If you’re checking your KPIs and finding that they’re significantly different from the actual CPA or ROAS in your campaigns, it’s time to dig deeper. Let’s dive into some strategies to help you bridge that gap

➡️ Reevaluate your current KPIs to ensure they are realistic compared to niche benchmarks and historical data. We recommend analyzing your average CPA over the past 30 days and aiming to reduce it by approximately 15%. Gradually decreasing costs is more feasible and reasonable than striving for a reduction of 50% or more.

➡️ Anticipate differences in performance among brand, competitor, and generic keywords. Generic and competitor keywords often have higher cost-per-taps (CPTs) and lower conversion rates (CRs), leading to higher cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or lower return on ad spend (ROAS).

If your target action or revenue builds up over 7 days post-installation, avoid quick conclusions based on users who installed recently. Instead, consider extending the date range to 14 or 30 days when analyzing the data, depending on your sales cycle, to give all users adequate time to engage after installation.

A clear and effective Apple Ads account structure is essential for campaign evaluation. Avoid an overly simple or mixed structure that includes:

1. Missing Campaign Types: Ensure you run brand, competitor, generic, and discovery campaigns to capture all opportunities and not spare traffic and users to competitors.

2. Lack of Clarity: It happens when keywords are all mixed randomly with different semantics, intent, competitiveness, profitability, etc. Maintain clear distinctions between campaign keywords to avoid confusion regarding keywords' intent and profitability.

3. Insufficient Differentiation: Organize ad groups to prevent mixing too many keywords, complicating analysis and optimization.

4. Mixed Keyword Match Types: Use separate keyword match types. Utilize broad keywords in discovery campaigns to manage search terms effectively, and apply exact match keywords in brand, competitor, and generic campaigns.

➡️ It’s crucial to continuously mine and test new keywords to enrich the portfolio and uncover new opportunities, as well as stay on top of trends. Mine keywords with the help of Discovery campaigns, and platform Intelligence tools like Keyword Discovery, Keyword Gap, and CPP Intelligence.

➡️ It's important to regularly review your keyword portfolio, especially if you’re working with Discovery and Proxy campaigns where new keywords might be added automatically. Сlean out any irrelevant or underperforming keywords to ensure your campaigns stay effective and don’t waste budget.
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​➡️ It's essential to review the unattended search terms across your account. Make sure to move promising Search Terms from Discovery or other Broad campaigns as exact match keywords into Performance campaigns. This ensures they are tested across the full funnel, allowing you to properly assess their performance. Regularly review Search Terms even in campaigns using exact match keywords – they can still be matched, and it's important not to leave them hanging.
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With multi-storefront campaigns, there’s no control over budget allocation and keyword bids based on performance in a particular geo. Some poorly performing geos may be dragging the whole campaign performance down, while geos with good potential are being underoptimized.

When seeing high CPA or low ROAS – apart from evaluating the expectations from each particular campaign type or geo and looking into structural discrepancies, it’s worth going down to the keyword level to spot any deviations.

➡️ Neglected non-converters or irrelevant keywords that spend and bring no conversions. Review and negate irrelevant keywords occasionally, and set up pause rules to get rid of non-converters.

➡️ Too volatile, competitive, or expensive keywords that might need an individual approach. Consider separating such keywords into a different ad group with harsher rules, stricter KPIs, different CPPs, or even CPA Caps for edge cases. Alternatively, consider labeling such keywords for a different manual or automatic optimization approach instead of regrouping where this is enough (use labels for monitoring or bulk bid management in Ads Manager or the conditions of auto rules).

A significant part of keywords may have no impressions due to not having a competitive bid. Set up an Impression Booster rule to tackle a bid that is competitive enough to enter the auction. Make sure to set reasonable conditions (e.g. boost until such an amount of Impressions that is likely to translate into at least a few taps, downloads, or in-app events). In case an Impression Booster rule is in place but the increments are too small to see any impact, consider manually increasing the bids to a reasonable starting point.

Double-check if best performers might be hitting the upper bid limit of the applied increase rules, while there’s room for growth based on high popularity or current SoV (not in range of 95-100%). Choose a competitive and reasonable upper bid limit, especially for a competitive niche. Consider increasing the upper bid limit, or labeling the top-performing keywords to apply a separate, more relaxed rule to them.

Review the funnel to pinpoint the source of the high cost per action and low ROAS. Is it a high cost per transaction at the start, or a lower conversion rate further down? Let’s explore solutions.

It’s crucial to occasionally review your account’s automation to ensure it is comprehensive, set up appropriately, and functioning optimally.

