7 Apple Search Ads Mistakes Killing Your ROAS (And How to Fix Them)

I’ve audited over 500 Apple Search Ads campaigns across 60+ apps. The same mistakes show up again and again — regardless of budget size, team experience, or app category.

The good news? Most of these are fixable in a week. The bad news? They’re probably costing you 20-40% more per acquisition than necessary.

Here are the seven I see most often.

What you’ll learn:

• The structural mistake that makes every other optimisation harder
• Why the ASO-ASA feedback loop is the most valuable data you’re not using
• How bid segmentation by intent changes CPI economics
• The creative assignment feature most teams ignore
• Why market-level thinking matters and copy-paste scaling fails
• How to build proper attribution before revenue metrics mean anything
• What “set it and forget it” actually costs you over time

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1. Running Broad and Exact Match in the Same Campaign

This is the most common structural mistake in Apple Search Ads accounts — and it makes every other optimisation harder because you can’t attribute performance to a cause.

When you mix broad, exact, and Search Match in the same campaign, you lose the ability to understand which match type is driving results. You end up with blended CPT and CR that tells you nothing specific.

The correct structure:

• Discovery campaigns: Broad match and Search Match only, in their own ad groups. This is where you find keywords you don’t know about yet.
• Exact match campaigns: Exact keywords that have proven performance, scaled separately.
• Negative keywords: Your exact match winners must be added as negatives in your Discovery campaign. Without this, Apple will serve your Discovery budget on keywords you’ve already validated — wasting exploration budget on known performers.

The separation creates clear signal. Discovery tells you what’s emerging. Exact campaigns tell you what scales.

2. Ignoring the ASO-ASA Feedback Loop

Your ASA data contains something your organic ASO data doesn’t have: keyword-level conversion to paying users.

App Store Connect tells you impressions and downloads by keyword. ASA tells you which keywords drove actual revenue — tap-through rates, conversion rates, and if your MMP is connected, downstream subscription events. Most teams run ASO and ASA as separate workstreams. The ASO person has never seen the ASA dashboard. The ASA person doesn’t know the metadata strategy.

This is leaving your most valuable optimization signal unused.

What to do: Review your ASA Search Term report weekly. Any keyword that shows strong conversion in ASA but isn’t explicitly in your metadata is an immediate ASO opportunity. Add it to your keyword field or subtitle and watch organic ranking respond.

The feedback loop compounds: ASA validates which keywords convert to revenue. ASO metadata is updated to target those keywords. Organic rankings improve. ASA relevance scores improve. CPT drops. That freed budget goes back into keyword discovery.

3. Bidding the Same CPT Across All Keywords

Not all keywords are worth the same CPT. A branded search for your competitor converts at 15-30%. A branded search for your own app converts at 55-65%+. Yet I regularly see accounts where every keyword has the same $2.50 max CPT regardless of intent.

Segmentation by intent type:

• Brand keywords: Highest conversion, lowest appropriate CPT. You’re defending your own traffic.
• Generic non-branded keywords: Highest volume, moderate CPT. Prioritize these — they drive scale at reasonable efficiency.
• Competitor keywords: Lowest conversion, highest CPT tolerance if CPA target is met. Requires explicit CPA cap.
• Discovery keywords: Optimize for learning, not volume. Use conservative bids.

Bid adjustment triggers: Increase bids when TTR is strong but impression share is below target (below 80% for Brand, below 60% for Generic). Decrease bids when CPI exceeds target by 20%+ over a 7-day rolling average or when CPT rises 25%+ without conversion improvement.

The rule: proportional adjustments only. Minor drift (one band) = 5-10% change. Clear underperformance (Poor band) = 20-30% change. Never make aggressive adjustments based on single-day data.

4. Not Using Custom Product Pages

Apple lets you assign different screenshots to different ad groups. A fitness app showing a “calorie counter” ad should land users on a product page leading with calorie tracking — not workout logging. The same app, different first impression, significantly different conversion rate.

