Best Apple Ads tools for app marketers: Boost visibility and ROAS

Apple’s App Store connects businesses with a massive audience of potential users – over 650 million people each week. To tap into this opportunity, app marketers rely on Apple Ads, Apple’s advertising platform for promoting apps within the App Store. 

Apple Search Ads helps ensure your app receives the attention it deserves, matching your app to relevant users at every opportunity. 

According to MobileAction’s 2025 Apple Ads Benchmark Report, the average tap-through rate (TTR) for App Store ads reached an all-time high of 9.07% in 2024, reflecting increasing ad relevance and improved user engagement.

This change suggests that Apple Search Ads can drive high-intent traffic and quality installs for app marketers, making it a crucial channel for user acquisition and retention.

However, with this growing opportunity comes increasing competition. Running successful campaigns on Apple Ads Advanced requires careful keyword targeting, bid management, and continuous optimization. 

The native Apple Ads interface provides basic functionality for creating campaigns and viewing performance, but many app marketers find that scaling performance and maintaining efficiency become challenging without additional support. This is where specialized Apple Ads tools come into play. 

The best Apple Ads tools offer advanced capabilities to help marketers maximize returns from Apple Search Ads, surpassing what Apple’s default platform provides. 

They offer deeper analytics, automation features, and optimization strategies that can significantly enhance campaign performance and save precious time for user acquisition teams. 

Challenges in managing Apple Ads campaigns without the right tools

Managing Apple Search Ads manually or with the basic tools can be time-consuming and cumbersome. 

App marketing teams often encounter several pain points when they lack an advanced campaign management platform:

• Limited visibility into user quality: Apple’s dashboard focuses on taps and installs, but provides no direct way to analyze post-install metrics (like in-app conversions or revenue) alongside ad data. This makes it challenging to obtain a comprehensive picture of user acquisition.
• Isolated perspective: You can only see your own campaign performance in Apple’s UI, with no insight into competitors’ keywords or strategies. There’s no built-in competitive benchmarking to understand how you stack up or discover new keyword opportunities.
• Cumbersome keyword management: Making changes to keywords or bids often requires doing them one at a time. The native platform lacks bulk editing capabilities, meaning only one keyword action can be performed at a time, and tedious manual updates are required for large campaigns.
• No external integration: Apple Ads alone doesn’t integrate with mobile measurement partners (MMPs) or attribution tools, preventing you from connecting ad spend to down-funnel events. Measurement and attribution solution integration is absent, so you must manually reconcile data from different sources.
• Manual optimizations and errors: Without automation, marketers must manually adjust bids, pause ads, and reallocate budgets daily. This manual approach is labor-intensive and prone to errors, especially as campaigns scale.
• Rigid reporting interface: The default interface has limited options for customizing views or combining data. There’s no way to create custom columns or saved filters tailored to your KPIs, making analysis less efficient.
• Organic and paid silos: Perhaps most importantly, Apple Search Ads operates separately from App Store Optimization (ASO), which involves organic visibility efforts. Without a specialized tool, it’s difficult to leverage organic and paid campaigns together for synergy – for example, using ASO insights to inform Apple Ads strategy, or vice versa.

All these challenges mean that running Apple Ads “the old way” can result in wasted spend, missed opportunities, and an overworked UA team. 

Best Apple Search Ads tools to boost visibility

When it comes to Apple Ads tools, MobileAction stands out as the best-in-class solution for app marketers. MobileAction is an official Apple Ads Partner and has emerged as a leading platform for managing Apple Search Ads campaigns. 

It’s trusted by over 5,000 mobile app and game companies worldwide for their user acquisition needs. 

MobileAction’s Apple Ads suite is essentially an all-in-one platform that equips user acquisition and growth teams with everything they need to automate, optimize, and monitor their Apple Search Ads campaigns in one place. 

By transforming the time-consuming, error-prone manual processes into streamlined, data-driven workflows, MobileAction enables marketers to focus on strategy rather than tedious tasks.

MobileAction provides task automation, bid optimization, budget allocation, campaign forecasting, and competitor insights – plus combined paid and organic solutions – to help app marketers achieve their user acquisition goals. 

