SKAG for Apple Search Ads:
still relevant in 2024?

Summary

Apple Search Ads work best when your ad directly matches what someone is searching for. That sounds easy, but it's actually quite a challenge. While running campaigns, you need unique ads for each keyword - a tedious and time-consuming manual process.

For this reason, many mobile marketers use a strategy called SKAG, which stands for Single Keyword Ad Groups. This approach was first used on platforms like Google and has become popular for Apple Search Ads too. SKAG campaigns have grown increasingly popular in recent years. But with all the changes in Apple Search Ads, are SKAGs still effective in 2024?

To address this question, our team at Asapty conducted in-depth research, leveraging our extensive experience and expertise garnered from managing hundreds of successful Apple Search Ads campaigns for mobile apps globally.

What is SKAG structure in Apple Search Ads?

SKAG, or Single Keyword Ad Groups, is a specialized ad campaign strategy that involves creating individual ad groups for each keyword within the Apple Search Ads network. Let’s imagine you aim to create a SKAG structure using five unique keywords. This is how the structure will look in this case:

Difference between SKAG and regular structure in Apple Search Ads account

By default, Apple Search Ads advises a campaign structure where all keywords are grouped into a single ad group. Being the simplest approach to start with, it poses several challenges. Managing such a structure requires a significant amount of manual work, especially when the objective is to target multiple markets.

Moreover, the aggregation of multiple keywords in a single ad group inhibits your ability to access keyword-specific data in your Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP). This limitation not only makes it challenging to measure the ROI for individual keywords but also restricts your control over the performance metrics of each keyword. Additionally, if you decide to pause a keyword, it continues to operate as a search term for other active keywords, further muddying performance analysis.

SKAG structure removes the struggle of obtaining keyword-level data from MMP. Instead, you can request the data at the ad group level and get all the essential information.

Benefits of SKAG structure

In a nutshell, the SKAG methodology provides a more nuanced level of control, enabling superior campaign management and more accurate performance evaluation.

It allows you to use negative keywords, use targeting settings by audience profile and location, enable display schedule, enable/disable LAT On settings (Limited Ad Tracking) for each keyword individually. Creating separate ad groups for each keyword allows for attributing ROI data of each keyword and controlling bids on maximum available precision. SKAG structure also allows you to set CPA Goal and CPT Bid for each individual keyword. This can be crucial - even very similar keywords like "tiktok video edit" and "tiktok video editor" may have dramatically different CPAs and ROIs.

We took this advantage while developing our Quick Start feature which helped a video chat app to get full control of the ads budget setting bids for each keyword and ad group. This brought some remarkable results decreasing overall CPI from $5.6 to $3.3 while boosting monthly installs from 20.5k to 45k.

How to level up your SKAG structure

While the SKAG structure offers many benefits, it also risks making campaigns overly granular and difficult to manage. To mitigate this, segment campaigns by keyword types and/or Search Ads Popularity groups. Common keyword type segmentations are Brand, Competitors, General, and Discovery. You can also segment by search popularity rate tiers. This organization prevents campaigns from becoming too fragmented while still leveraging the advantages of the SKAG structure.

Cross-negation in SKAG

A key issue in Apple Search Ads is that exact match doesn't guarantee truly precise targeting. A single keyword might have five or more spelling variations, including with or without spaces, singular or plural forms, and additional words. Here’s an example, bidding on the keyword "tiktok video editor" with exact match can also trigger related searches like "tiktok video cut", "tiktok video edits" etc. So for a given exact match keyword, you may get multiple related phrases. This risks campaign overlap and less trackable results. The accuracy varies by app category. Some see almost 100% accurate matching, while others have 20% or more broadened search terms.

Now this is where SKAG really makes the difference as it allows you to minimize the discrepancy between keywords and search terms by isolating each keyword in its own group and get more accurate bidding and result tracking.

In Asapty, we also added a smart Cross Group Negatives algorithm. Once activated, it identifies different variations for a keyword, creates a new ad group for each variation and negates it in other groups. This way you can make sure that your SKAG campaigns achieve 100% exact match.

Scaling your account with SKAG

Keyword research is an ongoing task as Apple Search Ads advertisers aim to expand their accounts. After building out the initial SKAG structure, run discovery campaigns to uncover new keywords not already captured in existing SKAGs. Discovery can find typos, long-tail keywords, synonyms, and other generic terms. Remember to add current SKAG keywords as negatives. This prevents overlap between the SKAG and your discovery campaigns.

For discovery, use one ad group with search match enabled and all exact match SKAG keywords excluded. When a new keyword is found, add it to the discovery campaign negatives and create a corresponding new SKAG in the exact match campaign. This way, you can easily scale promising new keywords and pause irrelevant ones, steadily expanding your SKAG structure.

How to create and manage SKAG structure easily with Asapty

At Asapty, we've long recognized the power of SKAG structure, a strategy that has consistently delivered outstanding results for many of our users. Armed with this knowledge, we developed a comprehensive toolkit for swift and effortless SKAG creation and management. Rather than manually crafting and overseeing campaigns across your account, simply navigate to the SKAG Creation tab in your Asapty dashboard.

Here, you have a centralized command center where you can launch new SKAG campaigns, expand existing ones with additional ad groups, or fine-tune your negative keywords - all from one intuitive interface. Try Asapty's Free plan to experience the advanced Apple Search Ads management suite.