When you think about your budget for paid user acquisition, you want your app to be seen by many people without breaking your budget. Sensor Tower can help with that. With Sensor Tower’s Search Ads feature, you can dive deeper into Apple Search Ads to see which keywords your competitors are bidding on versus your own. Also, with Sensor Tower’s Network Analysis, you can track your competitor’s advertising trends across different ad networks. With this help document, you’ll learn how to utilize our Search Ads feature to identify high-traffic keywords to optimize your own Search Ads campaigns and how to utilize our Network Analysis feature to see a side-by-side comparison of the how much your own apps are being shown compared to your competitor’s apps.

Strategically Bidding on Search Ads

In App Intelligence’s Search Ads, you can see all the keywords that your app is currently bidding on. For each keyword, you can get insights into which apps also have a high Share of Voice (SOV) for that keyword. Below are two best practices when using Search Ads for analyzing competitors.
 

Optimize Your Own Search Ads Strategy

• Confirm you are tracking your own app.
• Click on specific, major competitors in the table below the graph.
• See which additional terms those competitors are bidding on.
• Compare the SOV for your own apps and competitor apps.

      Note: The competitor with the highest SOV will be located at the far left

• Additionally, you can highlight trends in SOV for each app by hovering over the app name in the legend of the graph.

Discover New Search Ad Terms to Bid On

• Track a competitor’s app that you are looking to be similar to.
• Sort terms by the highest traffic score to see which ones are the most searched.
• See high-traffic terms to potentially bid and check if these terms are relevant to your app.
• Make a custom tab in Keyword Rankings titled “ASA” to keep an ongoing list of Search Ad terms you want to explore later and help with organization.

With these best practices, you will be able to make data-driven decisions when considering which terms to potentially bid on for Apple Search Ads. You can also use this data to find out how your competitor is changing their Search Ads strategy and what you should do to counteract that. For example, if you are not bidding on your brand name and a competitor is bidding on it, the competitor could be taking advantage of the popularity of your brand to boost their own downloads.

Insights into Competitor Advertising

With Network Analysis in Ad Intelligence, you can discover which ad networks your competitors are advertising on, as well as see the trends in how they shift their ad strategy for each network over time. For example, if a competitor gains a surge in downloads, you can detect if that surge is due to advertising on a specific ad network.

Track Competitor’s Ad Spending by Network

• Go to Network Analysis within Advertiser Insights in Ad Intelligence.
• Enter competitor apps.
• Select all networks in the Network filter.
• Identify which networks which your competitors are heavily advertising on by viewing the Share of Voice on each graph.
• Use this data to make decisions on which networks you should advertise on and when you should advertise on them based on your app’s performance in comparison to competitors.

If you don’t have any competitors in mind at the moment, use Top Advertisers in Advertiser Insights and choose a specific category you want to see. Then, pick out the apps that are spending the most money on advertising and are relevant to your app to find potential competitors. Using Network Analysis with Search Ads gives you the data you need to change your current paid marketing campaigns and adjust them to reach the most people while staying within your budget.



For more information or if you have any questions, please email support@sensortower.com