#210: Mastering ASA: Proven ASO Strategies with Simon Thillay, Head of ASO at AppTweak

Your phone has become an extension of your brain. You store a ton of information on it, you use it to get through your day or to plan something in advance. You’re working on it, you are spending your leisure time with it.

Every once in a while, when your existing 80-100 iOS apps (this is how much apps we have on our phones these days) aren’t enough and you need a new one, you go to the App Store. When you launch a search query there, the first search result you can see is on a blue background - this is an Apple Search ad.

Whether you’ve been driving traffic to your iOS app with Apple Search Ads or you never used this paid advertising platform before, today Simon will tell you how to use it efficiently.

Today’s Topics Include:

• Simon's background
• About AppTweak
• Apple Search Ads overview
• Balancing between keyword discovery and existing high-performance keywords
• Using Atlas AI to identify and cluster high-performing keywords for Apple Search Ads campaigns
• Measuring and mitigating the impact of cannibalization on brand defense campaigns

Links and Resources:

• Simon Thillay on LinkedIn
• AppTweak
• Atlas AI
• Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry

Quotes from Simon Thillay:

"So for those who not familiar, today there are actually four different types of inventories in Apple search ads. The one, I think most people are familiar with and the one you were mentioning in your intro, is search results campaigns, which is basically being able to put an ad at the very top of a search result page and based on what potential customer has just searched for.

But there's three more that Apple has released over the years. The second one is a search tab. So it's another ad that you can see, before people start typing in the search tab. And it's basically a game of trying to catch the attention and play on other signals to kind of convert there.

A third one would be the product page, so if people scroll down to the bottom of the page and look at the You Might Also Like section, there will also be an ad in there. But I think the final placement, the final inventory, is the one that gets the most hype these days. It's the Today tab."

"It may be called a discovery campaign, but the campaign part trumps the discovery part. And in other words, at first, the campaign is going to find keywords that fit the criteria you've set. But once it's found those keywords, unless you give it different instructions, it's going to stay focused on those. It's basically the principle of if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We found something that's working."

Host

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012