What are Keyword expansion strategies?
Keyword expansion strategies in SplitMetrics Acquire help you uncover untapped traffic by discovering and deploying high-potential keywords your competitors are already winning on.
This semi-automated feature analyzes competitor signals and market intelligence to:
✅ Identify keyword gaps between you and your rivals.
✅ Filter, score, and rank the most promising opportunities.
✅ Deploy top keywords into new ad groups in your selected campaigns.
The result? Smarter scaling of your Apple Ads campaigns with less manual work.
Why use Keyword expansion strategies?
Here’s how you’ll benefit:
🚀 Capture hidden opportunities
Surface overlooked keywords before your competitors do.
⏱️ Save hours of manual work
Automate the time-consuming process of keyword research and deployment.
📈 Expand reach without bloating campaigns
Add only high-value, relevant keywords with benchmark-based bids.
🛡️ Reduce risk
Avoid overbidding and keyword duplication with automated filters.
🔖 Stay in control
Every added keyword is tagged with source attribution for full transparency.
This is especially powerful in competitive segments like mobile gaming, where keyword gaps can translate to lost installs.
How do Keyword expansion strategies work?
When creating a new Keyword expansion strategy, you’ll need to define several key inputs to guide how the system discovers and deploys keywords. Here’s the process step by step:
1️⃣ Set Up Your Strategy
1. Go to Optimization Hub → Keyword expansion strategies.
2. Click Create strategy.
3. Define your key options:
- App and Storefront. Choose the app you want to optimize and the storefront (e.g., US, UK) where you want to run the strategy. This ensures the system analyzes competitor signals and traffic specific to your target market.
- Campaign. Select the campaign where the strategy will create new ad groups, based on the keyword types you choose (for example, Competitor or Generic). Once created, these ad groups will appear as enabled, and you can pause or adjust them whenever needed.
📌 Note: Single-storefront campaigns are supported, allowing for more precise targeting of local competitors.
- Keyword Types. Choose the keyword types for your strategy.
Competitor keywords – Terms directly related to your competitors’ brands.
Generic keywords – Broader search terms that show user intent but aren’t tied to any specific brand.
Other brand keywords – Branded keywords not associated with the competitors you selected.
❗Once added, keywords will appear as enabled, and their active or inactive status will depend on the delivery status of each ad group.
💡 Best Practice: Select all keyword types to maximize reach and manage bids separately for better control.
- Top Competitors. Select the competitors you want to target. The suggestions are based on local paid and organic search data to ensure they’re relevant to your storefront, and you can edit this list at any time.
- List of excluded keywords. Create and manage a list of keywords that should be automatically filtered out from keyword research results. This helps prevent irrelevant or sensitive terms from appearing in your automatic keyword discovery flow. Choose a match type when adding a keyword: Exact (the specific term only) or Broad (the term and its variations). You can update or expand this list at any time.
- Strategy name. Enter a name for your strategy and set a minimum CPT bid to complete the setup.
Once a strategy is created, it will show up on the Keyword expansion strategies dashboard. From here, you can get a full overview of all your strategies and pause, resume, edit, or remove them whenever needed.
2️⃣ Discover Keywords
The system analyzes your chosen competitors and uses Market Intelligence tools to expand their keyword sets. It pulls:
Synonyms
Typos
Long-tails
Brand variants
Translations
3️⃣ Filtering
Next, the system automatically filters out existing target and negative keywords by keyword type – Competitor, Generic, or Other brand keywords.
The duplicates checkup is performed at the storefront level, not at the campaign or ad group level.
This means the strategy checks for identical keywords (both active and inactive) across the entire keyword list of a storefront. By doing so, it eliminates the possibility of adding duplicate keywords to an ad group.
❗ Note: Negatives are managed separately
4️⃣ Keywords Deployment
Every Monday, your Keywords expansion strategy:
Automatically adds up to 50 newly found keywords into dedicated ad group(s) in your selected campaign.
Assigns selected minimum CPT bids.
Tags each keyword with a source system label for easy tracking and reporting. Labels will be assigned to both ad groups & keywords, regardless of their status.
