Since others in the thread are discussing a lack of "targeting" and such, see also "Search Ads Advanced" [0], which allows you to "refine your audience" -- "by gender, age, and show your ads only to devices located in specific geographic areas."
Also if DuckDuckGo can target you based on what you're searching there and then, is that not targeting? It's not stalk based targeted advertising, but you're still an ideal target since they're showing you something you're searching for, in some cases it might not be fully relevant to what you wanted, but close enough to be shown (not sure how highly relevant DuckDuckGo ads become relative to search terms).
Geographic location makes sense. If you have an application that is quite local it might make sense to not display ads elsewhere. Removing it from other stores is not really a solution because there might be tourists who would still like to be able to get it. Gender makes sense too because let's face it, there are lot of applications that are specially targeted at women or men.
Location makes sense, that's what I meant. Gender is too private, is represented naively, and exposing it to advertisers results, in my (trans) experience, in actively unpleasant ads.
Oh, and from my experience with things like YT flipping the gender bit on me regularly: you may be cis, but you should be concerned too. The way ads are targeted based on gender is _not_ benign at all.
I see. I kind of supposed that one could choose to not expose the gender to Apple and then the ads could not use this. Actually I do not know where do they get this information from. If they try to infer it then it is of course a problem.
How long before we see a post that people are being fooled into installing some copycat apps which are nearly identical to original apps but are getting promoted by Search Ad Basics?
How long? You can already do this with the existing search ads.
By promoting your app through search ads you are greatly increasing your chances of getting detected by app review or the company you are cloning very quickly. Meaning you are going to get pulled pretty fast, and are still paying for it. I don't see how the economics would work out.
Tt is more used for competitor apps stealing the top search result for things they aren't ranked highly for.
Maybe 5 years ago, but I don't think they have any quality bar now. For every decent quality game on the app store there are dozens of terrible clones: https://youtu.be/yU6WC4dpaHM?t=12s
It's incredible that on one hand, they can pull up competent and dedicated developers for a minor transgression, but then allow something as ugly and misleading as the above example.
I know it first hand. Our app has an auto-renewing subscription, and they are nitpicking every little detail on it (Not letting us say "Free Trial" even though it is literally a free trial for a week, with the subscription price/renewal stated clearly on the same view.) Yet an app like iHeartRadio has a "Free Trial" button with no visible terms, no visible price, and no renewal frequency listed gets a pass.
Plus they let those scam VPN apps through with a "Free Trial" that immediately charges you $99, and they stayed at the top of the grossing charts for days. It is insanely frustrating. The app review process at Apple is a joke now, honestly. I'm pretty sure it has been outsourced to some third party, we always get through on appeal, but why should a year old app with a 4.6 star rating with thousands of reviews have to appeal every single update submission.
Sorry for the rant, just dealing with this exact problem as we speak.
The App Store ads are a disgrace. 100% of my older relatives get fooled and install the first app that comes up in App Store when searching for something.
The only thing that gives Apple an edge over Google/Amazon is that they are not an ads company or retail shop.
Such a pity seeing them to want to move into that space.
Those ads are probably to pay the news companies, not Apple. They probably don’t get any money from Apple so they need some revenue to justify licensing their content for Apple news.
I think app store is fair game, if the adds are well done they can actually be useful. Overcast adverts prove this.
I think they need to invest heavily in making it very very difficult (impossible?) for copy cat type apps to appear in search and making sure that adverts are clearly marked as adverts... It will just turn into a shit show otherwise...
I've never seen the office nagging. I've never seen a single ad. Not from first boot that I can recall. There are no ads on my lock screen, there are no ads on my start menu.
The only things I can think of, is that I immediately turned off as many bs anti-privacy type settings as possible when I initially set up the system. I also use glasswire and restrict most things that try to go out without my permission (or anything I don't want to allow in general).
When I fire up my start-menu, I've got it defaulted to pinned tiles, there doesn't even appear to be space for an ad that might be getting blocked on there. There are no ads in the all apps section either.
If you had Windows Spotlight on (like the changing background image for lockscreen), they used to show occasional ads there. It could be they removed that.
I also haven't seem them, but I think they were removed by this tool: https://www.winprivacy.de/english-home/ (PLEASE, please check before downloading, I installed it a year ago or more, back then it was ok, I can't guarantee how it's now).
This disables a lot of tracking, but I assume, also disables ads. (I've seen only 1 ad, and that was for the OneDrive in explorer).
Are those dependent on the OEM? My start menu never had any of that from the first setup. Neither of those are on my system anywhere. The only really super annoying thing on my system has been cortana, being unable to fully remove it.
You are being disingenuous because you are a power user who has admitted to carefully reviewing your settings and running a third party cleaner, but you are acting like you are the kind of standard user we are talking about.
App Store search is a disgrace. At least the apps in ads are still being developed. Google search has ads taking up the whole page preventing you from seeing actually good results
I hate to whine but I hope ads are clearly labeled as ads, and also that this doesn't replace their efforts to make the app store and app discovery more friendly.
They’re very clearly labeled as ads, and as far as I can tell there’s only like one at the top usually, not taking up all the screen space, and has a different background color even.
