Case study · Apple Ads · ROI
What brand search on Apple Ads really costs
A $5 cost per install on brand terms looks like the best deal in the account. A holdout suggests the true cost is $12.50, and moving part of that budget buys 25% more incremental installs.
Illustrative scenario. The company and all figures are hypothetical and show how we’d approach the problem. This isn’t a client result, and your numbers will differ.
- $5.00
- Reported brand cost per install
- $12.50
- Incremental cost per install, before
- $10.00
- Incremental cost per install, after
- +25%
- Incremental installs on same budget
All figures are hypothetical.
The situation
Imagine an app spending $10,000 a month on Apple Ads, all of it on brand keywords. The account reports 2,000 installs at $5.00 each, the lowest cost in the media plan. The question is how many of those people, already searching for the app by name, would have installed from the organic result anyway.
The test
We'd pause brand campaigns in a matched set of storefronts for a few weeks while keeping them live in the others. Then we'd compare total installs from App Store search, paid and organic combined, against the expected trend. Pausing brand can carry a real risk when competitors bid on your name, so the test should also watch how often they appear in those storefronts.
In this scenario, total installs drop by 40% of what brand campaigns had been claiming. So 800 of the 2,000 monthly installs were truly incremental, and the other 1,200 would have arrived organically.
| Attributed installs | Share incremental | Incremental installs | Spend | Incremental cost per install | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brand only (before) | 2,000 | 40% | 800 | $10,000 | $12.50 |
| Brand, lower bids (after) | 1,500 | 40% | 600 | $6,000 | $10.00 |
| Category terms (after) | 500 | 80% | 400 | $4,000 | $10.00 |
| Total after | 2,000 | 50% | 1,000 | $10,000 | $10.00 |
What would change
Brand isn't switched off. Holding the top result still protects against competitors bidding on the name, so we'd lower bids until the spend matches that defensive job. The $4,000 this frees moves to category keywords at a higher reported cost of $8.00 per install, where far more of the installs are new. Attributed installs stay at 2,000, so the dashboard looks flat, but incremental installs rise from 800 to 1,000.
The takeaway
The cheapest keyword in the account may not be the best value. Measure brand separately, and repeat the test once in a while, because the answer changes when competitors change how they bid.