Brand Defense and Cannibalization in Apple Search Ads: A REPLUG Guide

The Apple Search Ads (ASA) platform is designed to help people discover your app on the App Store and match customers at the right moments when they’re looking for the type of service you offer.

ASA also has a basic analytics platform, with which you can track some of your users’ behavior and interactions and register all the data that can be useful for developing a successful marketing strategy for your app.

Apple Search Ads can also be used for brand defense, referring to the measures companies take to protect their brand reputation and market share from competitors, imitators, or other threats.

However, implementing brand defense strategies can sometimes lead to cannibalization issues, where one product or brand within a company’s portfolio negatively impacts the sales or performance of another product or brand.

Discover more about our services on ASA and our growth approach for your app. Contact us today.

Understanding Apple Search Ads

Your ads are automatically created using the metadata and imagery you provide in App Store Connect.

Apple Search Ads is an advertising platform provided by Apple Inc. specifically designed to promote mobile apps within the App Store’s search results.

First, Apple Search Ads are based on specific keywords, so the ads are shown to users actively searching for similar apps. This makes the advertising more effective and increases the chances of users discovering and downloading the app.

These advertisements operate on a cost-per-tap (CPT) mode, where advertisers only pay when users tap their ads, making it a cost-effective advertising solution.

Apple Search Ads also provides advertisers valuable insights and analytics, such as tap-through rates (TTR) and conversion rates, helping them optimize their campaigns and improve their return on investment (ROI).

Differences in Analysis Between ASA Basic and ASA Advanced

Apple Search Ads Basic and Advanced offer distinct features tailored to different advertising needs and objectives. Understanding their differences is crucial for optimizing your advertising strategy effectively.

Apple Search Ads Basic

Apple Search Ads Basic provides a simple, self-service platform for promoting apps within the App Store search results. Key features include:

Automatic placement: ads are automatically displayed in relevant search results based on app metadata, such as keywords, relevance, and bid amount.
Limited targeting options: include device type, location, and demographics, but advertisers have less control over specific audience segments.
Fixed cost structure: advertisers pay only for taps on their ads, with a maximum daily budget predetermined by the advertiser.
Limited reporting and optimization: basic reporting metrics, such as taps, installs, and conversion rates, provide information on ad performance. However, advertisers have limited access to advanced analysis and optimization tools.

Apple Search Ads Advanced

Apple Search Ads Advanced offers more sophisticated features and customization options for advertisers with more control and flexibility. Key features include:

Manual and Creative Control: advertisers can manually select keywords, set custom bids, and create multiple ad groups to effectively target specific audience segments.
Advanced Targeting Options: include audience refinement based on user behavior, demographics, and device attributes, allowing advertisers to reach more relevant users.
Flexible Budget Management: advertisers can set flexible budget allocations for different campaigns, ad groups, and keywords, enabling better optimization and budget control.
Advanced Reporting and Optimization: advanced analytics provide detailed insights into ad performance, including keyword-level data, attribution modeling, and advanced optimization tools to improve ROI and campaign effectiveness.

Apple Search Ads Basic offers a simple and intuitive experience suitable for users with few needs or little interest in tweaking their ads campaign in detail.

Apple Search Ads Advanced, on the other hand, offers greater customization, targeting options, and optimization capabilities for advertisers who wish to maximize the visibility and performance of their apps in the App Store.

Brand Defense Campaigns in Apple Search Ads

When discussing brand defense in the context of Apple Search Ads, we mean all the strategies to protect and strengthen a brand’s presence and reputation within the App Store’s search results.

In this sense, we are referring to the competitive practices of search steal, whereby, by hooking our brand keywords, other competitors will show up in the results bar as alternatives to the search the user has done.

This can be achieved by preventing loss of market share, maintaining or increasing the brand’s presence in search results, and preventing competitors from capitalizing on your brand’s visibility.

Optimize the Spend Allocation

Also, brand defense campaigns in ASA help optimize advertising spending by ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently to protect existing customer acquisition channels and maximize the ROI in this way.

The brand defense has several benefits for optimized spending. Some of these are:

ROI maximization – maximize the return on investment index for a campaign
Increased brand visibility – upping the number of people who interact with your brand on a regular basis
Reduced customer acquisition costs – by attracting users already familiar with your brand, you can potentially lower your overall customer acquisition costs.
Improved conversion rates – increase the average number of conversions per ad interaction, i.e., the desired actions the user takes in response to a CTA
Data-driven optimization – provide valuable data on user search behavior and brand awareness, allowing you to refine your overall ASA strategy for better results.

Run Up-To-Date Brand Defense Campaigns

Another method for running brand defense campaigns involves syncing them with your app’s development timeline.

As your app progresses through its stages, such as introducing new features or undergoing rebranding, ensuring these updates are effectively communicated to users is essential. This is crucial because users are bombarded with information daily and might overlook important app changes without clear communication.

You can implement short-term brand defense campaigns to highlight new features and events or rebrand efforts to address this. This can be particularly appealing to returning users, who may be enticed to reinstall your app when they see significant improvements since they last used it.

