Apple Search Ads Basics: Placements, Bidding and Costs

Apple Ads (the product most people still call Apple Search Ads) is the only paid channel that lives inside the App Store itself, which is why it sits behind so many chart climbs. This guide covers the two tiers, the four placements, what a tap costs in 2025 data, how attribution works without IDFA, and where paid installs fit into the top charts.

Basic or Advanced: pick your level of control

Apple sells the product in two tiers. Basic is a cost-per-install product: you choose a target price per install, Apple's automation handles matching, there are no keywords or audience settings, and spend is capped at 10,000 US dollars per app per month across a maximum of 50 apps ¹. Advanced is cost-per-tap: you pay when someone taps, up to the maximum bid you set, there is no monthly ceiling, and you get keyword control, custom product page alignment, detailed reporting and the Apple Ads Platform API ¹.

The placement difference matters more than the pricing model. Basic ads appear only in App Store search results, while Advanced can run on the Today tab, the Search tab, in search results and on other apps' product pages ¹. Both tiers can use the AdServices Attribution API, but Basic returns no keyword-level data ¹.

Source: Apple Ads Help, accessed October 2026 ¹.

The four placements

Apple builds every ad from assets already in App Store Connect, marks it with an ad disclosure icon, and bills all four placements per tap with campaign-level daily budgets ².

Search results

This is the placement with intent behind it: the ad appears when a user types a query, and matching is driven by that query ². It is the only placement with keywords, suggested bids, ad variations built from custom product pages, and a choice between Manage Bids (you pick keywords and bids) and Maximize Conversions (Apple's auto-bidder uses Search Match to favour keywords likely to install) ². In March 2026 Apple added a second ad position in search results; existing campaigns qualify for both slots automatically, Apple decides position by relevance and bid, the two slots must show different apps, and devices need iOS or iPadOS 26.2 or later ⁸.

Search tab

Search tab ads sit at the top of the Suggested list shown when a user opens the Search tab but has not typed yet ². No keywords are involved; the destination can be the default or a custom product page with a deep link ².

Today tab

The Today tab is the App Store's front page, and this is the one placement where a custom product page is mandatory: it is both the creative source and the tap destination, with assets animating behind the app name, icon and subtitle in a colour pulled from the icon ^2,3. Apple reviews the app name, icon, subtitle and custom product page assets before the ad can run ².

Product pages

Product page ads appear at the top of the "You Might Also Like" list once a user scrolls to the bottom of another app's listing ². They run in 90 countries and regions, one fewer than the other placements, because mainland China is excluded ². The destination is always the default product page ⁸.

How the auction sets your price

Apple describes its pricing as dynamic and auction-based. Your bid is combined with advertising relevance, other advertisers' bids, any reserve price and overall user experience to pick the winning ad and its price; the winner never pays more than its maximum bid and, on second-price principles, often pays less ⁴. Relevance means how closely the ad matches the context of the query ⁴, so a relevant app with good tap history can beat a higher bid from a loosely related one.

Two metrics to memorise: tap-through rate (TTR) is taps divided by impressions, and conversion rate (CR) is installs divided by taps, reported as tap-through only or as "total" including view-through installs ⁴.

What a tap costs: 2025 benchmarks

Published benchmarks come from tool vendors, not Apple, and they disagree because they sample different advertisers and average differently. Two of the larger datasets, both covering calendar year 2025, are below.

AppTweak's figures are medians from roughly 3,500 apps and 50,000 campaigns across 38 countries, with a separate US sample of about 2,800 advertisers ⁶. SplitMetrics reports averages from its own 2025 campaign data ⁷.

Category spread is enormous. In AppTweak's US data, Sports carries a median CPT of $14.56 and CPI of $26.70, Finance sits at $4.17 CPT, Games at $2.03, and Shopping is the cheapest at $0.82 ⁶. SplitMetrics independently puts Sports at $14.41 CPT and Finance at $6.06 ⁷. Campaign intent matters as much as category: in the US, brand campaigns tap at about $2.05, generic terms at $2.75, competitor terms at $3.26, and discovery campaigns at $1.16 for apps ⁶. Outside search results, costs are expressed per thousand impressions; AppTweak's global median Today tab CPM is $3.53, with conversion rates around 7.7% for Today tab and 15% for Search tab and product page placements ⁶.

Seasonality is real: SplitMetrics saw 2025 costs peak in September and bottom out in April ⁷.

Attribution without IDFA: the AdServices framework

Apple Ads attribution does not depend on IDFA or the App Tracking Transparency prompt. Your app calls AAAttribution.attributionToken(), available since iOS 14.3, which returns a Base64 string valid for 24 hours ⁵. You or your measurement partner then POST that token as plain text to api-adservices.apple.com; a 200 response with attribution set to true means the install matched an Apple Ads engagement ⁵. Apple suggests retrying up to three times at five-second intervals, because a 404 can occur if the call lands too quickly after the token is issued ⁵.

The payload returns identifiers rather than names: orgId, campaignId, adGroupId, adId, keywordId, plus conversionType (Download, Redownload or PreOrder), claimType (Click or Impression) and supplyPlacement, which tells you which of the four placements drove the install ⁵. The tap-through window is 30 days and the view-through window is 24 hours, with tap-through taking priority ⁵. Two gotchas: Search Match campaigns return no keywordId, and campaigns with age or gender targeting return attribution false ⁵. Users who accepted the ATT prompt get a detailed payload with an engagement timestamp; everyone else gets a standard payload without one, which is why measurement partners cannot always enforce the 30-day window precisely ⁹.

How this shows up in the charts

Apple does not publish its chart formula, and nothing in the Apple Ads documentation says paid installs are weighted differently from organic ones. What the third-party research agrees on is that top charts reward recent download velocity within a country and category more than lifetime totals, with retention, ratings and crash rates acting as secondary signals ¹⁰. AppTweak's reading is that Apple Ads influence rank only indirectly: ads add installs and improve velocity, and velocity moves the chart ¹⁰.

That is why a well-funded search results campaign tends to coincide with a visible jump in a category chart, especially in smaller storefronts where the install threshold for a top-50 spot is low. It also explains the reverse: when the budget stops, the velocity signal decays and the rank follows. On AppWinners we track those day-over-day moves across storefronts, so a sudden climb that reverses a week later is often a paid burst rather than a product moment. Treat Apple Ads as a way to buy velocity, and buy it where the chart is cheapest to move.