What Keyword Popularity Score Should You Target as an Indie Dev

If you've spent any time in Apple Search Ads, you've stared at the little popularity score next to a keyword and wondered: is 25 good? Is 50 too low? Should I be chasing 70+? It's the question every indie dev asks, and the honest answer is: there's no single magic number — but there is a useful way to think about it. Let me walk you through how I'd reason about it if I were starting a fresh campaign tomorrow.

What the popularity score actually is

Apple's keyword popularity score is a rough measure of search volume on a 5–100 scale. It is logarithmic-ish in feel: the jump from 30 to 40 represents a much bigger increase in real search traffic than the jump from 10 to 20. So when you see a keyword at 65, that's not "a bit more searched" than one at 45 — it's a different category of traffic.

A few things worth keeping in mind:

It reflects total search activity for that exact term, not how many of those searchers want your app.
It does not tell you the competition level or what bids look like.
A high score means more potential impressions, but also more advertisers fighting for them.
A low score doesn't mean useless — it can mean focused, high-intent traffic.

In other words, popularity score is one input. It's not a target.

Why "go for high popularity" is bad advice for indies

When you bid on a high-popularity head term — think generic category words like "meditation" or "budget" — you're competing with companies that have:

Much larger budgets and longer testing horizons.
Higher LTV per user (often because of bigger paywalls or B2B pricing).
Dedicated UA teams whose whole job is winning these auctions.

You can still win taps on those keywords, but your max CPT often needs to be high, and the searcher's intent is broad. Someone searching "meditation" might want a free 5-minute timer, a sleep app, a Buddhist teacher, or a corporate wellness tool. Your conversion rate on broad intent terms tends to drop, which pushes your CPA up at the same time the CPT is already painful.

For most indies, chasing the highest-popularity keywords is the fastest way to burn a budget without learning anything.

The sweet spot most indies actually want

If I had to give a rough starting framework, here's how I'd group keywords by popularity score:

Below ~15: Often too little volume to matter. Worth grabbing if they describe your app perfectly, but don't expect them to move the needle.
~15–35: The indie sweet spot. Specific enough that searchers usually know what they want, low enough competition that your max CPT stays sane. This is where you should focus most of your initial keyword work.
~35–55: Worth testing once you have winners in the lower band and you understand your CPA. Bids climb here, but so does volume.
55+: Approach carefully. Only worth it if (a) the term is extremely well-matched to your app, (b) your LTV supports a higher CPA, and (c) you've already learned what conversion rate you can expect from cleaner, lower-volume terms.

These ranges are illustrative — the right number for you depends entirely on your conversion rate and revenue per user. A subscription app with strong onboarding can afford to play in higher-popularity territory than a one-time-purchase utility.

A better mental model: popularity × specificity × intent

Instead of asking "what score should I target," ask three questions for each keyword:

How well does this describe what my app does? Not the category — the actual job your app performs. "Habit tracker with streaks" is more honest than "productivity."
What is the searcher probably trying to do? Are they comparison shopping, looking for a specific feature, or just browsing?
What's the realistic volume? This is where the popularity score comes in — last, not first.

A keyword at popularity 22 that exactly matches your app's job will almost always outperform a keyword at popularity 60 that is loosely related. You want to be the obviously correct answer to a smaller question, not a possible answer to a giant one.

How to actually choose your starting keywords

Here's a process that works well for a new campaign:

Brainstorm 30–50 candidate terms. Include feature words, problem words, competitor names where relevant, and variations ("track water", "water tracker", "drink reminder").
Pull popularity scores in Apple Search Ads' recommendations and search tools. Filter out anything below ~10 unless it's a perfect description.
Sort by specificity first, popularity second. Tag each one: "core," "adjacent," or "broad."
Start with 10–20 core keywords in the ~15–35 range as exact match in their own ad group.
Run a separate Search Match ad group with your default bid to let Apple find terms you didn't think of. This is how you discover real winners.
Run a separate broad match ad group for a handful of your strongest core terms to catch variations.

Keep the ad groups separate so you can actually read the data later.

What to watch after launch

The popularity score gets you in the door. After that, your real signal is the funnel:

TTR (tap-through rate): Low TTR on a high-popularity keyword usually means weak match — searchers are seeing your ad and skipping. That's a signal to pause, not to raise bids.
Conversion rate (taps → installs): This is your product page doing its job. If a keyword has good TTR but bad CR, the issue is often the screenshots or the first impression, not the keyword.
CPA vs. revenue per user: The only score that ultimately matters. A popularity-20 keyword driving installs at a CPA below your payback target beats a popularity-70 keyword every time.

Apple won't tell you revenue per keyword directly — you need attribution stitched through AdServices and something like RevenueCat to see which keywords actually produce paying users. Until you have that, you're flying on installs alone, which is a lagging and incomplete signal.

The takeaway

Stop treating the popularity score as a target. Treat it as one filter among several. For most indies, the right range to fish in is roughly 15–35 to start — specific terms with real but manageable volume — and you expand upward only after you understand your own conversion math. Specificity beats volume almost every time when your budget is small.

Once you have data flowing, the work shifts from picking keywords to reading them: which ones convert, which ones eat budget, which bids need a nudge. That ongoing review is where most indies lose hours every week. It's also exactly the kind of thing AdsBuddy is built to do — read your ASA and revenue data, then hand you a short list of suggested changes each day that you approve before anything goes live. But whether you use a tool or a spreadsheet, the principle is the same: popularity score gets you to the starting line, the funnel decides who wins.