In the zero-sum game of app store advertising, the conventional wisdom is to outbid your fellow advertisers. According to insights from Viktor Orlov at , this approach is fundamentally flawed.
The real competition isn’t another paid ad; it’s the number one organic result, and winning requires a deep focus on relevance, not just budget.
- Primary Competitor: The top organic search result for a given keyword, not other paid advertisers. According to Orlov, Apple’s auction prioritizes user experience, making a highly relevant organic listing a formidable benchmark for any ad.
- Governing Metric: Installs Per Thousand Impressions (IPM). While not a metric exposed in the Apple Search Ads dashboard, Orlov posits it’s the core signal Apple uses to gauge relevance. It’s a compound of tap-through rate and conversion rate.
- Relevance Engine: Custom Product Pages (CPPs). Orlov stated,
Custom Product Pages are the most powerful tool in Apple Search Ads, and almost nobody uses them properly.
They allow advertisers to align ad creative, messaging, and visuals directly with keyword intent. - The “Invisible Wall”: A conceptual performance threshold based on IPM. Below this threshold, campaigns struggle to scale. Once an ad’s relevance crosses the threshold, Orlov claims impression share accelerates, and cost-per-install (CPI) can actually decrease with scale.
This framework reframes Apple Search Ads from a media buying channel into a product marketing discipline. The primary lever for growth isn’t the bid but the user experience delivered by the ad itself. Orlov’s concept of the “invisible wall” suggests that incremental bidding is a losing strategy. Instead, advertisers must achieve a step-change in relevance to unlock scale. This means the work of a user acquisition manager is no longer confined to a dashboard; it must extend to deep collaboration with design and product teams.
The goal is to create a seamless, intent-driven journey from keyword to ad creative to app store page. By using tools like Custom Product Pages and deep links, advertisers are not just optimizing conversion rates; they are feeding Apple’s auction algorithm powerful signals about their app’s relevance for specific queries. As Orlov noted, You’re not just improving conversion, you’re improving how Apple understands your relevance.
This alignment is what allows campaigns to break through the impression ceiling and scale efficiently.
While this strategy is potent, its primary challenge is resource intensity. Creating, managing, and testing up to 70 unique Custom Product Pages per app requires significant overhead in design, copywriting, and product marketing resources. For smaller teams or apps with limited creative capacity, executing this strategy at a high level may be prohibitive. This creates a potential moat for larger, more sophisticated advertisers who can invest in the necessary infrastructure. The risk is that the channel becomes dominated by those who can afford to build bespoke experiences for every keyword segment, potentially pricing out smaller players who rely on more generalized campaigns.
Moving forward, the key indicators to monitor will be the evolution of Apple’s own advertising tools. Will Apple provide more direct analytics around CPP performance or introduce metrics that serve as a closer proxy for IPM? The development of third-party platforms that streamline the creation and management of CPPs at scale could also be a game-changer, potentially lowering the barrier to entry for this relevance-focused strategy. Finally, watch for a shift in advertiser discourse from a focus on bid management tactics to a more holistic discussion around creative-to-keyword alignment and post-install experience, as these are the areas that directly influence the core relevance signals Orlov described.
- Shift campaign focus from outbidding other advertisers to creating an ad experience superior to the #1 organic result.
- Treat IPM (Tap-Through Rate x Conversion Rate) as the primary internal KPI for unlocking impression share and scale.
- Invest systematically in Custom Product Pages and deep links to prove your ad’s relevance to Apple’s auction algorithm for high-intent keywords.
- Interpret a high or unprofitable CPI not as a sign of an expensive channel, but as direct feedback that your ad’s relevance is too low for that keyword’s economics.
- Success in Apple Search Ads is becoming less about tactical bidding and more about a deep, strategic understanding of the system’s incentives, as detailed in Orlov’s full presentation available from Business of Apps.
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