[WEBINAR] Apple Search Ads Influence on Organic App Rankings

Will your ASA campaign have an impact on your ASO? Do Search Ads campaigns influence your organic app rankings? Discover the results of our experiments and learn everything you need to know! Watch us in action on “All Things Apple Search Ads Online Conference” hosted by SearchAdsHQ.

How ASA can leverage your ASO

On April 11-12, Olivier (AppTweak Co-Founder & CEO) and Laurie (Inbound Marketing Manager) participated in All things Apple Search Ads Online conference, organized by SearchAdsHQ.

For two days 10+ leading experts such as Gabe Kwakyi from Incipia, Thomas Petit from 8fit or Sylvain Gauchet from Apptamin shared their tactics for maximizing Apple Search Ads performance.

If you’ve always wondered if your Search Ads campaigns had an actual influence on your App Store Optimization and organic rankings, watch this webinar and discover the results of our experiments! Just click “play” and get all the answers to your questions!

Source: SearchAdsHQ – Splitmetrics

How Search Ads Can Boost Your App’s Organic Keyword Rankings

The literature today shows that the influence of Search Ads on App Store Optimization remains unclear for most app developers and marketers.

At AppTweak, we love digging into our extensive amount of data in order to bring answers to your biggest concerns.

Find below the main key insights from the webinar as discussed in the video.

Use Search Ads to Boost your Organic Rankings

#1 Experiment: Influence of ASA when the app has already an organic ranking on a given keyword

We first made a search on the keyword “hotel room” in the US and looked at organic results. We noticed that “Orbitz Flight” app was ranked #25.

However, as we did the experiment again and when “Orbitz Flight” was displayed as an ad, its position in the organic results moved from #25 to #8!

Takeaway #1: when an app is shown as an ad on a given keyword, and if this same app is ranking organically for that same keyword, its organic ranking is promoted by Apple to the 8th position

#2 Experiment: Influence of ASA when the app doesn’t have any organic ranking on a given keyword

We wanted to know if this would be the case for an app that is not ranked organically on a keyword.

Our second experiment revealed that the app “Turo”, which was originally unranked on the keyword “hotel room”, was not boosted to the 8th position while it was displayed as an ad.

Takeaway #2: when an app is shown as an ad on a given keyword, and if this same app is unranked organically for that same keyword, its organic ranking is not promoted by Apple and it remains out of the organic search results.

#3 Experiment: Influence of ASA when has an organic ranking higher than 8th rank?

Finally, we did the same experiment but with an app that was ranking above the 8th result organically.

In our case, “Hotels.com” was ranking 2nd on the keyword “hotel room” and, while it was displayed as an ad, was still ranking 2nd and therefore, not pushed back to the 8th position.

Takeaway #3: when an app is shown as an ad on a given keyword, and if this same app is ranked organically for that same keyword above the 8th position, its organic ranking remains the same.

▶ If you want to read more details on our experiments, make sure to check our dedicated blog post How Search Ads can Boost your app’s Organic Keyword Rankings ◀

Conclusion

Search Ads do have an influence on ASO and organic rankings. However, we have seen that this boost is not allocated in all cases.

Since Apple gives your app a “second chance” to get more visibility by ranking your app on the 8th position (while it was ranking much lower) when you do Search Ads, we encourage you to target keywords for which you already have a certain rank!

There is one more question that would be interested to try answering: Is tap/download on a promoted 8th rank app considered to be coming from organic or paid acquisition? Feel free to share your insights or theories below!

In the meanwhile, wait no longer to improve your Search Ads campaigns with AppTweak!