The Apple Search Ads (ASA) Stack is a framework designed to help ASA practitioners of a mobile product or service to develop and evolve a strategy for Apple Search Ads. The ASA Stack’s objective is to provide user acquisition marketers with a holistic view of Apple Search Ads. It will show them how they can develop a comprehensive, strategic approach to growing the user base and/or optimizing for performance. The stack can be applied at any stage during a product’s lifecycle and to many different apps, although some elements of the stack could become more relevant at different stages of the business lifecycle.
How Does It Work?
The ASA stack has three key horizontal layers that can be leveraged in Apple Search Ads: Campaigns, Ad Groups, and Keywords. These are then supported by a fourth and a fifth layer: Tools and Supporting Insights.
The horizontal layers are intersected with the foundations (variables and elements) that you can utilize, customize, and develop to improve your Apple Search Ads account. As a matter of fact, it can be said that the variables and elements are, for the most part, the foundations of the ASA stack because these can modify your strategy and help adjust your goals which can be scaling the channel and/or optimizing for performance. Scaling the channel enables you to enhance your visibility and expand the number of users. Optimizing for performance can increase your conversion as well as improve your Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) or Life-Time Value (LTV).
Companies at different stages of maturity will need to prioritize the foundations differently to reach their particular business goals. As a matter of fact, a successful strategy will need to incorporate most of the elements from the three core layers to generate sufficient impact and it will be highly unlikely to achieve a specific objective (either scaling and/or optimizing the channel) without investment in Tools and Supporting Insights.
Each element (i.e. each individual cell) in the stack represents an activity that might form part of your strategy. Not all elements will be equally applicable to a specific app, category/industry, or given the company’s resources and internal capabilities. A smart strategy does not attempt to cover every single element of the stack at the same time but selects an appropriate mix of initiatives that reflect the business’ essence and its objectives. The strategy you will choose, if appropriately developed, would enable you to achieve profitability, but it should also allow you to invest in tools and insights that enable you to foster your future growth opportunities.
Campaigns Layer
By making sure you have a relevant and clear structure in your account, you will certainly be able to make the most out of your Apple Search Ads account. Having a precise idea of your goals and being organized will have a pivotal impact on your Apple Search Ads Campaigns. A clear campaign format will allow you to exploit automated scripts that can become your best ally in saving your time for daily operations, but also knowing and exploiting little tips and tricks can improve your ASA strategy. In this section, we will discuss the “campaign layer” which covers how you can leverage campaign structure, budget, daily caps, and storefronts to achieve your objectives
Campaign structure
Your campaign structure is one of the first things you need to address before starting to advertise on Apple Search Ads. How should I organize my overall strategy? What are my targets and objectives? Think about that before you start creating campaigns because it will help you better organize your strategic approach.
At Phiture, we work with a semantics-based campaign structure per market: Brand, Generic, Competitor, Discovery, and Probing. This layout can help to keep costs monitored per country or region, but also identifying the most important campaigns in terms of performance and conversion.
However, also other structures can be valuable, such as a value-based structure. I personally prefer the semantics-based campaign because:
- It is difficult to assess the value of keywords before you run your campaigns.
- Some keywords could be fluctuating in terms of the value they generate (external shocks, change in bids, competition, etc.).
- With Semantic campaigns/ad groups, you’re able to more effectively drive conversion with Creative Sets that are relevant to the Semantic Ad Group/Campaign.
How you structure your campaigns will lay the groundwork for your performance. You don’t want a messy campaign because it will only cause confusion.
When choosing a campaign structure we likely want to cover volume (scale) as well as aiming for performance. If your main target is scaling the channel and expanding the current reach, discovery campaigns can support your keyword exploration to find similar competitors or keywords that belong to your domain (we will talk about this in detail in the Keywords layer). This is done automatically, with the help of an algorithm. Other than discovery campaigns, also keyword research, which we will cover later, will be pivotal in achieving scale.
Budget
The Budget figure in the Apple Search Ads console should be interpreted as a lifetime budget. The reason why you should set a very high number on this budget is that if you suddenly spend the whole budget, your campaigns will stop. As we don’t want to run out of money during the weekends or any other time, we would make sure to increase the budget to a very high level to ensure that we are able to scale the channel and not be stopped by hiccups. Keep in mind that this figure is just a placeholder and does not represent the money you will be charged for.
If you have a limited budget and you want to use the budget figure as a monthly budget, the situation will be different. This can happen, for instance, if you want to strictly monitor your monthly budget. With budget restrictions in place, If you want to optimize for performance, you would allocate or reallocate the highest budget to best performing campaigns and/or your main target markets. In this article by SearchAdsHq, Apple Search Ads Cost: CPT, CPA, and TTR Benchmarks by Categories, you can find useful information that can help you frame your strategy before starting campaigns, and maybe even deciding which markets to target.
Conversely, if, for example, you would like to scale the channel and you don’t have strict budget restrictions, you should treat the budget figure as a lifetime budget to avoid surprises after the weekend.
Daily Caps
Daily caps, like budgets, can function as brakes when you have limited resources in place to spend on Apple Search Ads. As such, strict daily caps can help you control spend to optimize for performance but also to increase your scale. As for the former, very low daily caps for non-performing campaigns (by keeping them for exploratory purposes) can help you increase the ROAS on the account level if you mainly keep converting campaigns running. In regards to the latter, increasing the daily caps allows space to scale the channel, letting campaigns run without restrictions.
Storefronts
Advertising in different storefronts (countries) may be a clear solution to your scaling problems. You should consider the inclusion of additional storefronts to reach more users if your objective is to explore new possibilities in new markets. However, certain markets may be too expensive or they don’t convert well enough to hit your targets. In that case, if you want to optimize your performance, limiting the number of ads running in only storefronts with high ROAS countries can produce satisfying results.
