Apple's App Store Search Ads Arrive in India, 45 Other Markets

Apple's App Store search ads have reached India and 45 other countries. The Cupertino, California-based company on Wednesday announced that the developers in these countries can now start promoting their apps in App Store search pages to get more eyeballs for their apps. Originally introduced back at WWDC 2016, Search Ads are aimed to aid developers enhance the visibility of their applications in the increasingly crowded App Store. They show up as the first result on a search page in App Store with a blue background. Until now, the availability of App Store search ads was limited to just 13 markets.

Apple announced the change in a notification on its Developer website. Search Ads will now start showing up in 46 new markets, including India, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Finland, Hong Kong, Argentina, Austria, and Malaysia. In addition to the new markets, Apple has also tweaked how campaigns are configured. Now, the developers can assign a single campaign to run across multiple regions, however earlier the developers had to configure a campaign for every single country individually.

The iPhone maker offers two types of Search Ads – Search Ads Basic and Search Ads Advanced. The Search Ads Basic is a no-frills solution and just needs three key parameters from the developers - ads budget, countries where app needs to be promoted, and the app that needs to be promoted. Apple will automatically create an ad and match it with potential users. The developers are only charged for the number of installs and the company shows a max cost-per-install at the time of setting up an ad. The developers can also specify their own max cost-per-install. This cost-per-install will determine where your ads shows up and how quickly the ad target is achieved.

Apple Search Ads Advanced, on the other hand, are targeted at developers who want a much more hands on approach to their app promotions. It gives the developers many more options as well as targeting opportunities to promote the apps. The developers can select their own keywords, define their audience, and target just iPhone or iPad or both. There is no limit on the budget for Search Ads Advanced and the developers can go as high or low they want.

Even though Search Ads don't contribute much to Apple's bottom line as other products and services right now but it is believed that Search Ads could become $2 billion a year business by 2020.