Search ads - no impressions yet?

Hi everyone,


It's 6pm central time now and my search ads show as active but are reporting no impressions so far.

Is anyone seeing impressions?


I'm just trying to figure out if it's


a) due to too low of bids

b) due to delayed reporting

c) something else


Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks!!

Andrew

Replies

Yes. I've seen them on my iPad (in the US app store, of course). And I'm getting some (very low number) of impressions for my iPad-only app.

Same. Had 2 impressions at the start, but zero impressions for the last 24 hours.

Thanks for the added insights. This is all so frustrating. I'm like take our money Apple PLEASE!! Should easily be better than throwing it at Facebook.

In the last 48 hours I have had over 200 impressions, 47 taps and 21 conversions.

My bids per keyword are less than 5 cent.

With an average CPA of 10 cent I already like the new Search Ads.🙂

I ENVY YOU.

I've seen a FEW search ads when on the app store.


My guess is that Apple has their "relevance" test that they talked about cranked up very high.

Yesterday I had a total of:


593 impressions

$2.30 spent

36 taps

7 conversions

Cmon Apple... unleash the Kraken already

What I have now is 5-9 impressions a day. No taps. Anybody has simialr situation?

Yes me too. I've only had 15 impressions over a few days without any taps.

I've seen search others ads in AppStore search.


My campaign has about 16 keywords, most of them have $2.00 bid for each. No impressions (no taps, naturally).

Imho, it's kinda too much for a keyword, but getting at least 1 impression would be nice.

If you search on the US App Store using those keywords do you see any other apps appearing in the results as an ad? Try it multiple times. Initially it was almost like Apple was slowly activating keywords, or search terms on various categories of apps in the App Store. I don't know if they've completed that or not yet.


If other apps ads are showing, but yours aren't, then maybe you're failing either Apple's relevance or quality criteria. And there's no real easy way to tell if this is what is happening, other than you see it happening. Even if competitors were bidding really high for keywords, you'd expect to get a few impressions here or there. Unless you're up against really high competition with many apps bidding for the most popular keywords?

Yes, I do see other apps coming up as ads.


And I actually extended the campaign to show ads even to people who downloaded the app.


Here's a hint. Yesterday (over 24 hours ago) I added a keyword "trump" to my campaing. (my app has nothing to do with politics. It's an arcade game). Today I'm searching for keyword "trump" - no ads are shown at all. (suprisingly searching for "trumpy" shows ads).


I'm not sure about apple's relevance or quality criteria.

When I'm using a straighforward keyword for the game (i.e. "tanks"), a completely irrelevant application (for the phone numbers management) showed up as an ad... Advertising using different sources showed much better results (since day 1 of a campaign), with cost lower than 10 cents per actual download :-)


It's yet disappointing, but hey! that's a new area of business, and I guess it needs some time to get everything working "as expected".

I'm beginning to suspect that search traffic on the App Store especially for certain keywords might be a lot lower than we were expecting. I've exchanged a few emails with Ads support and they keep telling me it's working as expected.

I dropped the bidding of keywords to the average of $.20.


I'm using keyword "bored" in my campaign. The keyword is not used with the game itself.


I've tried to AppStore search again, put "bored" and ran search like 10 times.

5 times it showed app an add of a game (a different game each time) by "Ketchapp" published.

5 times it came up with no ads at all.


I wish Apple would also show "how many bids were lost", just to have an idea, IF campaing is even working.


(I also increased Max budget of the campaign, to see if it makes any difference 🙂)