The popularity of SearchAds as a paid growth alternative has been increasing. Now that Apple Search Ads are available in 59 countries and counting, it’s becoming more and more competitive each day. To make your life easier for the paid growth channel as well, we have revamped our SearchAds Intelligence tool!
Discover the Top Advertisers of Search Ads
As you know, you could already see the paid keywords of an app or apps running ads for a specific keyword via Search by App and Search by Keyword tabs respectively. Now we have added another cool feature to browse the apps dealing with SearchAds: SearchAds Top Advertisers. With this new feature, you will be able to see the top apps running search ads and analyze the ASA strategy of each app.
Curious to know more about the penetration rates of Search Ads based on categories and countries? Read our analysis here.
SearchAds Visibility Scores are Live!
Just like the visibility score, we have for ASO, now you can also see the SearchAds visibility scores for all apps running search ads. Wondering how we come up with those scores? We simply find out the number of keywords an app is running ads and which are those specific keywords. Then, we combine them with the search volumes and the number of impressions. The results are put on a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 indicating the highest visibility.
To exemplify the best use case of these scores, suppose you have an app in the Photo & Video category. Let’s be more specific and say that your app is mainly about editing videos. You’d like to find out which mobile app competitors are running search ads in the U.S. and the keywords that they have the highest impression share.
First, let’s take a look at SearchAds Top Advertisers page to see who is dominating the race.
The apps in the above screenshot are ordered based on their SearchAds visibility score. To get more insights about the strategies of these apps, you can check the table below this graph:
This table shows additional data such as the total paid keywords, category ranking, overall ranking, and category name for each app in the graph. Magisto Video Editor seems to be the most powerful competitor in SearchAds as it has a visibility score of 81, which can be considered quite good.
There are actually more interesting insights in this table. For example, you see some apps that are running ads on more than 20K words but getting a lower score than Magisto. Were you thinking that the more keywords you run ads on, the better your score will be? Well… It turns out that quality beats quantity here 🙂 It’s not the number of keywords but which keywords you choose is what makes the difference.
Since we mentioned “quality keywords”, let us give you a quick reminder: Without a proper ASO strategy and a high-quality keyword list, it would be too optimistic to expect good results from SearchAds. You always need to go back and take a look at the most download bringing keywords for organic search and build your ASA strategy accordingly. Remember that the ASO Report tool of MobileAction has been designed for you to spot those keywords easily.
Have no idea about it? Read our blog post to learn more about ASO Report.
As we found out that Magisto is the app to look into, let’s take a more detailed look at its keyword strategy. To navigate easily between tabs, just click on Magisto’s icon on the table or in the graph. It will directly take you to Search by App tab where Magisto is the selected app.
On the Search by App tab, you’ll see that Magisto runs ads in 37 countries and on more than 17K words! Should you examine each and every word? Not really… unless you’re very bored and have nothing to do for the next 10 years. Let’s just use the filters to find out quickly what you need: the highest performing keywords that you can use in your ASA strategy.
In the above screenshot, we set the impression share as “greater than 20” and the popularity as “greater than 50” to see the best keywords. We have also sorted the results based on the impression shares. If you click on “Track” for any keyword, you’ll see it on your Tracking List to use in your ASO strategy.
Wish to use these keywords for ASA? The same dashboard is coming up to the SearchAds.com so you’ll be able to conduct the same analysis there and run ads on the keywords you like!
Magisto’s Keyword Strategy
Realized anything interesting above? Magisto seems to be applying a mixed strategy by putting its bets on both generic keywords such as “video editor” and brand keywords such as “alight motion”, a competitor of Magisto. Since Alight Motion has an Android app only, Magisto is leveraging Alight Motion’s absence in the App Store and benefits from its competitor’s brand recognition. It’s actually a great strategy because Alight Motion’s target audience would be very similar to Magisto’s. So Magisto would be targeting users who are looking for an app with similar features and therefore most likely to download its app as Alight Motion doesn’t exist in the App Store. Smart, eh? 🙂
Let’s check out another keyword on the list – say “instagram video downloader” and see who else is running ads on it:
As our summary board on Search by Keyword tab says, this keyword is targeted by 25 apps with a popularity score of 56. We sorted the apps from lowest impression to the highest. See the different categories? Just because a keyword is about video download doesn’t necessarily mean that only apps in the Photo & Video category should target it. The competition is much more fierce than that.
Lastly, let’s see another keyword for the brand name example, “splice”:
Splice has an iOS App unlike Alight Motion and is doing pretty well in the organic keyword rankings for its brand name. But, it turns out that things didn’t go well on the paid side. You know how it feels when you search your company’s name in Google but the competitor’s name comes first, right? Well… this must be kind of the same feeling 🙂 So, seems like Splice needs to focus more on Search Ads to beat Magisto and get its crown back.
To sum up, you can find data in 3 different forms in SearchAds Intelligence:
- Search by App: To find Search Ads keywords of an app
- Search by Keyword: To find apps running ads for a particular keyword
- Search Ads Top Advertisers (new): To find the top Search Ads Advertisers
The new update will enable you to see the SearchAds visibility scores. So you’ll be able to decide which apps are more successful in their ASA strategy. You can also get great insights into all the aspects of Search Ads. And who knows? You may even find some useful keywords to target organically as well.
Can’t wait to try it? Go to SearchAds Intelligence feature and play around with it and let us know what you think in the comments.
Haven’t tried SearchAds Intelligence yet? Schedule a demo with us today!
