Share of Voice and Your Brand Protection on ASA

Search Ads Maven’s Share of Voice insights show your true App Store presence

For much of the talk about Apple Search Ads (ASA) we rarely bring impressions and less direct metrics into the conversation. ASA is a massive marketplace where Apple does its best to give every app an equal opportunity to showcase themselves. Yet, it can seem on the surface that only the apps with the highest spend have a chance to compete.

It’s true that with larger budgets, you can chase opportunities in the store easier, but there are some strategies you can employ that will make sure you can compete for your brand and category keywords. Using the percentage of taps combined with the percentage of impressions will give you a complete picture of your app’s presence in the App Store. Luckily Search Ads Maven has the tools and reports that can help you carve out and protect your brand’s space.

Brand Protection

Protecting your brand presence in the App Store is important to ensure you keep every potential install wherever it comes from. You can spend thousands marketing your app but if a rival app is able to outbid you in the store, all of that budget could be wasted. ASA is a useful tool for brand protection and ensuring that your brand is visible to potential customers who are searching for products or services related to your brand.

The first step is to bid on your own brand keywords. This may feel counterintuitive, but did you know that Apple calculates organic rank in search based on the percentage of taps for an app for a given keyword? That means a competitor can outrank you on your own brand keywords if their ads gain more taps than yours. It’s forbidden on the App Store to add your competitor’s names into your metadata, BUT there are no rules against placing bids on them, especially if there are generic terms in the app name.

So, it’s important to keep a careful eye on keywords you rank highly on, especially if they are popular terms. Continuing with this example, let’s look at two keyword searches, “dungeon “ and “dungeon rpg,” in the Search Ads Maven keyword analysis tool.

With our app, we can see that we have a 91-96% chance of being in the top ten organic rank for our category in both keyword searches. Let’s assume I have both of these keywords in my metadata as well, so both could be considered “brand” keywords for me.

The keyword “dungeon” is more popular and has fewer apps using it, but it has 29 apps making keyword bids for it, as we can see in the list below. Two apps already have an organic rank for that term and would show up in the results naturally, but it’s clear they want to rise in the rank and make the keyword more relevant. Their rank will rise when someone taps their ad or their organic rank. Odds are the apps have the keyword in their metadata and are bidding on something that could be their brand keyword.

Meanwhile, most of the apps running ads for “dungeon rpg” already have an organic rank with the term. This may signal that the bid amount for this keyword is more affordable and that they are looking to increase installs on a more affordable budget. Concurrently, “dungeon rpg” could also generate a better conversion rate for these games and thus fuel more installs per tap. You can see, though, that the highest-ranked app running an ad is only at 36, so the top 20 apps are not using this keyword in their brand campaigns.

Let’s continue in Search Ads Maven and use the ‘Search by App’ tab to examine the keywords associated with the top organic-ranked app, Dungeon RPG – Abyssal Dystopia –.

217 keywords are tied to the app. If we sort by popularity, we can see the top popular keywords and their organic rank. These are the keywords that should be the bulk of the brand campaigns for the app. Still, it’s a big question: “What is the worth of each keyword?” Some keywords are worth a higher bid amount to an app. If you are looking to carve out your brand’s section in the App Store you have to ask yourself how many installs that piece of brand will generate per month? How many taps? How effective am I? The best way to find these answers is by using Share of Voice.

Share of Voice

Share of Voice is a measurement of your app’s visibility in the app store compared to your competitors. In the context of Apple Search Ads, Share of Voice refers to the percentage of ad impressions your ads receive for a given set of search terms compared to the total number of ad impressions for those terms. Essentially, it’s a measure of your ads’ visibility on the search results page for a particular keyword or group of keywords.

Taking the above example, if there are 100 ad impressions for the keyword “dungeon rpg” and your ads receive 30 of those impressions, then your Share of Voice for that keyword is 30%. This means that your ads appear for about a third of the searches for that particular term.

Measuring your Share of Voice is important because it can indicate the success of your bids compared to your competitors. If we just use a tap-through-rate to measure our success, it won’t capture the incremental value your ad can have. If your Share of Voice is low, it may indicate that you need to adjust your bidding strategy, ad copy, or targeting to improve visibility and audience reach. Search Ads Maven has a built-in Share of Voice report that can be scheduled to provide each app’s visibility over a variable window of time.

Protecting and growing brand presence is a multistep process that consumes much of a User Acquisition manager’s time. With Search Ads Maven’s tools and reports, you can streamline your efforts to ensure you are built to win every install you deserve. By utilizing Share of Voice and effective brand management, you can use Search Ads Maven to ensure your brand protection and ensure visibility to potential customers searching for products or services related to your brand.

For a free consultation or Search Ads Maven demo with one of our Apple Search Ads experts, visit https://www.searchadsmaven.com/request-a-demo/.