Let's briefly explore what to review in your automation:

Evaluate if the KPIs align with category benchmarks, historical data, and campaign types. Ensure they are current and match your objectives.

➡️ Ensure all prominent campaigns, ad groups, and keywords are included in the automation. Check for any missed campaigns and confirm the timely inclusion of new ones.

➡️ Use the Active rules column to verify applied rules at each level.

➡️ Balance actions: pair decrease rules with increase rules, and pause rules with reactivate rules.

➡️ Implement the Impression Booster for competitive bidding.

➡️ When setting up Search Term management rules, cover Discovery and all broad campaigns to avoid leaving any unattended.

➡️ Cascade the rules to give a bolder boost to top-performing keywords, and milder one to mid-range performers.

➡️ Decrease mildly if the performance is slightly below satisfactory, and boldly if the performance is way outside KPIs.

Ensure that you don’t inflate the bids by unnecessarily increasing them when there’s little room for growth (e.g.: add a condition like SoV is not in range 95-100% to the increase rules).

In Impression Booster rules, use Search Popularity as an additional condition to avoid over-boosting low-volume keywords (e.g.: boost if Impressions < 10 for previous 3 days AND Search Popularity > 5).

➡️ See if you’re adjusting the bids too infrequently to be able to see any impact.

➡️ Or, on the contrary, too frequently to be able to assess the impact before making further changes.

➡️ Too small increments may slow down responding to optimal bids and industry trends, especially with low action frequency.

➡️ Too bold increments may lead to unexpected and hard-to-control spikes in performance, even more so with high action frequency.

Carefully balance action frequency with bid increase or decrease increments to align with your funnel feedback.

When evaluating ROAS or Cost per Target Action, use an appropriate date range to draw fair conclusions. If there's a delay in actions, extend the range to gather enough data and exclude the period equal to the delay (e.g., for a 3-day Install-to-event delay, use a custom range like 10 days ago to 4 days ago). If shorter ranges are needed for quicker insights, consider the data's immaturity and use milder or projective KPIs.

Multiple rules applied to the same keywords might rely on different target metrics. Avoid overlaps that could result in unintended bid adjustments. Adjust rules to focus on the primary target metric, use an additional metric only when there is insufficient data, and set clear borders. E.g.: Increase by 15% if Purchase > 0 AND Cost Per Purchase < $10 OR Purchase = 0 AND Downloads > 0 AND Cost per Download (Avg CPA) < $10.

Overlapping values in conditions of rules applied to the same keyword can double the bid changes. Ensure that cascaded rules with different thresholds do not overlap and each applies to its distinct range (e.g.: Decrease by 10% if ROAS < 60%, Decrease by 5% if ROAS in range 60-89%).

➡️ Implement stricter rules to pause non-converting, budget-wasting keywords, paired with reactivation rules for flexibility.

➡️ Use sharp bid decreases (CPA shock rule) for significant performance drops, ensuring these actions are based on meaningful deviations rather than slight KPI fluctuations. 

➡️ Label the most volatile or unpredictable keyword for sharper actions or stricter KPIs to enable more targeted management.

➡️ Be mindful of lower bid limits so that keywords don’t fall out of the auction entirely without a second chance.

➡️ Similarly, upper bid limits should rather be flexible enough to allow top-performing keywords to continue scaling without hitting a ceiling too early.

Choose your target event carefully, ensuring sufficient data is available to evaluate performance on specific metrics. Consider metrics higher in the funnel for early optimizations. If target events are volatile, combine metrics using the ‘OR’ operator—e.g., increase bids for both cheap purchases or cheap trials when purchases are low.

Setting achievable goals for conversion volume can enhance the probability of activating events further along the funnel (for example, aiming for 50 impressions instead of just 1 to improve the chances of receiving several taps).

➡️ Set up rules to automatically handle underperforming Search Terms in Discovery and keywords in Proxy campaigns. Non-converting or too expensive Seach Terms, or keywords that spend a lot without delivering conversions should be paused.

➡️ In addition to automated rules, it’s important to manually review search terms to spot irrelevant ones that may have slipped through and can waste the budget.

➡️ Search Terms showing good potential should be timely transferred to exact campaigns to assess their performance on the full funnel.

➡️ Consider transferring top-performing keywords from main campaigns into the Discovery broad match ad group, as they are likely to generate more relevant and valuable search terms.

➡️ Make sure to cover any Broad campaigns across your account other than Discovery to assess and manage matched Search Terms.