TV Cable-Cutting Leader Slashes Brand Term CPT 74% on Apple Search Ads

Vertical: Entertainment

Takeaways

74%
Reduction in CPT
for primary brand term

79%
Reduction in CPG
for in-app orders

Optimized
Brand protection
with automation

Customer

An app-based TV service that enables millions of monthly active users to stream live television and on-demand content over the internet. Users can watch live shows wherever they are, at home or on the go, across mobile devices, connected TVs, and other platforms.

Challenge

The customer was investing heavily to protect its brand terms on Apple Search Ads from being conquested by competitors. However, maintaining control over their share of voice came at a high price whenever competitors significantly elevated their keyword bid minimums on those terms. In one peak season, the team’s average cost per tap (CPT) jumped 900% on their primary brand term. This in turn shot up their cost per goal (CPG) for their in-app order event tenfold. They wanted to protect their brand—but needed to gain better control over the runaway costs of doing so.

Solution

The customer linked up with Search Ads Maven, the Apple Search Ads campaign management platform. Unpacking their brand protection goals with our team, they learned how the platform’s Automation Studio could be leveraged to optimize their share of voice with streamlined efficiency. The Search Ads Maven team helped them implement an automation strategy that:

Monitored daily impression share across their brand terms
Automatically increased/decreased keyword bids to maintain target impression share at the optimal cost
Employed Strategic Losing™ to avoid runaway costs due to competitive conquesting

What is Strategic Losing?

Strategic Losing™ is a built-in, proprietary automation template on Search Ads Maven that retreats from a winning bid position when the cost is too high—allowing a competitor to win temporarily at great expense, quickly exhausting their budget, forcing them out of bidding, and returning the CPT to reasonable levels.

Impact

Within a week, the automation strategy brought the CPT on the customer’s key brand term down 74%, which in turn reduced their CPG on their in-app order event by 79%. Moreover, with the competitor’s daily budget quickly exhausted through Strategic Losing, no impression share was lost. The customer plans to maintain this automation strategy in always-on mode based on their rules and preferences to balance impression share, efficiency, and volume continuously.

The team is now realizing such seamlessly consistent savings on their brand term campaigns that they’re able to focus new spend and develop new strategies for non-brand campaigns as well as their own efforts for competitive conquesting.

”The cost of brand protection on Apple Search Ads was nearing a breaking point for us. Search Ads Maven has flipped the script—allowing us to maintain our share of voice at a level of spend efficiency we never thought possible.
Senior Paid Search Manager