App Advertising is a tough business. App marketers use various distribution channels, spend tons of money, and hope to become visible to prospective customers. Our Ad Intelligence data shows that the top advertising apps sometimes use up to 15 different user acquisition channels to drive more traffic to their app listing pages.

Such marketing networks include traditional advertising such as TV ads, Instagram or Influencers. Many apps also distribute their ads through mobile ad networks such as AdMob or IronSource.

However, there is still an important challenge: Measurement. Even though there are methods to estimate your spend and return, it is not possible to know the actual outcome of your app marketing efforts with 100% accuracy. Maybe a user saw your blog, and weeks later searched for your brand name to download your app. Or maybe they stumbled upon one of your mobile or TV ads and saw what your app does.

Weeks later, these users might come to the App Store to download your app. Even if you can not measure it, we can easily estimate that you spent quite a bit of money to bring in these untrackable users.

Now that the IDFA is no longer relevant, it is only harder to track your efforts. However, a certain amount of brand awareness is still spread through your ads without a doubt. The users who see your advertisement are more likely to go to the App Store to search for your app’s name to download it.

The amount of money and effort you spent to bring in these users makes them highly important. It would be sad if one of your competitors took them away from you after all your hard work right?

Use Search Ads Intelligence to Rule the App Store

To give you insights on whether your competitors are running Apple Search Ads on your brand keyword with customized creative sets, we have added Creative Sets feature to Search Ads Intelligence.

Now, in addition to viewing your competitors’ Apple Search Ads keywords and who runs ads on your brand keywords, you’re able to see whether or not they use custom creative sets, too.

Let’s assume that we are the UA manager for Fox News. We can check variations of our brand keyword to see which competitors are trying to take advantage of our brand name to drive users.

Instantly, we can see that the keyword Fox News is a very popular one. A search score of 61 indicates that this keyword is frequently searched for in the App Store.

These searches most probably include people who searched for Fox News as it is a big brand name, as well as those who stumbled upon their ads in any marketing channel. Furthermore, 16 apps are actively running ads for this keyword.

So, Fox News would ideally want to appear at the top of the search results for such queries. This can be done organically through App Store Optimization, or through Apple Search Ads in the App Store.

However, we can see that fuboTV is getting most of the impressions out of the ‘Fox News’ keyword. Importantly, they are using custom creative sets to steal these impressions and to increase their conversion rates.

Through Search Ads Intelligence, we saw that 16 other apps were bidding on the keyword ‘Fox News’, which is the brand keyword for our app.

As a UA manager, we have to make sure that apps such as fuboTV do not take away our potential users.

They are also organically ranking 19th for our brand keyword. Considering the relationship between App Store Optimization and Apple Search Ads, letting them receive taps or downloads through our brand keyword will allow them to both appear higher at our brand keyword while also making it easier for fuboTV to win auctions in Apple Search Ads.

Now that you can see what competitors are doing to drive traffic from your brand keywords, you can start taking actions to prevent this. First of all, make sure that your presence in Apple Search Ads is strong, especially for your own keyword.

Next, you can target the brand keywords of your competitors to take advantage of their traffic. In your Competitor Campaign, target brand keywords using exact match and use custom creative sets to increase Tap-Through rates by tailoring your creative assets to specific audiences.

Just as fuboTV uses soccer to attract users who are searching for Fox News, customize your assets according to the demographic of your competitor. If other apps are already doing this, check out their creatives and try to draw insights on how to improve your performance.

Search Ads Intelligence is now available in both ASO Intelligence and Ad Intelligence.

App Marketers can:

• See which keywords competitors are bidding on and find new keyword ideas

• Instantly locate apps bidding on their brand keywords

• View their competitors’ creative sets to get new ideas on what to show their audience.

• Find out the Top Apple Search Ads Advertisers

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by Mehmet Can Cavas
source: MobileAction