How much search ads credit remaining?

Just got an email that I have some credit remaining from my initial $100 signup credit and that Apple have extended the use by until March 30th 2017.


I originally set my credit limit to $100 for initial testing and this limit has now been hit.


Im in Australia so guessing that when I sign in Im actually seeing AU$ amounts and this is perhaps why I still have a credit? I do vaguely recall seeing it converted to AU$ when I first signed up but can't recall what the exact figure was?


I can find nowhere in the apple ads reporting site that actually states what the currency is (it does show an AU$ amount on the invoices when they arrive though).


So, how do I know how much credit I have left in Australian dollars? There appears to be no obvious way to check this.


I also suggest that Apple ensure that they provide users with a way to show what the currency is, not just a dollar symbol.

Replies

The original credit was in USD. I noticed this as my GBP ran out sooner than I expected. 😕


You pretty much have to add up all the invoices you've received and convert the currencies yourself (or convert the original credit to AUD for a rough idea). It's not actually listed anywhere as far as I can recall. Once the credit stops reducing your billed AUD total to zero, then you know the credit has run out.


You can also simply go into the Search Ads console, and set the date range to cover when you started right through to today. You still have to manually add up the entries in the Spend column (why isn't there a total here Apple?), but that will tell you the total you've went through (and includes both spending against the free promotional credit and spending after it runs out.


I've noticed Search Ads is behaving a bit 'wilder' the last few weeks. I don't know if there's less competition with other advertisers (due to people running through their credit and not bothering any more), or if Apple has turned up the spigot, but I'm getting more impressions than before. Setting the bid prices is more important to keep a campaign under control, but if you've still got credit, now is maybe a good time to use it, and even if you run a bit over it is still possible to get installs at a CPA less than the revenue earned per copy sold - the free credit being very useful to find out where this level is.

Thanks for your reply. I did figure out how to check the total spend but the missing AUD credit amount figure was bugging me. Judging by OANDA.com 's historical exchange rate data for end of Sept 2016 (when I signed up) it appears that the initial AUD figure should be somewhere around the AUD$130 mark


Apple obviously know exactly how much credit remains, so I'm unsure why they can't simply insert that figure into the reporting system, unless it's absence is intentional which is a bit cheeky.


You are probably right about competition dropping off, especially if advertisers were not finding it worth their while during the trial credit. Unfortunately my app is free, with a single in-app purchase to disable ads so it's hard to determine if it's worth continuing after the credit expires. If it were a paid app the results would be far more obvious.

I have this theory that they developed the Search Ads interface without any concept of a promotional credit, just an invoice was raised weekly and your card got billed, and someone decided at the last minute the best way to promote this and get it going was to give everyone some credit up front. Because it wasn't designed for tracking credit in an account as such (as you weren't supposed to have an account that could hold credit), the interface has never been built that way. The whole thing feels a bit like what putting your own ads through iAd used to be like, so maybe they've reused chunks of that system for this.


I have a free app I promote using this as well. It's useful for getting exposure on the App Store and getting to the top of the list as far as users are aware once in a while, but it has to be seen whether this can be used to drive you up the rankings far enough that when you stop you don't have to use it anymore. I suspect that it probably won't work out like that. That's one of those decisions you have to consider depending on what your whole marketing strategy and budget is at the end of the day. But it's definitely easier to measure any financial benefit when used for paid apps as there's a direct 1-to-1 relationship between money out and money in.


In your case I'd assume you have another 30 AUD, set the limits based on this, and if you end up spending a small bit of your own money, or don't entirely use every last cent of the credit it's not a disaster as it'll only be a $ or two either way.


The other thing I've not mentioned above that's useful for free apps, is that you finally get some hard evidence on the keyword combinations users use - handy for ASO purposes at the very least. That's if you're running any Search Match or Broad Match campaigns and the keywords are searched on often enough to escape the 'Low Volume Terms' trap (look over the entire history of your campaign on the Search Terms tab to maximise the number shown).