If you’ve been putting off Apple Search Ads because the whole thing looks like a marketing job you don’t have time for, this is the post that gets you started without the jargon. One note before anything else: Apple renamed the product to Apple Ads in April 2025. Most people, and most Google searches, still say “Apple Search Ads” — so if you’re confused about which is which, they’re the same thing. We’ll say “Apple Ads” from here.
The reason it’s worth your attention as an indie is simple, and it’s the whole pitch: on the App Store, you’re advertising to people who are already searching for an app like yours. That’s a fundamentally different, better position than shouting into a social feed. Let’s start there, because it changes how you should think about everything else.
Why search intent changes the game
On Meta or TikTok, nobody woke up wanting your app. You interrupt them mid-scroll and try to manufacture interest in two seconds. It can work, but you’re paying to create demand from nothing.
Apple Ads is the opposite. Someone opens the App Store and types “habit tracker” or “invoice app.” They have the intent already — they’re standing at the checkout with their wallet out. Your ad just puts you first in line. That’s why App Store ads often convert at rates a social campaign can only dream of: you’re not persuading someone to care, you’re catching someone who already does.
The practical consequence: the mental model from your first Meta campaign doesn’t fully transfer. There’s no broad-audience-and-let-the-algorithm-find-them here. The user hands you their intent as a search term. Your job is mostly to show up for the right terms and not overpay for the wrong ones.
Basic vs Advanced: the real choice
Apple Ads comes in two flavours, and picking the wrong one wastes either your money or your time. Here’s the honest comparison, in Apple’s own terms:
| Basic | Advanced | |
|---|---|---|
| You control | A monthly budget and a max cost-per-install | Keywords, bids, audiences, placements |
| Pricing | Cost-per-install (CPI) — pay per download | Cost-per-tap (CPT) — pay per tap |
| Effort | Set it and forget it | A weekly routine |
| Budget cap | Up to $10,000/month per app | No cap |
| Best for | ”I want installs, not a second job" | "I want to see and steer what’s working” |
Basic is genuinely fine, and no one should shame you for using it. You set a monthly budget and a maximum you’ll pay per install; Apple’s automation does the rest and charges you only when someone actually installs. For a solo dev shipping features all week, that predictability is worth a lot.
Advanced is where control lives. You choose keywords, set a bid per tap, and can see exactly which search terms produce installs and which drain money. It costs you a weekly hour and a bit of a learning curve. The rest of this post is about Advanced, because if you’re the kind of person reading a strategy post at all, you probably want to see the levers.
You can also start on Basic and graduate to Advanced later. That’s a perfectly sane path — don’t let anyone tell you that you must run keyword campaigns from day one.
Do this first: defend your own name
Before any clever targeting, run one campaign: your own brand name, exact match.
It feels absurd to pay for people already typing your app’s name. But here’s what happens if you don’t. Competitors are allowed to bid on your brand term. Someone searches “Flowjat,” and a rival app sits in the top ad slot above your organic listing. You just paid nothing — and lost a customer who was looking for you by name to a competitor who paid pennies.
Brand terms are also the cheapest taps you’ll ever buy, because Apple rewards relevance: your app is the most relevant result for your own name, so your cost-per-tap is low and your conversion is high. Defending your brand is usually the single most profitable campaign an indie runs. Start it today; it costs almost nothing and closes an open door.
The counter-argument — “I’d have gotten that install organically anyway” — is sometimes true. The way to actually know is a two-week incrementality test: pause the brand campaign, watch whether total installs dip. Until you’ve run that, defending is the safer default.
A minimal Advanced structure you can run in an hour
You don’t need fourteen campaigns. You need a shape you understand. Here’s a starter that maps to how people actually search:
1. Brand — exact match. Your app name and obvious misspellings. Wrap each keyword in brackets, [your app name], which tells Apple to match only that exact phrase and close variants. Cheap, defensive, high-converting.
2. Category — exact match. The generic terms describing what your app is: [habit tracker], [expense tracker], [meal planner]. This is the demand you’re trying to capture. Bid carefully — these are more competitive and more expensive than brand.
3. Competitors — exact match. The names of rival apps, if you can honestly say a switcher would be happier with you. This is contested ground: high intent, but low relevance (your app isn’t literally named that), so expect higher costs and watch whether the installs actually convert to paying users.
4. Discovery — broad match + Search Match. One campaign where you let Apple find search terms you didn’t think of. Broad match runs your ad on relevant variations and adjacent phrases; Search Match is Apple’s automatic term discovery using your App Store listing and data about similar apps. Keep the bids low here — this campaign’s real job isn’t to convert, it’s to surface new keywords. When a discovery term proves itself, promote it into your exact-match campaigns and negative it out of discovery so the two don’t compete.
That’s four campaigns, each with a clear job. You can build it in an afternoon and maintain it in a weekly review.
What to actually watch
The console will show you a dozen numbers. Most weeks, four matter:
- CPT / CPI — what you pay per tap (Advanced) or per install (Basic). Your cost floor.
- Tap-through rate (TTR) — the share of impressions that get tapped. Low TTR means your app icon, name, or screenshots aren’t earning the click. That’s an App Store listing problem, not a bidding one.
- Conversion rate — taps that become installs. Low here also points back to your product page: your screenshots and description aren’t closing the promise the search made.
- Cost per paying customer — the only number that pays your rent. An install isn’t revenue.
That last point is where App Store advertising quietly diverges from everything else, and it’s worth sitting with. Apple’s console can tell you what an install cost. It cannot tell you which of those installs became a paying subscriber next month — that lives in your revenue tools, not Apple’s dashboard. So a campaign can look brilliant on cost-per-install and be underwater on cost-per-customer, and the console will never let on. The same trap as the gap between cheap clicks and real conversions on social, wearing a different hat.
Whatever your channel, the discipline is identical to the budget math for a small ad account: judge on cost per paying customer against your break-even, not on the cheap top-of-funnel number the platform is proud of.
Where Flowjat fits
Apple’s console is honest about what it can see — taps, installs, cost-per-install — and silent about what it can’t: whether those installs turned into revenue. That blind spot is exactly where indie budgets leak, because “installs got cheaper” and “we made more money” are not the same sentence, and only one of them pays you.
Flowjat exists to close that gap. It connects your ad spend and your real revenue so the question you actually care about — are these installs becoming paying customers, at a price that works? — has an answer that doesn’t require exporting three dashboards into a spreadsheet on a Sunday night. Run the App Store campaigns above; let the tooling keep the scoreboard honest.
The Flowjat team
Building the ad copilot for builders