Test Today tab and product page ads without muddying your search results
Apple Search Ads now sells Today tab and product page placements. Here is how to fund them as a contained test so they do not distort the search campaigns you already trust.
Apple added two placements to Apple Search Ads in the fall of 2022: the Today tab and product pages. Both sit outside the intent-driven world of search, which is exactly why they are easy to misjudge. If you switch them on inside an account that already runs well, you will blend two very different kinds of traffic into one set of numbers and lose the ability to say which one moved your cost per install.
Our advice is to treat them as an experiment with its own budget, its own reporting window and its own success rule, set before the first tap.
Know what each placement actually is
A Today tab ad appears on the App Store's front page. It is built from a custom product page in App Store Connect, which needs at least four portrait or five landscape assets. The page is approved in App Store Connect first and then reviewed again by Apple Search Ads, and the campaign itself is created in Apple Search Ads Advanced. According to Marin Software's summary of the creative rules, promotional text is limited to 50 characters, screenshots must fill at least two-thirds of the asset, and pricing, offers and ranking claims are not allowed.
A product page ad shows at the top of the "You Might Also Like" list on relevant product pages. It is assembled from metadata you already have (app name, icon and subtitle), and you can run it across all relevant categories or narrow it to selected ones.
Neither placement is triggered by a query. Nobody typed a keyword to see them, so you should not expect search-style conversion rates, and you should not judge them against your brand or category keywords.
Give each placement its own campaign and budget
The cleanest way to avoid contamination is structural. Create the Today tab and product page campaigns separately from your search campaigns, with daily budgets that cannot borrow from anything else. Pick a number you can lose without changing your quarterly plan. Suppose a subscription app spends $30,000 a month on search; a $3,000 test budget per new placement is enough to learn something and small enough that a bad result does not change your blended numbers in any meaningful way.
Keep the search campaigns frozen while the test runs. That means no bid overhauls, no new keyword sets and no Search Match toggles in the same weeks. If you change both sides at once, any shift in installs has two possible explanations and you cannot separate them.
Decide what a good result looks like before you launch
Write the decision rule down first. For example: "We continue if cost per install is within 1.5 times our search average and the users retain or convert to paying at a comparable rate over the first week." The exact multiple is yours to choose, but the point is to have one. Awareness-style placements tend to produce cheaper taps and weaker downstream behavior, and without a rule you will be tempted to rationalize whichever number looks best.
Compare on the metric that matters to your business, not on tap-through rate. Singular's analysis of the new placements notes that more placements add management complexity and may dilute tap-through and conversion rates, so a lower rate by itself is not a verdict. Look at cost per install and, more importantly, cost per downstream event such as a trial start or purchase.
Watch for the two ways search gets muddied
The first is attribution. Singular reports that the Apple Search Ads Attribution API did not change with the new placements, so confirm in your own reporting what the attribution data returns for installs from these placements before you build any dashboard around keyword-level fields. If your measurement partner groups everything under "Apple Search Ads", split the new campaigns out manually by campaign name.
The second is halo. A Today tab impression can prompt someone to search for your app by name later, which would inflate brand search results and flatter the search campaign. To check, track brand keyword taps and installs by week during the test and compare them with the weeks before. A rise is worth noting, but treat it as a hypothesis, not proof. Brand search also moves with seasonality, press and other channels, so do not credit it entirely to a new placement.
Creative constraints shape what you can learn
Singular points out that only one Today tab ad can run at a time and that each new creative needs fresh approval, so you cannot run a fast side-by-side creative test here the way you can on other networks. Plan for sequential tests, change one thing per round, and leave each version running long enough to collect a meaningful number of taps. If you have never tested the custom product page in search results, do that first, since the same page will serve as the tap destination.
Product page ads have the opposite problem. Because they appear near the bottom of other apps' pages, competitors can show up in the same list, and the audience is passive. Start with a narrow category selection rather than all relevant categories, and widen only if the early results hold.
A simple sequence
- Finish and approve one strong custom product page for the Today tab.
- Launch the Today tab campaign with a capped budget and a four-week window, leaving search untouched.
- Launch the product page campaign separately, restricted to one or two categories.
- Review weekly against the written rule, including brand search as a halo check.
- After four weeks, keep, scale or stop each placement on its own merits.
The takeaway is that these placements deserve a fair test, not a quick verdict, and a fair test requires isolating them from the campaigns that already pay your bills.