5 Expert Questions to Ask an Apple Search Ads Professional

Looking to outsource your App Store Ads campaigns? Smart move. Outsourcing to an expert is a great way to save time -- freeing you up to focus on other important initiatives.

Whether it’s a 3rd party tool or an individual, vetting them is imperative. Even if the person comes recommended, that doesn’t mean they’re a fit for you. Beauty, as they say...is in the eye of the beholder.

Here are 5 questions you should ask your Apple Search Ads (ASA) specialist before on-boarding them:

1. What is your pricing model?

This is a given but too important not to include. Go with whatever model makes sense for your business. A monthly min + percent of spend is common. Ensures the specialist (or tool) gets paid plus incentives them to scale. A flat fee is fine. Makes budgeting easy. However, be weary of high monthly flat fees (>$1K) that are a big chunk of your total ASA spend (>30%).

2. What are you optimizing for?

The tool or service should know that optimizing for installs alone is a dangerous game to play. Chasing vanity metrics might make sense in edge-cases but profits are king. Especially in today’s climate. If you have an MMP in place, the specialist should be fawning and using that data to inform bidding and budgeting. If they don’t, they should be hounding you to get an attribution setup.

3. Do you have any references and / or case studies to share?

This is one of those, “check off the box deals”. The content in references/case studies is going to be positive and full of embellishments. However, if a specialist can’t provide one, that’s a warning sign.

4. How are you structuring campaigns and why?

The best campaign structure is one that lets you hit your performance goals today with flexibility to scale down the road. Period. The specialist should be mindful of performance goals when structuring campaigns. If the rationale for the given structure is sound, great. Watch for structure recommendations that seem trite or arbitrary.

5. What tools and technologies are you using?

If you’re using a tool already then the answer to this question is implicit. However, if you’re using person or agency, then probe to see how they’re managing campaigns. I LOVE excel but it should not be relied on for dashboarding and routine tasks. See if the specialist is using a 3rd party tool to automate processes (they should). Ideally, they’ll have a reporting dashboard that they can grant you access to. It’s 2020. Tons of tools out there that can save you time and money.

What questions do you typically ask your Apple Search Ads specialist? We’d love to hear from you.