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A strategic move to defend your brand presence
Bidding on one’s own brand name in Apple Search Ads can evoke mixed feelings among marketing managers. While some see it as a necessary strategy for brand protection and visibility, others might find it counterproductive. There is no right or wrong answer, and in some cases the data may even support both strategies for the same app in different markets.
What is clear for anyone who’s ever looked at a list of keywords in a vertical, is that brand keywords dominate the App Store. They appear at the top of the list, with the highest popularity scores. In this context, brand campaigns have become a standard practice in Apple Search Ads.
Assess the incremental impact of brand campaigns
Finding out which “half” of the budget is wasted on advertising has been a question for centuries. No method is perfect, but here’s something most marketeers can try without too much effort.
First, establish a baseline for your brand campaign installs in ASA and overall Search installs in App Store Connect. Then, pause the brand campaign for a couple of weeks and measure the difference in Search installs. For a more accurate assessment of the results, your app store presence and other marketing campaigns (not only ASA) should remain unchanged for the duration of the test.
Let’s imagine a case where the brand campaign delivers 5000 installs per month and the total number of monthly Search installs is 15000. If after pausing the campaign for a month, we get 12000 Search installs, we can assume that 3000 paid installs were incremental and 2000 were cannibalised (they would have occurred organically). It’s a good idea to repeat this test several times in a year to better estimate the percentage of incremental vs. cannibalised installs. Also, the results may differ from one market to another, depending on brand awareness and competition levels.
The higher the percentage of cannibalised installs, the less sense it makes to spend on a brand campaign.
How does cannibalisation happen?
First of all, I’d like you to know that I am not using the term “cannibalisation” of my own accord. I find it horrific and I hope whoever came up with it had his share of karma. Why can’t we use something like “displacement” or “shift”? Anyway, back to our topic.
Cannibalisation in Apple Search Ads happens when you pay for an install that would have also occurred organically. This would normally happen if you enter the auction with a less relevant competitor.
In the example below, Meditopia bidding on their brand name is more likely to lead to cannibalisation of organic installs when they enter the auction against Flo Period & Cycles Tracker than against Calm: Sleep & Meditation.
How to optimise the effectiveness of brand campaigns?
- Experiment with bids
In all ASA accounts I have touched, brand keywords are the most cost effective. By using the impression share report, gradually increase or decrease bids until you find the perfect balance between bids and maximum exposure.
- Monitor your competitors
Use an ASO tool to identify the most active bidders on your brand name, examine their product and custom pages to identify in which ways they craft messages that could be attractive to your users. In the example above, Calm and Meditopia have many elements in common, from the gradient blu in the icon, to overlapping terms (sleep, meditation, sounds).
Find ways to illustrate your benefits with outstanding screenshot design and compelling messages.
- Enter into a gentlemen’s agreement
I have one client who is part of an agreement with competing apps to not bid on each other’s brand name. So far, no one has broken their word, but I noticed a couple of new players taking advantage of the situation. So I still run a small brand campaign, but with considerably lower budget than what could have been without the agreement.
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