In brief
ASM offers developers an early opportunity to attract users, but the article expects those gains to fade quickly. Developers will need to manage budgets, choose keywords carefully, improve download conversions, and assess acquisition costs and potential manipulation.
Today (September 29), Apple officially unveiled its ASM (App Store Search Marketing) service on its overseas website and sent email notifications to developers. This brings the App Store’s bid-based rankings announced at WWDC into operation. The consumer-facing launch is scheduled for October 5—during our National Day holiday.
However, the China App Store is not included in ASM’s initial launch, and its launch date remains unknown. Those eager to start advertising can first observe overseas ad performance and learn how to make effective use of ASM.
Campaign planning is broadly similar to bid-based rankings on search engines. Setting the campaign budget and daily budget cap is the first step in configuring paid app rankings. Promotion costs consist of two components: bidding per impression and charges for completed downloads.
Apple offers highly detailed options for customizing ad delivery. Naturally, advertisers can select keywords to bid on, but they can also create a “Negative Keywords” exclusion list to avoid keywords that may attract searches without generating conversions. Advertisers can also configure their target audience and ad schedule, rather than running ads around the clock.
Audience filtering can cover gender, age, location, and even whether a user has previously used an app from the same developer.
According to Morketing Duomeng’s analysis of ASM’s terms, Apple’s approach to auction-based advertising resembles that of search engines in China: bid-based rankings take keyword relevance into account, and ads appear alongside ordinary unpaid search results with the same user experience, although they are labeled as advertisements. There is even no brand protection: with a sufficient bid and the right keywords, developers can have their own app appear ahead of WeChat when users search for “WeChat.”
ASM therefore places greater demands on developers’ ASO skills. A suitably weighted combination of keywords becomes more important—and more valuable, since every keyword costs money. Preventing competing products from using ASM to undermine their own products will also be crucial.
Duomeng also notes that Apple’s terms already allow advertising agencies to act as intermediaries. Developers can authorize advertisers to manage their app promotion and adjust ad delivery on their behalf, while still accessing the resulting traffic data in their own dashboard. Fully transparent ROI also presents a challenge for advertisers.
What does ASM mean for entrepreneurs?
There will be a period of early gains when ASM first launches. This is undoubtedly good news for entrepreneurs in sectors caught up in “hundreds of rivals battling it out” and spending heavily to attract users. But, as with auction-based advertising such as Baidu’s paid rankings, WeChat’s Guangdiantong, or Taobao rankings, these gains will soon fade. Advertisers will then have to weigh exorbitantly priced popular keywords against long-tail keywords with a low search frequency, while discovering and testing less popular keywords will become another demanding task.
Developers also need to pay particular attention to how they sustain users’ curiosity and improve impression-to-download conversion rates throughout the journey from a paid appearance in search results to a completed download.
Although ASM has yet to launch in China, with the United States launching first, developers still need to watch for potential issues: What will customer acquisition actually cost? Will consumers resist clearly labeled advertisements? Can ASM’s system prevent malicious searches and downloads by competitors? Which is more effective: ASM or artificial chart manipulation? If an advertising agency is used, how can developers address fabricated downloads by that agency?
For questions like these, the market will eventually find a balance between costs and returns. Yet new gray-market businesses are certain to emerge before and after that balance is reached, creating new business opportunities for existing chart-manipulation teams.
http://www.hksilicon.com/articles/1188542