ads is the only way to buy a position in that search result, which makes it the most direct paid channel an iOS app has: there is no feed to interrupt and no creative to scroll past, just a user who typed a query and an app placed against it.
Where the ads appear
There are four placements, and they behave differently enough that treating them as one channel is the first mistake most advertisers make.
| Placement | Where it shows | Best used for |
|---|---|---|
| Search results | Top of the results list for a query | The core placement. High intent, keyword-level control. |
| Search tab | Before the user types anything | Broad awareness. No keyword targeting, so judge it separately. |
| Today tab | The App Store front page | Reach and brand. Expensive per install, weak on intent. |
| Product pages | The “You Might Also Like” row on other apps’ listings | Competitive conquesting. Cheap taps, variable quality. |
Only search results give you keyword-level bidding. If you run all four placements inside one campaign and look at a blended cost per install, you will not be able to tell a profitable keyword from a Today tab impression that happened to convert.
How the auction works
You set the maximum you are willing to pay for a tap, and you usually pay less than that. Apple is often described as running a second-price auction, but observed prices do not follow that formula: an app with a lower bid can take most of the volume, and the price of a tap moves above what the next-highest bid would predict. Set bids from what you measure, such as position, volume and payback, rather than from a model of competitors’ bids.
Winning is not purely a matter of money. Apple weighs bid against relevance: how well your app metadata matches the query, and how often users who see your ad actually tap it. A well-matched app with a modest bid routinely outranks a poorly-matched app bidding more.
- Your maximum cost-per-tap bid — what you will pay for one tap.
- Relevance — how closely your app’s name, subtitle, and metadata match the query.
- Tap-through rate — how often people who see the ad tap it, which compounds over time.
- Whether the user meets your audience filters, if you set any.
Basic and Advanced
Apple sells two versions of the product, and they are not tiers of the same thing — they are different products with different economics.
| Basic | Advanced | |
|---|---|---|
| You pay for | Installs | Taps |
| Keyword control | None — Apple chooses | Full, per keyword |
| Monthly spend | Capped | Uncapped |
| Custom Product Pages | No | Yes |
| Reporting | Minimal | Keyword-level, via API |
| Suits | A first experiment | Anyone optimizing seriously |
Basic is genuinely useful for finding out whether App Store search converts for your app at all. Past that point its lack of keyword control becomes the constraint: you cannot separate brand traffic from category traffic, so you cannot tell whether you are paying for demand you already had.
What it costs
Cost per tap is usually in the low hundreds of cents in English-speaking markets, but the number that matters is cost per acquisition — taps times your tap-to-install rate — and beyond that, cost per paying subscriber. Those diverge sharply by keyword type.
- Brand keywords — your own app name. Cheapest by far, and mostly demand you already earned. Defend them, but do not count them as growth.
- Competitor keywords — rival app names. Expensive, low conversion, occasionally worth it if your differentiation is sharp.
- Category keywords — what your app does. The real growth lever, and where bid discipline earns its keep.
- Discovery — Apple matching you to queries you did not name. Cheap research; graduate the winners into exact-match campaigns.
Getting started
- Create an Apple Ads Advanced account and connect it to your App Store Connect app.
- Split brand, competitor, category, and discovery into separate campaigns from day one. Merging them later is much harder than splitting them now.
- Start exact-match on twenty to forty keywords you are confident about, plus one discovery campaign on a small budget.
- Wait. Two to four weeks before judging an exact-match keyword; longer for discovery.
- Promote discovery winners into exact match, and add the losers as negative keywords.
- Only once volume is steady, begin testing Custom Product Pages and paywalls against your highest-spend keyword clusters.