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Apple Ads audience settings — customer types, demographics, location and ad scheduling

What Apple Ads audience options actually do — "new users" vs the ambiguous "returning users", why age/gender targeting reaches only users with personalised ads on (Thomas Petit estimated ~5% effective reach in 2023), when location targeting and ad scheduling to fill organic-rank dips make sense, and where practitioners disagree.

Updated 2026-10-24·2 sources·user-acquisitionapple-adstargetingdemographicsaudiencecampaign-setup

Apple Ads audience settings

TL;DR

  • Customer type: choose New users to stretch budget. “All users” is for big brands buying recognition. “Users of my other apps” needs ~5,000 users in the group (Ariel Michaeli).1
  • “Returning users” is ambiguous. Apple’s docs include people who deleted the app, people who have it on another device, and possibly people who still have it. You pay for taps that can’t become new downloads.23
  • Even with “new users only”, Thomas Petit still got a fair number of returning-user downloads. Since AdServices (~2021) he stopped splitting new and returning users.4
  • Demographics apply only to users with personalised ads on. Petit estimated ~80% have them off. Add gender and OS-version limits and a gender-targeted CPP reached about 5% of people.5
  • Location (city/state) suits local or rolling-launch apps, e.g. food delivery that started in New York and Boston.6
  • Ad scheduling can fill hours when your organic rank dips, for apps with strong hour-of-day patterns (business, utilities). Ariel calls it a “tinkery” tactic.7

Details

Ariel’s narrow-first setup (Jan 2025, Appfigures app).869

  1. Advanced (not Basic), Search Results, one country per campaign. He used to bundle same-language countries but found UK keywords competing in the US.
  2. Budget: think monthly. Daily × 30 is your real spend ($10/day ≈ $300/month); set it from what you want to spend, not from competitors.
  3. No end date unless the campaign is time-bound. Ending isn’t optimising.
  4. One ad group, max CPT $1, search match off, exact keywords, negatives (see Apple Ads match types, search match and negative keywords — check your search terms).
  5. Audience: specific, new users, and narrow demographics you can justify. For Appfigures he excludes very young ages (“people thinking about their app as a business”). News apps might target older users.
  6. Default product page creatives at first. Track spend vs downloads per keyword over time.

Why Petit avoids personalisation. It doesn’t work for users who turned personalised ads off (~80% in 2023) or who run iOS older than 15.2. Each filter compounds, the CPP barely serves, and you may not know why.5

Disagreements / caveats

  • Demographic targeting: yes or no? Ariel narrows age/gender first and broadens later. Steve P. Young (June 2026) says leave demographics blank because it throttles impressions (How to set up an Apple Ads Max Conversion campaign). Petit’s reach math sides with Steve. Use demographics only if you accept a much smaller, non-representative audience.
  • Apple’s privacy defaults and the returning-user definition may have changed since 2023/2025. Re-check the current docs.
  • Ariel’s advice comes from a B2B analytics app on modest budgets; consumer apps usually need more reach.

See also

Footnotes

  1. How to Set Up an Apple Search Ads Campaign the Right Way #ASA @ 09:01 — Ariel Michaeli ↩

  2. How to Set Up an Apple Search Ads Campaign the Right Way #ASA @ 09:48 — Ariel Michaeli ↩

  3. Hard truth about Apple Search Ads | Thomas Petit | ASO Conference 2023 @ 15:28 — Thomas Petit ↩

  4. Hard truth about Apple Search Ads | Thomas Petit | ASO Conference 2023 @ 16:18 — Thomas Petit ↩

  5. Hard truth about Apple Search Ads | Thomas Petit | ASO Conference 2023 @ 14:41 — Thomas Petit ↩ ↩2

  6. How to Set Up an Apple Search Ads Campaign the Right Way #ASA @ 12:23 — Ariel Michaeli ↩ ↩2

  7. How to Set Up an Apple Search Ads Campaign the Right Way #ASA @ 13:15 — Ariel Michaeli ↩

  8. How to Set Up an Apple Search Ads Campaign the Right Way #ASA @ 00:48 — Ariel Michaeli ↩

  9. How to Set Up an Apple Search Ads Campaign the Right Way #ASA @ 01:34 — Ariel Michaeli ↩