Apple Search Ads vs Meta for iOS apps: when each one wins

Almost every iOS app we talk to has the same first question: Apple Search Ads or Meta? The honest answer is that they do different jobs, and the right one depends on a question about your category, not about the platforms.

What Apple Search Ads is

A person opens the App Store, types what they want and sees your ad above the results. The intent already exists; you are paying to be the answer. This makes it the cleanest channel in mobile: high conversion, predictable costs, and keywords that tell you exactly what people were looking for.

Its limit is just as clear. It cannot show your app to anyone who did not search. If your category is new, or your app does something people do not yet have a name for, there is nothing to bid on.

What Meta is

A person is scrolling and your creative stops them. There was no intent; the ad created it. This is how you reach people who would never have searched, and how a new category gets explained to the world. The cost is that everything depends on the creative, the targeting is less precise than a typed query, and attribution on iOS is noisier.

Meta also has a side effect people forget: a good Meta campaign lifts App Store searches for your brand name, which shows up in Apple Search Ads as cheap brand traffic. The two channels are not rivals; one feeds the other.

The deciding question

Is there search volume for what you do? Type your category terms into the App Store and look at the results. If there are strong competitors and plenty of apps, people are searching, and Apple Search Ads is the place to start. If the results are thin or unrelated, you need to create demand first, and that is Meta.

How to run them together

• Apple Search Ads first, in your own account, brand and category terms separated, so the baseline cost per trial is known.
• Meta second, with creatives built for the first three seconds, judged on trial starts rather than installs.
• Watch brand search volume in Apple Search Ads when Meta is on. That lift is part of Meta's return.
• Land both on the right product page. A custom product page per intent for search; a page that matches the creative for social.

The trap

Meta's cost per install is often lower than Apple's, and that is exactly how teams end up spending more and earning less. Installs from an interrupted scroll convert to trials and renewals at a different rate than installs from a typed search. Compare the channels on cost per trial and on first renewal, by country, and the picture usually changes.

We run both for our own apps and for partners, with close to $100,000 a month in total budget. Here is how we approach it.