I think many companies can run their ads as pay for performance. eBay's ads are a fixed cost of the product sale - the higher you set it, the more often your ad shows but you only pay if it leads to a sale.
Platforms simply have so much data and scale they can do a much better job of targeting than their customers can. It's not efficient for lots of marketers to test out lots of ads, carefully track conversions, and decide what to spend on. Just let the platform maximize ads given a certain amount per sale, and the platform will naturally target based on what converts best (and since this is Amazon scale or Facebook scale, they can do these tests automatically for every campaign and get statistically significant results very quickly).
I wish Amazon would roll out eBay style ads. They have all the data and could do a much better job than sellers, and could capture a significant portion of the added value it would provide.
This ad product doesn't rely on personal information which is why it's the perfect kind for Apple. Once you've typed something into search they have your intent and can show related apps to it.
On other types of ads, a former iAd exec said it did hold them back [1].
I don’t think we can hold Apple responsible for 3rd parties like Flurry. Those companies will always find a way to do what they do because there is incredible value in having access to such data (as a developer).
I'd imagine it will be the same as google's stance on segmenting audience in search - you can't do it. You can really only target based on search query and very little else (geo, etc).
Apps haven't sold themselves for a while now, unless you have a specific reason people should share you (see HQ Trivia's growth.) If you build the world's best todo app it will have zero traction without a massive marketing budget because the competition is already settled. And if you build something new, but niche, you have the same problem - you need to get to the top of search results, but you can't do that without download quantity.
You do get retention stats from Apple, I think it also breaks it down via source (organic vs search ad). Also I'm not sure why people are just realizing this now, these ads have existed for the past 6 months or so. This is just a way to set it up faster for people that don't want to configure their targeting.
> No expertise needed.
>
> Setting up your account is easy. Simply tell us your app
> and monthly budget. Our intelligent automation creates your
> ad and matches it to interested users.
Wow -- you don't have to have any marketing competence whatsoever. Just pay Apple per install and they'll magic it up.
To me this looks like an indirect way for Apple to extract more money from developers.
Since it's so easy to set up a campaign that does not lose money (it's pay per install), imagine _every_ developer setting up a campaign with their app's price as maximum bid (ignoring revenue shares to simplify). Lots of installs, but zero revenue for developers.
This is about risk. You want less risk and so does Apple. Since app quality is a crap shoot, they won't and don't need to offer that kind of model. Likewise, you should build into your model how much you can afford to spend knowing some subset of installs will be lower quality.
> No user tracking - Search Ads does not profile users based on their search queries, and no data from other Apple Apps — including Health, Apple Pay and HomeKit — is used to deliver ads.
> No data sharing - No individual user data is exposed to advertisers, only aggregate campaign delivery information is made available.
For how long, though? If this service will become successful (which it likely will be), there will be a huge monetization opportunity by allowing more targeted ads e.g. based on other app installs.
Google allows all other kind of targeting to happen on their platform. If Apple doesn't want to track users' and their past behaviour, they might use things such as "currently installed apps" as an alternative.
Having said that, it was merely to illustrate an example of things they could do -- there are tons of other ways to to increase the value of searches.
Why does this not count as "getting into ads"? Genuinely don't see the difference. And to be fair, the product kinda puzzles me in the first place. Is it really only an ad at the top of app store search pages?
Let me clarify for you: They’re not _seriously_ in the ads business and they never will because it’s full of privacy issues.
They’re using ads here to help people find the app they’re looking for - that’s it. It’s contained within the App Store to help people find ads.
How much rev has apple made from iAd? Prob not a lot
That's literally what they're doing here. Selling advertising. Yes, you can say—and I hope—that they won't compromise their other lines of business to increase ad revenue. But this is a step closer to that precipice.
They've been 'into ads' for years. They were in a bidding war for AdMob in 2010, lost out to Google. They've bought ad technology companies. They haven't been super-successful in the space (iAd didn't work out) but you don't do those things if you 'don't want to get into ads')
That doesn’t address his/her point, though. If Apple realizes they’re leaving billions of dollars per year on the table, there is very little to stop them from spinning up an analytics division to rake that in.
Unless they feel their public stance on privacy is responsible for a non-trivial portion of their current revenue.
They've never seriously compromised their privacy stance that I've seen, with the arguable exception of their unfortunate position in China. This would be a big step off an uncertain cliff, and their CEO has a personal history that lends credence to his argument that privacy matters.
So you think Tim Cook will wake up tomorrow and realize there’s money in advertising?
They could’ve done that years ago but they are not in the business of advertising. They sell hardware with complimentary services and ads are an accessory to that mission — not the mission itself.
> Show your ads only to new customers, existing customers, downloaders of your other apps, or to everyone. You can also refine your audience by gender, age, and show your ads only to devices located in specific geographic areas.
> By adding just a few lines of code to your app, you can easily understand the value of different customer groups over time and the keywords that drove their conversion. You can use this information to optimize your CPT and CPA targets for different keywords, ad groups and audiences.
> Ad groups are a collection of keywords relevant to the app you’re promoting in App Store search results. You can set specific criteria and bid amounts for each ad group. Ad groups are an effective way to define who sees your ad.
[0]: https://searchads.apple.com/advanced/