Yo! What's up? This is the Daily Overpass. My name is Eric. I make apps!
Today let's talk about Apple's Search Ads..
Okay, so today I want to answer a question by a Royal Penguins. Thanks again for the question Royal Penguins.
I have a question about penguins. Maybe you know the answer to it. Maybe somebody does.
I asked my kids yesterday. Is it possible to eat penguin? I mean, why don't
we eat penguin? Is it because they're endangered? And do you think they taste
like chicken? I mean maybe somebody knows that out there.
I don't know. But you know, it came up yesterday. Anyway, Royal Penguins
asked "Have you ever tried using Apple Search Ads? Actually, I have.
They have like a trial of, you know, they gave you like a hundred dollars to spend
on trying Apple Search Ads. So I tried that with a few of my apps
and for those of you who don't know, Apple Search Ads are being able to put
an ad at the top of Apple's search in the App Store. I did a search
here on my iPad for Learn Chinese, I don't know if you can see that, but
they're kind of marked up there with the with ad next to it . So, they don't
actually blend in. It's not like weighted. It's a bit like Google ad search. It
shows clearly as an advertisement. But it does show up at the top right. So, I tried
this on a few different apps just trying it out some of my paid apps
because the the lifetime value of my users on the free apps. Just you know,
it just doesn't quite work economically. So, I thought if I'm gonna try the search
ads, we try with paid apps and then try it with free apps. And I've done both
in the past with AdMob and Facebook ads. And everything trying to go
advertiser free and then at and also the paid apps. And try to see which
one does better and everything like that. And I just always had like.. it might be..
it could be my the way I target everything. But my ads have always been
where I actually lose money on the advertisement. So I think with Apple
search ads, it goes getting a CPA -a cost per acquisition. I think it was like
three dollars and the app was like $2.99.
Minus the 30% and all that stuff for Apple. In the end it, didn't quite work
out for me. But I mean it could have.. it's a really slick experience
the way they do it. I kinda like the way that the Apple search has
work. When you go in and you target your keywords. I found it easier than the
Google equivalent. So, you go in there and you target the keywords and it will tell
you the popularity of the keywords that you're searching for. You
know how often they're search, which is actually used that
we're not doing an ad. Just go through and check out a few different
keywords to see how they would look in terms of how many people are
actually searching on them. And how popular they are as search terms and
everything. So, I did that I put a few things through and again, like I said
it was it economically didn't work out for me, but I think it could. One of
the things - we all know what the big problem with the app stores
are. We could all say it at the same time. 3.. 2.. 1..
there's too many apps.That's the problem. It's not these
search algorithms, it's not the platforms, it's just that there so many
apps going in. What is it like? 40,000 new apps go in a month on on the iOS store.
Or something I read that recently. I mean, we just have so much stuff going
in. And the hard bit is being found. Lately, like over the last year or so,
I've been meeting a lot of people who are user acquisition specialists. They're
not ASO specialists or not developers or not - they're just user acquisition
specialists.They know all these different tools, they know the
keywords to search for the types of ads, they calculate all the lifetime values
of users and they try to get - they try to make that equation work.
If you have a lifetime value of a user and you've
determined to be like five dollars, then it makes sense to spend three dollars
on an add-on - on an acquisition through an ad or it makes you know even four
dollars so you just could scale it up. For me, because most of my
apps are free, and that's the model I've been going on from the
beginning. Free with upgrades and through in-app purchases, stuff like that.
My value per user is actually pretty low. It's like 10 cents or less.
Because you occasionally- they'll click on ads, but
when you average it all out, it's actually really really low and I'm able
to live comfortably. I mean, well comfortably is a stretchy
word, but I'm able to make as much as I did as a contractor. Although I don't
have to do contracting anymore. You just through app- through app revenue
Oh, but that's kind of nice. But it's not really scalable.
When I figure about how do we get more users in, one of the first things
that comes up is ADS because that's the easiest way. But it's- lately
I've been looking a lot more at how do we bring that value per user app?
How do we get the in-app purchases in front of them? At what other in-app
purchases can we add? Because ad revenue while it works for me, it doesn't
work for everybody. You need to have- you need to have a lot of
impressions in order to make it work financially. It's something
that bothers me a lot. We have- we get a lot of downloads, we get a lot
of revenue through ads. But you know, we have to keep that
going. We have to keep the treadmill going. And we just takes one other
app to come in there and knock you off the top spot. And then
your revenue drops. Started to look more at how do we raise value
per user and if we can raise value for a user then that means we can
start doing paid ads. It seems like just the the way the app market is
going, where it's getting more and more crowded,
you got these large companies coming in and the big advantage they have over
you or over me is that they have this huge budget. They have this
client, these user acquisition budgets.
So they're able to just bring more people in. You don't see something
like Uber can spend loads on cost-per-acquisition and once they start
getting that going, then it becomes organic as soon as I start getting
enough people on. I've been up into actually. A few talks on this and it's
really, really interesting. To make- to make- to answer the
question, yes, I have used Apple search ads. I think that they're really
cool. My fear is that the app markets have to start going this way because
there's so many apps going into the app market. One of the
things that bothers me - what bothers
everybody, everybody's a developer, is that the app market is not based on
merit. The best apps don't do the best in terms of- they're not at the top
of the store. Sometimes, there could be a better app buried way down
deep that nobody could ever find. Somebody left in a comment on one of my
videos. One of my really old videos, just a few weeks ago. They said- because I
think I was talking about some of my apps only get like five or six
downloads a day and it was from a couple years ago. But I
still get some like that and he said you you think that's bad. He says my apps
been out for months. I've only had six downloads total. And it's not just some
stupid game. I worked for six months on this thing and what I
took- what I thought about that was- this is the problem. We all
think that this amount of work that we put in, we think about, like when
you go to work. I wrote a blog post about this this morning. When you go to
work, if you work more, if you work better than everybody else, if you add more
value, then you get paid more. That's not necessarily the case on the app store.
You need to get people in there and finding it and that's the big
problem. It's this- it was the same with Google back in the day. The
reason that Google AdWords works is because there's too much-
there's too many web pages. You can't put a web page out there on some topic and
expect it to show up at the top, just because it's really good. No.
You need to start getting other people linking to and all this kind of stuff
and start playing with the system. Or you spend a lot of money on ads. Anyway,
kind of rambling on a little bit there. I thought, Apple search ads, it didn't
really quite work for me. But I could see that it working you sometime in the
future. I'd really like to know what you guys think. Are any of you guys
using well Apple search ads or any other paid acquisition like that? How are
you finding it working? Do you do it for your free apps? And you if you do it for
your free apps, is that you weigh it towards - are you really
confident that in-app purchases are going to work or ad clicks or anything
like that? Or do you just do it for paid apps? And if you do for paid apps, do you
also have an equivalent free app? But I've always been really curious about
this. You know for me, I always have a free app for every paid app.
It's- that might not be the best model. Anyway, I'd be really
interesting what you guy say. Anyway, that's it for today.
I will talk to you, guys, tomorrow.