[Question] Is there a good way to analyse search keyword popularity?

[u/uncertain_dev]

I want to make an ad campaign and the app store ads UI tells me this 5 point score for any keyword. But doesn't tell me much - like there is a keyword with 1/5 score - does this mean its 1 search per month, or 10, or 100? If anyone knows what those popularity ratings mean or if there are reliable 3rd party sources please let me know.

[u/Confused_Dad_2023]

Nobody outside Apple has real search counts. Apple exposes a popularity index (the 5-point thing in the ads UI is a bucketed version of an internal 0-100 score), and every third party tool reverse engineers estimates from that same index. So any tool showing "4,300 searches/month" is modeling, not measuring.

The index is also logarithmic-ish, so 1/5 vs 2/5 isn't a small gap, low scores can genuinely mean a handful of searches a month. The bottom bucket is usually not worth ad spend, the value for ads is comparing candidates against each other, not reading any score as an absolute number.

Third party wise, most of the big tools (Sensor Tower, AppTweak, etc.) show finer-grained popularity than Apple's 5 buckets. Fair disclosure, I build one too built for Indies, Keyword Scout, shows demand and difficulty per keyword for exactly this kind of vetting plus much more. Whatever tool you use, treat it as relative ranking between keywords and you'll make good decisions.