In other words, it hits all the key criteria that define the best Apple Ads tool:

• Comprehensive Campaign Management 

MobileAction enables you to manage your entire Apple Search Ads funnel through a single, unified dashboard, eliminating the need to juggle multiple accounts or spreadsheets. You can track every metric and manage every element of your campaigns in one place, ensuring zero errors and full visibility into performance.

• Automation & Smart Optimization 

The platform takes over the repetitive, time-consuming tasks that would otherwise drain your team’s resources. Its Automations engine (with 20+ ready-made templates) can automatically pause underperforming keywords, adjust bids based on performance thresholds, and optimize budgets across ad groups – all according to rules you set. 

The Smart Bidding feature utilizes AI-driven algorithms to optimize your bids in real-time, ensuring you’re bidding the right amount on the right keywords without overspending. These automation capabilities not only save time but also react more quickly than manual management, keeping campaigns optimized and profitable.

• Advanced Keyword Discovery & ASO Integration 

A successful Apple Ads strategy hinges on targeting the right keywords. MobileAction’s tools excel in keyword intelligence. Keyword Advisor helps uncover high-intent keywords you may be missing, including competitor terms and niche long-tail keywords. 

MobileAction combines Apple Search Ads data and App Store Optimization (ASO) insights into a single platform. This means you can identify organic keywords that convert well and seamlessly add them to your paid campaigns, or monitor how paid campaigns are boosting your organic rankings. 

By combining organic and paid data, marketers can leverage synergies that wouldn’t be apparent in siloed tools.

• Budget Allocation & Campaign Optimization

Efficiently allocating budget is critical to maximizing ROI, especially as you scale campaigns. MobileAction includes intelligent Budget Allocation tools that analyze your campaign portfolio and automatically direct spend to the highest-potential campaigns and keywords. 

It can forecast campaign outcomes and recommend optimal daily budgets, helping you avoid both underspending and overspending on any given campaign. 

In practice, this means your budget is continuously optimized to deliver the best results, without requiring constant manual tweaks. In fact, many advertisers have seen impressive performance gains – for example, some have reported a 55% decrease in the cost per acquisition goal within the first six months of using MobileAction’s Apple Ads solution.

• Deep Insights & Competitive Intelligence 

MobileAction provides far richer analytics and reporting than the basic Apple Ads dashboard. You get easy-to-understand insights through integrations with MMPs (like AppsFlyer, Adjust, etc.), so you can quickly see which campaigns or keywords are not just driving installs, but also driving valuable post-install actions (purchases, subscriptions, etc.). 

The platform’s Insights Center provides detailed market trends and benchmarks, enabling you to measure your performance against industry standards and inform your strategy with data rather than guesswork. Moreover, MobileAction provides a significant competitive advantage by incorporating mobile market intelligence features. Its Competition Analysis suite shows you how you stack up against competitors across all four Apple Ads placements (Search results, Search tab, Today tab, and Product pages). 

You can see which apps are bidding on certain keywords, analyze competitors’ ad creatives and custom product pages, and identify gaps in their strategy that you can capitalize on. These competitive insights empower you to stay one step ahead in the App Store advertising game

In short, MobileAction addresses all the major needs of Apple Search Ads marketers in one solution. It’s not just adding one or two features on top of Apple’s basic tools – it’s a holistic platform that covers campaign creation, optimization, analytics, and strategy. 

By using MobileAction, app marketers can save time, stay organized, and elevate their campaigns to the next level.

To sum up

Apple Search Ads is a powerful channel for reaching high-intent users, but to truly excel and get the best results, app marketers need more than the basics. MobileAction provides the ultimate Apple Ads toolset – a professional, data-driven platform that simplifies campaign management and supercharges performance. 

By addressing the common challenges of Apple Ads and offering advanced features like automation, smart bidding, keyword intelligence, and competitor insights, MobileAction empowers UA managers to achieve greater scale, efficiency, and ROI from their campaigns. 

For app marketers and mobile growth professionals seeking to stay ahead of the competition, MobileAction is undoubtedly the best Apple Ads tool to enhance your App Store campaigns. Ready to scale on Apple Ads? Book a demo today!