Apple Introduces Search Ads Basic
searchads.apple.com
searchads.apple.com
For example Apple could infer categories of users according to their Appstore profile and permit you to target people by their trade.
Oh, and from my experience with things like YT flipping the gender bit on me regularly: you may be cis, but you should be concerned too. The way ads are targeted based on gender is _not_ benign at all.
Apple here is offering a cost-per-intallation pricing, so it's to their benefit to improve the targeting on their end.
http://bylr.net/3/2017/11/99month-is-a-steal-for-cloudapp-fo...
It's incredible that on one hand, they can pull up competent and dedicated developers for a minor transgression, but then allow something as ugly and misleading as the above example.
Plus they let those scam VPN apps through with a "Free Trial" that immediately charges you $99, and they stayed at the top of the grossing charts for days. It is insanely frustrating. The app review process at Apple is a joke now, honestly. I'm pretty sure it has been outsourced to some third party, we always get through on appeal, but why should a year old app with a 4.6 star rating with thousands of reviews have to appeal every single update submission.
Sorry for the rant, just dealing with this exact problem as we speak.
As far as every single time having to appear — have you considered making the change that wouldn’t require an appeal?
By promoting your app through search ads you are greatly increasing your chances of getting detected by app review or the company you are cloning very quickly. Meaning you are going to get pulled pretty fast, and are still paying for it. I don't see how the economics would work out.
Tt is more used for competitor apps stealing the top search result for things they aren't ranked highly for.
The only thing that gives Apple an edge over Google/Amazon is that they are not an ads company or retail shop.
Such a pity seeing them to want to move into that space.
I mean, I paid $1k for the iPhone X and iOS, why the hell do the native apps come with ads?
What's next? Ads in Calendar and Mail?
Serious question: where are these ads supposed to be showing?
There are a few less of them if you remove internet access.
Then there's the nagging about getting office or whatever latest software that pops up in the corner occasionally.
It is somewhat dependant on your version of Windows 10.
The app stores links are as much ads as bundling software in the old days.
Bundled software is not an ad, it is already there.
This disables a lot of tracking, but I assume, also disables ads. (I've seen only 1 ad, and that was for the OneDrive in explorer).
I've never seen the office nagging. I've never seen a single ad. Not from first boot that I can recall. There are no ads on my lock screen, there are no ads on my start menu.
The only things I can think of, is that I immediately turned off as many bs anti-privacy type settings as possible when I initially set up the system. I also use glasswire and restrict most things that try to go out without my permission (or anything I don't want to allow in general).
When I fire up my start-menu, I've got it defaulted to pinned tiles, there doesn't even appear to be space for an ad that might be getting blocked on there. There are no ads in the all apps section either.
My lock screen only has a background image.
I think they need to invest heavily in making it very very difficult (impossible?) for copy cat type apps to appear in search and making sure that adverts are clearly marked as adverts... It will just turn into a shit show otherwise...
They seem quite clearly marked as ads.
It’s a reason to not buy them a premium Apple device next time.
What a shame.
An unambiguous search would take a paragraph to describe.
No wonder there is ageism in tech. 50 year olds are considered feeble minded and apparently unable to read.
I think many companies can run their ads as pay for performance. eBay's ads are a fixed cost of the product sale - the higher you set it, the more often your ad shows but you only pay if it leads to a sale.
Platforms simply have so much data and scale they can do a much better job of targeting than their customers can. It's not efficient for lots of marketers to test out lots of ads, carefully track conversions, and decide what to spend on. Just let the platform maximize ads given a certain amount per sale, and the platform will naturally target based on what converts best (and since this is Amazon scale or Facebook scale, they can do these tests automatically for every campaign and get statistically significant results very quickly).
I wish Amazon would roll out eBay style ads. They have all the data and could do a much better job than sellers, and could capture a significant portion of the added value it would provide.
Having used this “one click” setup on Twitter and Facebook before I know these campaigns are increasingly ineffective.
That said, the App Store is a different kind of ecosystem so things could go differently.
In other words - I thought it was widely understood that Apple made excellent products and was poor in services that required personalization.
On other types of ads, a former iAd exec said it did hold them back [1].
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2015/07/14/iad-user-data-privacy-policy/
IMO Apple's stance on privacy is a bit smoke and mirrors when they allow tracking services like flurry to exist in apps.
Don't apps sell themselves?
This seems incredibly similar to pay per click.
Just because someone downloads and an app doesn't mean that they're going to use it.
If only there was some sort of retention statistic on how often an app is downloaded and deleted.
I just hope that quality does not suffer. I'm genuinely curious to see if this will drive user engagement/retention
In that sense, I think search ads could offer a ton of potential, but don’t think it’s running correctly now/yet.
You do get retention stats from Apple, I think it also breaks it down via source (organic vs search ad). Also I'm not sure why people are just realizing this now, these ads have existed for the past 6 months or so. This is just a way to set it up faster for people that don't want to configure their targeting.
Wow -- you don't have to have any marketing competence whatsoever. Just pay Apple per install and they'll magic it up.
Since it's so easy to set up a campaign that does not lose money (it's pay per install), imagine _every_ developer setting up a campaign with their app's price as maximum bid (ignoring revenue shares to simplify). Lots of installs, but zero revenue for developers.
> No user tracking - Search Ads does not profile users based on their search queries, and no data from other Apple Apps — including Health, Apple Pay and HomeKit — is used to deliver ads.
> No data sharing - No individual user data is exposed to advertisers, only aggregate campaign delivery information is made available.
They've never seriously compromised their privacy stance that I've seen, with the arguable exception of their unfortunate position in China. This would be a big step off an uncertain cliff, and their CEO has a personal history that lends credence to his argument that privacy matters.
They could’ve done that years ago but they are not in the business of advertising. They sell hardware with complimentary services and ads are an accessory to that mission — not the mission itself.
> Search Ads Basic
Why does this not count as "getting into ads"? Genuinely don't see the difference. And to be fair, the product kinda puzzles me in the first place. Is it really only an ad at the top of app store search pages?
Having said that, it was merely to illustrate an example of things they could do -- there are tons of other ways to to increase the value of searches.
> By adding just a few lines of code to your app, you can easily understand the value of different customer groups over time and the keywords that drove their conversion. You can use this information to optimize your CPT and CPA targets for different keywords, ad groups and audiences.
> Ad groups are a collection of keywords relevant to the app you’re promoting in App Store search results. You can set specific criteria and bid amounts for each ad group. Ad groups are an effective way to define who sees your ad.
Wait, what? Why is it only in U.S. storefronts? Does this mean I have to walk into an Apple store to get the Ads?