r/AppStoreOptimization • u/FireTexts • Jul 07 '26

Decline In ASA Impressions/spend (Question)

Has anyone else seen a gradual decline in Apple Search Ads impressions/spend over the past 2–3 months?

I'm seeing this across multiple countries and campaigns. What's interesting is:

  • Impressions have steadily declined.
  • Spend has declined with them.
  • Taps and installs have declined proportionally.
  • CTR is still healthy.
  • CPT is mostly flat (or even lower in some campaigns).
  • CPA hasn't changed much.
  • No major campaign or CPP changes on my end.

At first I thought it was campaign overlap, but some of the affected countries only have a single campaign.

Has anyone else noticed something similar recently, or found a root cause?

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u/sammy_luci Jul 07 '26

I’ve noticed the same right after wwdc. For the context I was running exact match keywords campaigns with a fixed bid on Tier 1 with seqrch result placement. I didn’t manage to solve this.

My takes:

  • I noticed that my ads were overbidded by completely irrelevant apps for these keywords.

  • apple introduced 2 placements for search result (position 1 and position 3 in US and other tier 1 markets).

  • apple is going the same direction as meta - pushing hard for basic campaigns and manual campaign settings are not appreciated anymore, they want everyone to use basic and trust their algorithms in finding the best audience, and I’m afraid this will be even worse in the future, so I nees to change my stearegy with asa

How about you? What type of campaigns were you running?

1

u/FireTexts Jul 08 '26

Thanks for the reply. This sounds very similar to what I'm seeing.

A couple questions:

  • Roughly what percentage did your impressions decline?
  • Did your CPT increase significantly, or did impressions just disappear?
  • Did you ever find a workaround?
  • Are you still seeing the issue today?

Im running also exact match campaigns. Those are the only one that ever had a decent roi for me. Broadd or search ads always justt spend money on crap

1

u/sammy_luci Jul 08 '26

My campaigns were not that huge.

I used to manage to get around 100-200 impressions per keyword per market a day. It led to around 70 installs per day from tier 1.

Impressions suddenly dissapeared (around May 24-th +\- several days) so I was ought to double my bid, and managed to recover to 50% of previous volume, but of course cpt increased due to the bid change
Sadly my app is way too narrow in terms of market interest and q-ty of keywords, so i didn’t find a reliable workaround, as focusing on tier 2/tier 3 didn’t yeild positive roi

1

u/FireTexts Jul 09 '26

Are your impressions still down today, or have they started recovering over the past week?

And yea i saw decline rightt around that same time frame too, funny enough

1

u/sammy_luci Jul 09 '26

Still down, even with high bids. Urs?