How to Launch Your First Apple Search Ads Search Results Campaign, Step by Step

If you've never run Apple Search Ads before, the dashboard can feel a bit opaque. There are several campaign types, two account modes, match types, Search Match, bids, CPA goals — and Apple's docs explain the buttons but not the strategy. This post is the strategy: a step-by-step way to launch your first Search Results campaign without lighting money on fire, written for indie devs and tiny studios spending their own cash.

We'll assume you're using the Advanced (full control) account type. Basic is fine if you truly just want to set a monthly budget and forget it, but you'll learn far more — and waste less — in Advanced.

Before you touch the dashboard

A few things to lock down first. Skipping these is where most first campaigns go sideways.

Pick one country to start. One Apple Search Ads campaign targets exactly one country or region. Start with the country that already produces most of your organic installs and revenue. Don't try to cover five countries on day one.
Make sure your product page is the version you want to advertise. Screenshots, subtitle, and the first lines of your description carry most of the conversion weight on Search Results. If you're mid-redesign, finish that first.
Set up revenue attribution. Apple will tell you taps, installs, and CPA. It will not tell you revenue per keyword. To know which keywords actually pay back, you need to link Apple's attribution token (via AdServices) to your purchase events. RevenueCat handles this cleanly; rolling your own is possible but more work. Without revenue attribution you're optimizing for installs, which is fine for a free app but misleading for anything monetized.
Define what "good" looks like. Write down, before launching, the CPA or ROAS you'd be happy with. For a subscription app, a rough starting point is: average revenue per install over 12 months should comfortably exceed CPA. For a one-time purchase, CPA below net revenue per install. These are your numbers — Apple won't tell you them.

Step 1: Decide on campaign structure

For your first launch, keep it boring. A clean three-campaign structure inside one country works well:

Brand — your app name and obvious variants.
Generic / category — descriptive keywords for what your app does (e.g. "habit tracker", "budget app").
Search Match / Discovery — Apple's automatic matching, isolated in its own campaign so it can't cannibalize bids on keywords you're actively managing.

Why separate? Each of these has wildly different intent, conversion rate, and a sensible bid range. Mixing them in one campaign makes the data hard to read and the optimizations clumsy.

Inside each campaign, ad groups hold the keywords and bids. For a first launch you can usually keep one ad group per campaign. You'll split later if you find clusters of keywords that need different bids.

Step 2: Build the brand campaign

This one's easy and almost always the most profitable, so do it first.

Add your app name as an exact match keyword.
Add the most common misspellings and variants as exact match too.
Add a broad match version of your app name to catch long-tail brand searches you didn't think of.
Set a bid that's high enough to win — brand searches convert extremely well, so you can usually afford to bid aggressively. Start somewhere reasonable and adjust up if you're losing impression share.

Yes, you'll sometimes pay to acquire users who would've installed organically. The counter is that competitors can and do bid on your brand, and not defending it can cost more than the incremental CPT.

Step 3: Build the generic campaign

This is where the real work — and the real upside — lives.

Brainstorm keywords from three angles:

What your app is ("meditation app", "sleep tracker").
What problem it solves ("can't sleep", "learn spanish fast").
What competitors are called (only if you're comfortable with that, and check local rules).

Aim for 20–50 keywords to start. More than that and you'll struggle to give each one enough data to evaluate. Fewer and you may not find the winners.

Match types: Use exact match for keywords you're confident about. Use broad match sparingly for a handful of head terms where you want Apple to expose related variants you can later promote to their own exact-match keyword. Don't make everything broad — you'll lose control of where money goes.

Initial bids: Apple will suggest a bid range per keyword. A conservative approach is to start at the lower end of that range, or slightly below it. You won't win every auction, but you'll learn which keywords have any conversion volume at affordable CPTs before you scale up. Raising a bid is easy; recovering from a week of overspending on a dud keyword is annoying.

Daily budget: Set it at a level where, if the entire day spent on the worst-performing keyword, you'd still sleep fine. For solo devs that's often quite small. You can always raise it.

Step 4: Build the Search Match campaign

Create a separate campaign (or at minimum a separate ad group) with Search Match enabled and no specific keywords — let Apple decide. Set a low-to-moderate bid. This campaign acts as a discovery engine: it surfaces search terms you'd never have thought of.

The trick is to mine the search terms report regularly. When a Search Match term performs well, add it as an exact-match keyword in your generic campaign and add it as a negative keyword in the Search Match campaign. That way each winning term moves to a place where you control its bid, and Search Match keeps hunting for new ones.

Add obvious negatives from day one too — irrelevant terms, competitor names you don't want to bid on, anything that's clearly not your audience.

Step 5: Launch and wait (longer than you want to)

Resist the urge to tweak every day for the first week. Apple's attribution settles within roughly a day, and you need enough taps per keyword to draw any conclusion. A keyword with 12 taps and 0 installs might still convert — or it might not. You can't tell yet.

A reasonable rhythm:

Days 1–3: confirm spend is pacing, impressions are happening, nothing is obviously broken. Fix only catastrophes (e.g. a typo keyword eating the whole budget).
Days 4–10: start pruning. Pause keywords with lots of taps and no installs. Slightly lower bids on keywords with installs but bad CPA. Slightly raise bids on keywords converting well but starved for impressions.
Day 10+: look at revenue, not just installs. This is where attribution pays off — some keywords drive cheap installs that never pay, others drive expensive installs that subscribe. Without revenue data you'll optimize toward the wrong winners.

What to actually look at

The metrics worth tracking per keyword, in rough priority order:

Impressions — are you even in the auction?
TTR (tap-through rate) — low TTR with lots of impressions usually means your screenshots or subtitle aren't matching the searcher's intent.
Conversion rate (installs/taps) — low here means the product page isn't closing. Custom product pages can help if you have very different keyword themes.
CPA — is each install costing what you budgeted?
ROAS — the only number that ultimately matters once you have enough data.

A few traps to avoid

Bidding too high on day one to "see if it works." You'll see if it works — and pay a premium for the lesson. Start lower and ramp.
Too many keywords too fast. Every keyword needs enough taps to evaluate. Spreading a small budget across 300 keywords means you'll never know which ones convert.
Ignoring the search terms report on Search Match. That's where the gold is.
Optimizing on installs when you sell subscriptions. The cheap-install keyword and the high-LTV keyword are often different keywords.
Changing five things at once. You won't know which change helped.

Closing takeaway

A first Search Results campaign isn't really about finding the perfect bid on day one. It's about setting up a structure that lets you learn — brand, generic, and Search Match cleanly separated, sensible starting bids, revenue attribution wired up, and the patience to give keywords enough data before judging them. After a couple of weeks you'll have a small set of keywords that clearly work, a list of duds to pause, and a Search Match campaign quietly turning up new candidates.

If staring at the dashboard every morning trying to decide what to change isn't your idea of fun, this is roughly the loop AdsBuddy automates the thinking part of: it reads your Apple Search Ads data and your revenue, and each day suggests a short list of prioritized changes with the reasoning attached. You still approve and apply every change yourself — nothing moves without you. But the "what should I even look at today" question gets answered before your coffee's cold.