Apple Search Ads: Holiday Marketing Campaigns

The holiday season brings a wealth of new opportunities for app marketing. As people prepare for and enjoy the festive months, there's a surge in searches, downloads, and in-app revenue. It’s the perfect time to capitalize on Apple Search Ads to maximize your app’s visibility and boost user acquisition.

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When Launch Holiday Marketing Campaigns?

When it comes to holiday marketing, timing is crucial. Beyond the major holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving, think about days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or even the launch of a popular TV series. These events can trigger spikes in app searches and downloads. Users tend to follow predictable, cyclical behaviors during these times, and aligning your marketing efforts with these patterns can make a significant difference.

To truly capitalize on this opportunity, your holiday user acquisition strategy needs to be robust and multifaceted. It should include not only Apple Search Ads (ASA) but also holiday-themed emails, social media campaigns, chatbots, and timely notifications.

It’s essential to ensure that your app’s internal content—whether it’s special holiday events, in-app purchase bundles, or themed features—aligns with your external advertising. Without this harmony, your marketing efforts might fall flat, damaging brand trust and losing potential subscribers.

In this article, we’ll focus on how to use Apple Search Ads to complement your overall holiday marketing strategy, ensuring this season is your most successful yet.

Why You Need Apple Search Ads for Holiday App Marketing Campaigns?

Holiday marketing campaigns allow you to leverage seasonal traffic trends and attract new users. Whether it's a Christmas or Halloween-themed app update, ASA can help your app maintain its competitive edge and core rankings. Here’s why Apple Search Ads should be a key part of your holiday strategy:

Better Discoverability

Apple Search Ads can significantly enhance your app’s visibility by getting it featured on the App Store’s “Browse/Explore” pages. With the introduction of new ASA placements in the “Today” and “Search” tabs, it’s easier than ever to get your app noticed.

Higher Conversion Rates

Implementing seasonal Apple Search Ads campaigns can boost your store listing’s conversion rates, especially when you follow ASA best practices.

Increased Engagement and Re-engagement

Limited-time marketing campaigns create a sense of urgency, encouraging users to engage with your app before the offer ends.

Up-to-Date App Perception

Seasonal updates show users that your app is current and evolving, increasing their curiosity and driving reinstallations. On average, this can lead to a 15-30% increase in conversion rates.

Now that you understand the benefits of using Apple Search Ads in your holiday marketing strategy, let’s dive into some practical tips to help you get started.

Tip 1. Do not Overspend on Apple Search Ads Holiday Marketing Campaigns

During the holiday season it’s extremely important to plan and allocate your Apple Search Ads budgets. You need to think about timing for each event and prioritize to ensure your budget covers the entire period.

The most important advice here is to allocate your marketing budgets wisely. It is true that, during the holiday season, it is much more difficult to compete for keywords. Big companies with high budgets usually don’t really care about the ROAS price or ROI; they just want visibility and try to do everything that they can to achieve this.

If your product is not related to the upcoming events or you don’t have a budget specifically for the holidays, it’s a good idea to double check if it is worth it. Maybe you can spend this money at the end of the season when the competition is less intense. For example, December is the most expensive month, because of the high bids from companies that don’t pay attention to ROI, but in January these companies are more relaxed, so this is a good chance to run highly targeted campaigns and conduct profitable user acquisition.

Tip 2. Optimize Apple Search Ads Custom Product Pages for Each Holiday Campaign

Custom product pages allow you to create different versions of App Store product pages and can be a good complement to your holiday ad creatives. Usually they showcase certain features of the app in each version and share them via unique URLs. Optimization of custom product pages during the holiday season can boost both IPM and conversion rates. To achieve the maximum effects from them, it’s best to leverage it before the holiday season begins.

Try to create a different custom product page for each season or holiday. Again – testing is a must. You need to test several different custom product pages to see which one performs best for your ad group. Once you find the best performing customer product page, you can use it across all the campaigns. Don’t forget to refresh creatives on your product pages to create a sense of newness for your users and thus increase conversions. It’s sufficient to refresh product pages once per month.

To understand the whole picture of your custom product pages’ performance, you need to attribute this data to your analytics platform. For example, Qonversion allows you to automatically collect Apple Search Ads attribution data for each campaign so you can create ad groups with identical settings but different CPPs. This lets you conduct A/B tests to determine which custom pages perform better. If a particular ad group with a unique CPP generates more installs, trials, and revenue, it may be beneficial to focus on it.

It’s a good idea to base the product page on your best-performing holiday ad creative. This way your campaign will have a more focused message and flow that will likely bring in new installs.

As for recommendations, you need to have at least 4 screenshots for each CPP. Highlight important features in the captions and make them readable and visible. Draw the user’s attention to the special events for the holiday season using descriptive action verbs. Don’t go overboard with the visuals; it should be concise and legible.

Prepare your holiday logo

Pay attention to your logo during the holiday seasons. Adjusting it to a holiday or seasonal event can increase your conversion rate.

