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ASO glossary

Apple Ads (App Store advertising)

Apple Ads is Apple's advertising service for promoting apps on the App Store. Ads appear in four placements: the Today tab, the Search tab, search results and product pages.

Updated

The placements

PlacementWhat Apple states
Today tabEach ad features your app name, icon and subtitle, and uses a custom product page you set up in App Store Connect as the tap destination
Search tabA prominent ad at the top of the Search tab
Search resultsAds matched to a person's search term; see search results ads
Product pagesAn ad shown on a product page

How it relates to ASO

Paid and organic work use the same assets. Your app name, subtitle, icon and screenshots show in the ad, and a custom product page can carry its own screenshots and promotional text for the ad's audience. So better metadata helps both.

Apple does not document any effect of ad spend on organic keyword ranking, so treat claims of one as unverified. Ads can raise impressions and downloads, which feed your analytics.

Search popularity

Apple Ads shows search popularity, a relative indicator of how popular a keyword is in App Store searches, as a number from 1 to 5. It is designed to help advertisers learn which keywords matter for search results campaigns.

Example

A hypothetical habit tracker runs an ad in search results for "habit tracker" and sends the traffic to a custom product page that leads with streak screenshots. It then compares that page's conversion rate with the default page.

Common mistakes

  • Sending ad traffic to a default page that does not match the ad.
  • Bidding on a term the app does not satisfy.

Next step

Read search popularity and the keyword research guide.

Sources

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