To mine keywords, you have to create a separate discovery campaign for each storefront and set a comfortable budget to spend on searching for new keywords.
Obviously, the bigger the budget, the faster you will find more high-performing keywords. On the other hand, there’s no point in cutting the budget severely, as you may miss the potential profit that the discovered keywords can bring. The good idea is to apply the 20/80 rule to allocate 20% of your budget for the discovery campaign.
Since the main purpose of a discovery campaign is to generate as many search terms as possible, there isn't much point in breaking it into targeting groups. This will only produce low-volume terms and make management more complicated.
Step 1. Сreate a proper account structure
Create a separate discovery campaign for each storefront and set a comfortable budget.
Create a Search Match ad group without keywords and with Search Match enabled, and set your bid at the ad group level.
Within the same campaign, create a separate broad match ad group with broad match keywords and with Search Match disabled.
If you already have a list of exact match keywords, add them to the broad match group as broad match keywords. This will speed up the process.
Add all keywords from your broad match campaign as negative exact match keywords to the discovery campaign to avoid competition for impressions.
To avoid competition for impressions, add all keywords in exact match groups to the discovery campaign as negative exact match keywords.
Step 2. Analyze search terms' performance
Give your campaign a couple of weeks to run. This will guarantee that you collect sufficient data to analyze new search terms that Apple Ads matches to your ads.
Go to the Search Terms level and check the Processing status column. Search terms generated within the last 14 days will be marked with a New status.
💡Tip. To learn more about the different statuses in the Processing status column and what they mean, check out our detailed article here 📚
Arrange the search terms (STs) into three groups–Good search terms, Bad search terms, and Insufficient data—and work with them as shown in the chart below.
How do you determine an appropriate category for a search term? Remember that due to the Apple Ads data privacy policy, search terms converted into installs are not reported to MMPs (only the keyword and the match type). Therefore, it is impossible to analyze post-download metrics for search terms.
Step 3. Identify good search terms
Good search terms are relevant high-performing search terms that make the traffic grow without hurting its quality. All the steps above lead to discovering these queries. Good search terms should be moved to the exact match keywords group.
The best way to evaluate the quality of search terms is to look at their Avg CPA (Total). For example, if your Avg CPA (Total) threshold is $5.0, then queries with Downloads (Total) > 0 and Avg CPA (Total) < $5.0 can be considered winning ones. Below are the filters you should use to discover winning queries:
After you’ve found your winning query, take the following steps (see the chart above):
1) Add the winning search term to the exact match group. Depending on your account structure, there can be several exact groups where you need to move this keyword.
2) Add the winning query as an exact negative keyword to your discovery campaign, just like you did in Step 1. This keyword is included in the exact match group, so you have to ensure that Apple Ads doesn’t match ads to this search term in your discovery campaign.
A negative exact match excludes your ad for searches of the exact keyword phrase, but it may still show for searches that include related and long/short keyword versions. That’s why it’s reasonable to add close variants (for example, "game" and "games") and misspellings to negatives as well.
Step 4. Identify bad search terms
Bad search terms are irrelevant or non-performing search terms. They don’t bring any downloads and eat up a sufficient amount of money, usually 3 x Target Avg CPA (Total). Here are the examples of filters that can help find such queries:
Once you’ve discovered such search terms, add them to your discovery campaign as negative exact keywords.
Step 5. Identify keywords with insufficient data
These are search terms with insufficient data to be moved to any category. There are 2 cases:
There are no conversions, and your spend threshold hasn’t been reached yet. For example, the search terms have spent less than 3 x Target Avg CPA (Total) and haven’t brought any downloads yet (e.g., Downloads (Total) = 0 and Spend < $15).
Low volume term. The data you request may be below Apple’s privacy threshold. For example, search terms must reach at least ten impressions; otherwise, the "low volume" value appears in your search terms report. Age, location, or gender reports require a minimum of 100 impressions before Search Ads can show any values.
If your report has returned the "low volume" value, give the data some time to accumulate or extend the date range to 30, 60, or 90 days to get more data.
Step 6. Keep mining new keywords
Take steps 2-5 every week or fortnight and use the data from the latest review up to the present moment. By following these recommendations step by step, you can gradually increase the number of relevant keywords and, as a result, boost your traffic volume.
Naturally, the traffic volume in discovery ad groups will start dropping in a while. It has to do with the exact negative keywords regularly added to discovery ad groups. To keep mining new relevant keywords, you can gradually increase the CPT bid in discovery ad groups to make it into the auction with more expensive keywords.