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How the Apple Ads auction behaves — bid probing, bidding down and avoiding a competitor's "crown"

Practical Apple Ads bidding lessons — the auction is not a clean second-price auction (raising bids can add cost but no impressions), high tap-through rate lets you cut bids up to 90% and hold position, probing bids reveals a competitor's ceiling, and keywords where one rival owns ~33% share of impressions are best avoided by small budgets.

Updated 2026-10-24·4 sources·user-acquisitionapple-adsbiddingauctionimpression-sharekeywords

How the Apple Ads auction behaves

TL;DR

  • Not a clean second-price auction. Thomas Petit raised bids and got exactly the same impressions, just higher spend. Check that a bid increase actually buys volume.1
  • Bid down where you already win. On his own brand keyword (~90% share of voice), a 90% bid cut kept the same volume. Relevance, above all tap-through rate (TTR), defends position. With 20–40% TTR you can cut bids massively.12
  • Probe competitors’ bids (Adil Bilgi, Adapty, June 2026): raise your bid step by step until impressions jump. Where your cost per tap lands (e.g. $10) reveals the rival’s max bid. Sitting just below it ($9) makes every install expensive for them at no extra cost to you.34
  • Bid sets the price, relevance decides the impression. Apple scores relevance mainly on TTR and your organic rank for the keyword; a more relevant app can win the auction on a lower bid (Adapty).56
  • Avoid the “crowns” (Ariel Michaeli): skip keywords where one big app holds the highest impression share (e.g. ~33% on “photo editor”). Go after relevant long-tail terms with an even share split.78
  • Apple’s suggested bid is not a target. Ariel started at $1 max CPT where Apple suggested $4. Steve P. Young bids near target CPA instead (see Apple Ads single keyword ad groups (SKAG)).9

Details

Reading the auction. If you bid $5 and your average cost per tap is $1.51, the competitor you’re beating sits around $1.50. To win more share, keep nudging the bid. If $6, $7 and up to $10 give no extra impressions, but at $11 cost per tap jumps to ~$10, the biggest rival bids ~$10.3 Then decide whether to take the share or “make life costly” by sitting just under their ceiling. Adil frames this as the core auction game.4

Relevance beats bid (Adapty, June 2026). Mykola Martynovets saw two near-identical PDF scanner apps bid the same amount on the same keyword: one got impressions, taps and profitable ROAS, the other zero impressions. Titles and subtitles were similar; the difference was relevance (metadata strength, organic ranking, historical TTR).610 Adil Bilgi’s point: ASO is not only about free installs. It also lifts category ranking and Apple Ads relevance, which lowers what you pay. Keep testing the product page, icon and the keywords shown in screenshots (Which factors actually move App Store rankings (2026)).11

Impression share data. Apple’s share-of-voice report gives brackets (e.g. 30–40%, 90–100%) and is in the API since 2023. Petit uses it to decide bid up/down.12 It doesn’t name competitors. Three third-party tools gave him three different stories, one showing 10–20% where Apple said 80%. Trust Apple’s figure; use third parties only directionally.1213

Finding beatable keywords (Ariel’s Appfigures workflow, Jan 2026). In a competitor’s Apple Ads keyword list (PicsArt bid on ~2,500–3,000), sort by share of impressions. Where they lead, they’re outspending everyone. Outspending a leader takes heavy spend on that one keyword.7 For PicsArt, “eraser” terms (photo/background/magic/AI eraser) had good popularity and no dominant bidder. That’s both a bidding opportunity and a feature to highlight on a matching CPP.8

Scaling = raising bids. The usual reason you can’t scale is that your return target won’t let you bid higher. Better monetisation is the scaling lever (see How far does Apple Ads scale? Channel share, ceilings and what limits you).14

Disagreements / caveats

  • Petit’s bid-down finding is from 2023 and on brand terms with dominant share. On contested non-brand terms, cutting bids usually loses position.
  • “Make it expensive for competitors” invites a bidding war; it costs you nothing only while you stay below them.
  • Steve’s SKAG advice is to start bids near target CPA to buy data fast. Ariel starts at $1 to stay cheap. Both lower bids later; neither gives a formula.

See also

Footnotes

  1. Hard truth about Apple Search Ads | Thomas Petit | ASO Conference 2023 @ 24:19 — Thomas Petit ↩ ↩2

  2. Hard truth about Apple Search Ads | Thomas Petit | ASO Conference 2023 @ 25:49 — Thomas Petit ↩

  3. Turn Apple Ads into a revenue channel @ 24:59 — Adil Bilgi ↩ ↩2

  4. Turn Apple Ads into a revenue channel @ 53:14 — Adil Bilgi ↩ ↩2

  5. Turn Apple Ads into a revenue channel @ 26:49 — Adil Bilgi ↩

  6. Turn Apple Ads into a revenue channel @ 28:25 — Mykola Martynovets ↩ ↩2

  7. Copy This Strategy, It'll Blow Up Your App @ 11:05 — Ariel Michaeli ↩ ↩2

  8. Copy This Strategy, It'll Blow Up Your App @ 11:54 — Ariel Michaeli ↩ ↩2

  9. How to Set Up an Apple Search Ads Campaign the Right Way #ASA @ 03:11 — Ariel Michaeli ↩

  10. Turn Apple Ads into a revenue channel @ 29:11 — Mykola Martynovets ↩

  11. Turn Apple Ads into a revenue channel @ 30:01 — Adil Bilgi ↩

  12. Hard truth about Apple Search Ads | Thomas Petit | ASO Conference 2023 @ 19:35 — Thomas Petit ↩ ↩2

  13. Hard truth about Apple Search Ads | Thomas Petit | ASO Conference 2023 @ 20:30 — Thomas Petit ↩

  14. Hard truth about Apple Search Ads | Thomas Petit | ASO Conference 2023 @ 21:26 — Thomas Petit ↩