How to Optimize for Promoted IAP (In App Purchases)

One of the major paradigm shifts in iOS 11 was the ability for apps to promote up to 20 of their In-App Purchases directly into the app’s product page, search results, and even Apple’s featured tabs, leading to a potential 20x improvement in visibility.

To understand how the industry has adopted promoted IAPs, we conducted a small-scale study of 10 random keyword searches, in order to analyze how many of the top 10 organic app results were promoted IAPs.

To our surprise, we found that only 3 (3%) of the top 10 keyword results for 10 keywords were promoted In-App Purchases. Even scrolling past the top 10 results into the 30th results and beyond yielded no significant increase in the number of promoted In-App Purchases.

From these results, we can infer that not many apps are have yet successfully begun optimizing for promoted In-App Purchases, which either means that A) Apple’s promoted IAP was a fail or B) there is plenty of opportunity for capturing more real estate via promoted IAP.

Our opinion is still that promoted IAP are an incredible, brand new opportunity for apps to boost their ASO performance, and given that the industry has yet to successfully implement promoted IAP it remains a gold mine of an opportunity. Read on for an explanation of how to get that gold while it’s…