Create holiday-themed screenshots

Adjusting your app screenshots to a holiday or season might make users more likely to explore your app. Such screenshots can show your potential users that you update your app regularly, too.

Tip 3. Use Relevant Keywords for Each Apple Search Ads Holiday Marketing Campaign

It’s well known that Apple’s algorithms won’t index apps for search terms specific to the holidays on their own. The more unique the season or holiday is, the more complicated it is to identify relevant keywords for your campaign. Again, you need to analyze your audience before the season starts to identify which keywords perform best. Try to do thorough custom research so that, by the time the season starts, you can predict what text query your user will search for a seasonal update.

During the holiday season, it’s better to use the Discovery campaign, as these campaigns will help you to broaden your audience and mine relevant holiday keywords. Use Search Match and Broad Match within the campaign and create two ad groups: an ad group that has Search Match enabled but no keywords and an ad group that has Search Match disabled but has top-performing keywords in broad match.

Consider adding relevant specific keywords for the particular holiday or season to your existing category-themed ad group. Such keywords increase your coverage and help you to attract new users. You may also want to create separate ad groups for Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas, or other holidays and seasonal events.

Tip 4. Test Your Creatives – Lots and Lots of Ad Creatives

Although creatives aren’t directly related to your Apple Search Ads holiday campaign, there are a lot of benefits of using holiday ad creatives. They help you increase your click-through rates and conversion rates and improve your brand awareness and engagement. They are easily shareable, and people love to engage with them.

Testing ad creatives is a must for seasonal strategy. Testing lots of creatives and identifying what works best can help you outmaneuver your competitors, because usually a lot of people don’t iterate with creatives much and concentrate only on screenshots. We’re not saying that screenshots are not important here, but the synergetic effect from both of them will be most valuable.

While performing A/B creative testing, remember that:

• Each seasonal event needs to have sample hypotheses that require lots of creatives to test.

• Hypotheses need to be strong, clear, and achievable

• Don’t try to test more than one hypothesis at once, as results will mislead you and you may lose your traffic.

• Follow competitor research and user opinions.

Testing and identifying the best working creatives is not enough. You need to switch creatives, because customers tend to get bored of the images they see, especially if you’re targeting a really niche target audience with your ads. On-time creatives changes can save your conversions.

Changing creatives once per month is a good baseline, but during holiday season it might be a good idea to do it more often. For example, once in two or three weeks may be effective. This doesn’t have to be a complete makeover; simple changes to the background color, headings, lead layout, or text sizes can be sufficient. Keep in mind that holiday-themed creatives sometimes continue to perform well even after the holidays.

General Recommendations for Holiday Marketing Campaigns Creatives

Ensure you have enough resources for creating holiday-themed creatives. There’s not much time and it requires a good amount of work to create a new batch.

• Your creatives should evoke emotions in users. Utilizing emotions in general is a good idea for everything, not only for holiday creatives, but during the holiday times people usually feel nostalgic and emotions can play a particularly large role. Moreover, it’s good to use real footage with real people to emphasize emotions, because such creatives increase conversions.

• Pay attention to the details. Even small things, like changing typical items for holiday elements, can have good results. You can, for example, switch a sword to a Christmas tree, or some other element to a pumpkin. Don’t forget about pointers and buttons: you can turn pointers into Santa’s hand, a witch’s broom, or a New Year’s cracker.

It’s hard to know which creatives perform better without analytics. Qonversion recently added SIngular attribution to help you gain a comprehensive ad creatives analytics so you can measure performances and make the best advertising decisions. Combining the dataset from Singular and Qonversion gives you instant insight into how much subscription revenue you earn from each ad creative as well as the ROAS in one dashboard. These allow you to see how often you need to change your creatives, which of them you should leave, and which of them to stop.

Tip 5. Track Your Apple Search Ads Holiday Marketing Campaigns Performance

Holiday or seasonal marketing can bring a lot of value to your app promotion. Moreover, the holiday season is a great time to test new Apple Search Ads placements such as the Search tab, Today tab, and Product pages to increase the number of impressions.

To make sure that your Apple Search Ads campaigns reach their true potential, you need to have enough data and comprehensive analytics. The main problem with the Apple Search Ads dashboard is that it does not include any in-app data or crucial revenue metrics, like post-install events, that are essential for subscription apps. You only have access to impressions, installs, CPA, conversion rates, tap-through rates, and new downloads. These are not enough to ensure that your ASA-campaign is fully effective, though.

To have a full picture of your ASA holiday/seasonal campaign performance you need to track revenue from a cohort of users at a campaign and keyword level. That is the only way to make effective marketing decisions, maximize your ROI, and run effective advertising campaigns.

A successful holiday user acquisition campaign requires tools that will accurately measure advertising performance. For example, Qonversion Apple Search Ads attribution provides you with the tools to monitor important metrics for your subscription-based apps, scale your campaigns, and maximize your profits. Learn more on how the Intervals Fitness App used Qonversion’s Apple Search Ads Dashboard to double their in-app subscription revenue.

We wish you happy and profitable holidays and if you have any questions or ideas about Apple Search Ads, feel free to reach out to us!