Apple Search Ads for Indie Apps: How to Run Your First Campaign

Apple Search Ads is Apple's own paid placement at the top of App Store search results, tied to keywords instead of a broad ad network. For a solo builder, the practical setup is to run Apple Ads Advanced instead of Basic, turn on Search Match with a small daily budget, and move your best-performing keywords to exact match once you have enough taps to tell which ones actually install. Do this only after your app already retains real organic users, because Apple Search Ads amplifies what you already have. It does not fix a product nobody keeps opening.

Apple offers two products under Apple Ads, and they are built for different people. Basic is fully automated: Apple's system matches your ad to relevant searches using your app's own metadata, category, and similar apps, and you never touch a keyword. It runs on a pay-per-install model with a campaign-level daily budget, capped at $10,000 per app per month. Advanced hands you the keyboard: you choose keywords or lean on Search Match, set your own bids, and pay per tap rather than per install, with no monthly minimum or maximum.

Basic's ceiling and automation are built for a team that already knows it wants to spend real money and does not want to manage keywords. That is rarely the position of someone running a single app solo. Advanced lets you test with the same few dollars a day you would spend on anything else while you learn what your category actually costs, and it is the only one of the two that shows you which keywords are doing the work.

Apple Ads Advanced has two match types, broad and exact, plus Search Match as the default entry point. There is no phrase match, so the choice is simpler than most ad platforms.

The sequence that avoids wasted spend is to run Search Match first with a modest daily budget, pull the Search Terms report after a couple of weeks, and move the terms that actually produced installs into their own exact match keyword. Everything Search Match surfaced that was irrelevant becomes a negative keyword instead of a term you keep paying for.

Negative keywords stop your ad from showing on searches you know will not convert. Apple supports two types: exact match negatives block a search that matches your negative term exactly or with a close variant like a plural, and broad match negatives block any search containing the words in your negative phrase, in any order.

Your real cost-per-tap and conversion rate are not knowable in advance. They depend on your category, your keywords, and how well your product page converts once someone lands on it, and none of that is public data. The honest approach is to pick a small daily budget you are fully comfortable spending for a month purely to learn, not to acquire users at a target cost you have not earned the right to expect yet.

Widen the budget only after your Search Terms report shows which keywords convert and you have moved them to exact match with tightened negatives. Scaling spend on Search Match alone, before you know which terms are doing the work, mostly scales the noise along with the signal.

If your tap-to-install rate is the weak number, the fix is usually the destination, not the ad. Apple's Product Page Optimization feature lets you test a different set of screenshots against your current listing on real traffic, which is the same mechanism covered in [App Store screenshots that convert](/blog/app-store-screenshots-that-convert). Run that test before assuming the keyword itself is the problem.