Most teams never configure Custom Product Pages. They send all traffic to the default page regardless of which keyword triggered the ad.

The impact: When a user’s search intent doesn’t match the first screenshot they see, they leave. You paid for the tap. You got nothing back.

How to fix it: Create CPPs in App Store Connect for each major intent cluster in your campaigns. Assign each ad group to its corresponding CPP. Match the creative promise to the search intent. This change alone can move conversion rates by 15-25% on affected ad groups.

5. Treating All Markets the Same

CPIs vary wildly by country. A $3 CPI in the US might be $0.80 in Brazil. But competition, user quality, and LTV also vary — in ways that make simple comparison misleading.

Copying your US campaign structure to other markets without adjustment is leaving efficiency on the table. The bid levels are wrong (calibrated to US competition), the keyword set may not match local search behavior, and LTV assumptions built for one market may not hold in another.

Market-level approach:

• Research CPT and CPI benchmarks for each specific market
• Adjust bids based on local competitive dynamics, not US benchmarks
• Segment LTV by acquisition geography using cohort analysis before scaling any market
• Treat each major market as a separate optimization problem until you have sufficient data to generalize

Some markets are better for volume at low cost. Others deliver high-LTV users worth paying more to acquire. Both can be correct — the mistake is treating them identically.

6. Optimizing for Installs Instead of Revenue

CPI is easy to measure. But a $2 install that never converts to paid is worth less than a $5 install that subscribes on day one.

Teams that optimize for CPI build incentives throughout their campaign structure that systematically select for low-quality users: cheaper geographies, broader keywords with lower intent, less specific creative that attracts casual tappers.

The shift required:

• Set up MMP attribution (AppsFlyer, Adjust, Branch) to track revenue events, not just installs
• Define your downstream conversion events — trial start, subscription purchase, Day 7 active
• Run campaigns toward CPA and ROAS goals, not install volume
• Use cohort analysis to understand LTV by acquisition source before scaling

Until your attribution is set up, you can’t know whether your acquisition is profitable. All other optimization is guesswork about a metric that doesn’t determine business success.

7. Set It and Forget It

Apple Search Ads is not a launch-and-leave channel. Competition changes week to week. Seasonality affects bid efficiency. New keywords emerge in your category. App updates change relevance dynamics.

I’ve seen accounts running identical campaigns for 18 months without a single optimization. The bids are calibrated to a competitive landscape that no longer exists. The keyword list hasn’t been updated since launch. The search term report — which contains a continuous stream of user language and new opportunities — has never been reviewed.

Minimum review cadence:

• Weekly: Check search term reports for new opportunities in Discovery. Add irrelevant terms as negatives. Pause exact keywords that have entered the Poor band for CPT or CR.
• Bi-weekly: Review bid performance against current benchmarks. Adjust based on 7-day rolling averages.
• Monthly: Strategic review — keyword expansion, budget allocation across campaigns, new CPP opportunities.
• Trigger-based: CPT up 25%+ sustained over 7 days, CR entering Poor band, CPI exceeding target by 20%+.

The best accounts treat Apple Search Ads as an ongoing optimization practice, not a campaign you set up once.

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The Bottom Line

None of these mistakes are fatal. All of them are fixable. The priority order matters:

1. Fix campaign structure first (Mistake #1) — messy structure makes everything else impossible to attribute
2. Connect your measurement (Mistake #6) — without attribution, you can’t validate any other fix
3. Segment your bids (Mistake #3) and assign CPPs (Mistake #4) — these compound each other
4. Build the ASO feedback loop (Mistake #2) — the highest-leverage ongoing practice
5. Review consistently (Mistake #7) — everything above decays without maintenance

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Spending more than $10K/month on ASA and suspect you’re making some of these? Book a free 30-minute audit — no pitch, just an honest assessment of what’s working and what isn’t.