Additionally, evaluating the success of these campaigns can offer valuable insights into which features or events resonated most with users or if the audience positively received the rebranding efforts.

Effective Brand Defense Campaigns

Establish effective brand defense campaigns to protect your app and prevent cannibalization.

This can involve several strategies and best practices, such as keyword monitoring to identify any competitive threats or unauthorized use of brand keywords, strategic bidding to prioritize brand-related keywords and maintain top positions in search results, leveraging ad extensions such as app ratings and reviews to enhance ad visibility and credibility, and, of course, continuous optimization.

You can learn more about Apple Search Ads and its Ad Repository by reading this article.

Addressing Cannibalization in Apple Search Ads

Brand defense campaigns have quickly become standard practice in Apple Search Ads to prevent competitors from appearing at the top of search results. However, this practice can lead to the occurrence of an event known as cannibalization.

But what is cannibalization?

Cannibalization refers to a situation in which a product promoted by an ASA campaign overshadows other products offered by the company or the generation of conversion ads instead of organic conversions that would have occurred anyway without ads.

Best-To-Use Strategies to Prevent Cannibalization

This phenomenon is particularly relevant in ASA because brands often bid on similar or overlapping keywords for multiple apps, leading to competition within their own portfolio.

Cannibalization matters in ASA because it can result in inefficient use of the advertising budget, decreased overall revenue, and diminished return on investment (ROI) for the brand. It essentially pits one app against another within the same brand, leading to internal competition that may undermine its overall success.

The comprehension and management of cannibalization are crucial for optimizing ASA campaigns and ensuring that advertising efforts contribute positively to the brand’s overall growth and profitability. To minimize cannibalization in ASA campaigns, brands can employ various strategies and techniques, such as:

Keyword segmentation for more precise targeting reduces the likelihood of one app’s advertisement cannibalizing downloads from another.
Negative keywords exclude specific terms from triggering ads for certain apps, which can lead to cannibalization.
Budget allocation by allocating more budget to apps that are less susceptible to cannibalization and therefore minimize the impact of internal competition on overall performance.
Cross-promotion promotes related apps within each app’s user base or incentivizes users to download multiple apps.

Optimizing Your Apple Search Ads Campaigns

When optimizing your Apple Search Ads campaigns, it is always important to closely monitor key metrics to evaluate performance and make any improvements.

The main metrics you need to pay attention to are:

Click-Through Rate (CTR) – a ratio of the clicks on ads to the number of views
Conversion Rate – the number of users who converted as a percentage of the total number of users that visited your site
Cost per Acquisition (CPA) – the average cost of new user acquisition, calculated by dividing the total cost of ad campaigns by the number of new users acquired
Return on Investment – the return on capital invested in a campaign

Consistently analyzing all the metrics can be particularly complicated for big enterprises.

Moreover, the Apple Search Ads dashboard is limited in post-install activity analysis, so you can only analyze top-of-the-funnel measurements on the platform. For this reason, it’s crucial to implement an MMP so that you can clearly understand the performances of your ASA campaigns.

Related: learn more about Mobile Measurement Partners.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning can greatly improve the effectiveness of Apple Search Ads campaigns by allowing large amounts of data to be analyzed in real-time and automatically adjusting bidding, targeting, and ad creative strategies to maximize performance.

AI algorithms can identify user behavior patterns, optimize bids based on conversion probability, and make suggestions to improve overall campaign performance.

In addition, we created a detailed checklist of MMP setup points to consider. Download it here.

The Expert’s Opinion: REPLUG’s POV

“Brand defense campaigns on Apple Search Ads can sometimes seem attractive, especially since they’re known to enhance overall results, thanks to their lower CPA and higher ROAS. Marketing managers – and even some agencies – are particularly fond of them for a compelling reason: they seem to amplify the effectiveness of your paid user acquisition efforts, presenting them in a more favorable light than usual.

However, the true value of brand defense becomes evident in specific scenarios. It’s particularly crucial for smaller, less-known apps vulnerable to overshadowing by larger competitors. Imagine a scenario where a more prominent brand bids on your app’s name. Potential users searching for your app might be persuaded by the recognition of a bigger brand, opting for their advertisement instead of your organic listing. This situation is where brand defense proves its worth.

Brand defense is also indispensable if you invest heavily in branding, TV, radio, or offline campaigns. People exposed to your product through these channels might search for your app directly. Ensuring your brand is the first they encounter in search results, free from competitors’ ads, is crucial.
However, it might be time to reassess if you’re considering making brand defense the cornerstone of your Apple Search Ads strategy. A strategy overly reliant on brand defense could indicate a need for a more robust approach… or perhaps a new agency ;-)”

Lorenzo Rossi, Co-Founder @REPLUG

Conclusion

Establishing a strong brand defense and addressing cannibalization in ASA is crucial to protecting brand visibility and maximizing campaign ROI. REPLUG offers the experience and tools to optimize your ASA campaigns and ensure success in in-app marketing.

Contact us today for a consultation on Apple Search Ads and other app marketing services. Get in touch.