❗Note: Deleting a strategy will not remove keywords that were already deployed — they remain in your selected campaigns.
5️⃣ Monitor and Refine
Track the performance of added keywords directly in your campaign dashboards:
Filter by the source label to view only keywords added via expansion strategies.
Monitor metrics like CTR, CVR, CPT, and ROAS.
Adjust bids or strategy inputs as needed to fine-tune performance.
6️⃣ Edit Keyword Expansion Strategies
When a strategy has fully mined all keywords from your selected competitors (0 new keywords are being added), you can update the competitors to discover new opportunities. Alternatively, if all competitor keywords are mined, you can focus on Generic keywords with a lower bid, or continue with Other Brand keywords using more conservative bids.
From the Keyword expansion strategies dashboard, you can:
Update the list of competitors.
Switch between Generic, Competitor, and Other Brand keyword groups.
Adjust minimum CPT thresholds for more precise bidding.
Edit the list of negative keywords.
To make changes, hover over your strategy, click Edit, make the updates, and save.
These options let you continuously optimize campaigns, explore new competitive landscapes, and scale across multiple storefronts without restarting the workflow.
Best Practices for Setup
To get the most value from Keyword Expansion Strategies, align your setup with your campaign structure and business goals. Here’s how:
Standard campaign structure
Typical setup:
Includes 4 campaigns per storefront – Brand, Competitors, Generic (Intent/Semantic), and Discovery (Probing). Each has separate budgets and KPIs.
Recommended Keyword expansion strategy options:
1️⃣ Two Strategies by Campaign type
Create separate Keyword expansion strategies for Competitors and Generic campaigns.
Use your existing campaign KPIs and rules.
2️⃣ Discovery as Destination
Create a Discovery campaign, set up one Keyword expansion strategy with two ad groups inside it.
Use it to test and evaluate new keywords.
Later, migrate proven keyword performers into dedicated campaigns.
3️⃣ New campaign, specifically for a Keyword expansion strategy
Create a new campaign with a separate budget and then create a Keyword expansion strategy for it, with two ad groups.
Evaluate performance, then move winning keywords into your existing campaigns.
Complex campaign structure
Typical setup:
Storefront includes a Brand campaign plus several Competitor and Generic ad groups, grouped by features, intent, semantics, or audiences.
Recommended Keyword expansion strategy options:
1️⃣ New campaign, specifically for the Keyword expansion strategy
Create a new campaign with a separate budget and then create a Keyword expansion strategy for it, with two ad groups.
Evaluate performance. For top-performing keywords:
Duplicate them into existing campaigns/ad groups.
Pause this campaign and both ad groups.
2️⃣ Discovery as Destination
Create a Discovery campaign, set up one Keyword expansion strategy with two ad groups inside it.
Test, evaluate, and migrate winning keywords into relevant campaigns.
Pause this Discovery campaign and both ad groups to keep the account clean.
Shared budget & unified KPI per storefront
Typical setup:
One campaign containing ad groups for Brand, Competitors, and Generic. Discovery and Probing ad groups may also present.
Recommended Keyword expansion strategy options:
1️⃣ Use Existing Campaign
Set up one Keyword expansion strategy targeting the existing campaign.
Adjust rules to handle Competitor and Generic keyword types separately.
2️⃣ New Scaling Campaign
Create a new campaign with a separate budget and then create a Keyword expansion strategy for it, with two ad groups.
Evaluate performance. Move high-performing keywords into your main campaigns as needed.
SKAG (Single Keyword Ad Group) model is not supported in Keyword expansion strategies.
💡 Consider creating a dedicated Keyword expansion strategy campaign as an alternative:
Create a new campaign with a separate budget and then create a Keywords expansion strategy for it, with two ad groups.
Evaluate performance. Move high-performing keywords into your main campaigns as needed.
Keyword expansion strategies help you:
✅ Save hours on manual keyword research
✅ Expand your campaigns intelligently
✅ Stay ahead of competitors by surfacing hidden traffic opportunities
Head to Optimization hub → Keyword expansion strategies and set up your first strategy today!