Apple Search Ads Study: Impressions, Search Popularity & Relevancy

As avid app marketers and keyword optimization geeks, one of our biggest passions, beyond achieving stellar results, is cultivating an ever-deeper understanding of ASO and PPC optimization tactics.

So, with a decent amount of search ads performance data on our hands, we decided to take a moment to investigate one hypothesis and a curious question on how Apple’s search ads platform works:

1. Hypothesis: based on how ASO works, our hypothesis was that placing keywords into an app’s metadata will result in an increase in impression volume for those keywords, as compared to other keywords not contained within an app’s metadata.
2. Question: after seeing some strangely low impression volume for head terms, we wondered how well Apple’s search popularity number correlates with impression volume.

Setup

• Our main KPI was impressions garnered over a 2 week time period, per keyword (impressions / keyword count).
• We omitted all branded keywords from the study to prevent impression skewing in the metadata test, and split the results into broad and exact match types, given the significant difference in volume driven by each match type.
• One annoying discovery actually caused us to have to re-pull…