Apple Search Ads Managed Against a Post-Install Event

In the Netherlands, the largest exact-match term in a category like rentals or vacancies rarely clears 900 taps a month on Apple Search Ads. The account that wins here is not the one that harvests the most keywords; it is the one that decides, per term, which downstream event justifies which bid, and holds that decision when the tap-through rate looks bad. We run Search Ads accounts where the bid is set against a post-install event you can name in a sentence: a listing enquiry sent, a shortlist created, a trial started. Account shape: Brand, category exact, competitor, and one discovery campaign whose only job is to feed the others. Search Match stays on in discovery and off everywhere else. Harvested terms move to exact with a bid derived from the event, not from the discovery cost per install. Custom Product Pages mapped to intent groups - one for people typing a city name, one for people typing a job title, one for competitor terms - because a single default product page against a Dutch city query wastes the most expensive tap in the account. We manage through the Search Ads Campaign Management API v5 rather than the web interface, so bid changes are logged, reversible and reviewable by you. Dutch and multi-market specifics: Dutch search behaviour on the App Store mixes English and Dutch stems in the same category, and Apple does not treat them as one term. We build both sides and price them separately, since the English variant usually costs more and converts worse for a locally regulated product. For Belgium and Germany we run separate storefronts with their own bids rather than a copied structure, and we do not launch a storefront where we cannot read the post-install event. The brand-bidding question: We do bid on your own brand, and we prove it rather than assert it. Once a quarter we run a geo holdout - brand campaign off in two comparable regions for three weeks - and report incremental installs against incremental spend. If the holdout says brand bidding is buying installs you already had, we recommend cutting it, including when that shrinks the budget we manage. What we refuse: We will not take an account that has no MMP or Apple Ads attribution wired to a post-install event; bidding to installs on Search Ads is the most reliably wasted budget in mobile, and we would rather not be the ones spending it. We do not report tap-through rate or conversion rate as an outcome. They are diagnostics, and a monthly deck built on them is a deck designed not to be argued with. We will not run Today tab placements below the volume where their cost can be read against anything, which for most Dutch-market apps means never. We do not add keywords to make an account look busy in a review; a flat keyword count with rising event volume is the report we want to send. Not the right fit: Apps whose category is dominated by one branded incumbent that owns the generic terms in installs as well as bids - the arithmetic will not work and we will show you why in the first call. Teams who want Search Ads run against a monthly install target set before the quarter. Games; we do not work on them and other people do it better. Working method: Weekly bid and structure review, a written note each week that says what changed and why, and a monthly session on the two or three decisions that matter rather than a walk through a dashboard you already have. Creative for Custom Product Pages is specified by us and produced by your designer, or by ours if you prefer, but never as a standing monthly volume. You hold the ad account and the billing relationship with Apple throughout; we work inside it as named users.