What is Apple Ads?

Why it performs well

App Store search advertising captures intent at close to its maximum. Someone searching the App Store for a category is looking to install something in that category right now, which is a narrower and more actionable intent than almost any other addressable moment.

Conversion rates are correspondingly high, and the format is simple — the advertisement is the app listing itself, so there is no creative production and no mismatch between the ad and the destination.

The structural question

Apple restricted third-party tracking through ATT, degrading the measurement and targeting available to every other advertising platform on iOS. Apple's own advertising platform operates on first-party App Store data, which ATT does not restrict.

Whether that is a competitive advantage or a straightforward consequence of the privacy design is genuinely contested, and it is the subject of regulatory attention in several jurisdictions. For a media buyer the practical point is simpler: measurement inside Apple Ads is better than measurement of any competing iOS channel, and that asymmetry should be accounted for when comparing them rather than read as pure performance difference.

Buying it well

• Bid on your own brand term. Competitors can and do bid on it, and losing your own name is expensive.
• Use broad and exact together, with broad match as a discovery mechanism feeding exact.
• Judge on post-install outcomes, not on install cost — see retention rate.
• Remember it is demand harvesting. Store search captures intent that other activity created, so its attributed performance overstates its incremental contribution.