Your guide to commanding the App Store’s premium placement
While intently planning a vacation to Slovenia and Croatia, you shift gears and open the App Store to browse house and garden resources. As the store launches, you spot a striking animated ad for AllegroTrek, a sleek discovery app that reveals nearby upcoming music performances wherever you are in the world, including ticket purchasing and personalized event recommendations. You weren’t explicitly searching for a cultural app, but right away the serendipitous discovery feels essential for your upcoming trip.
This is the magic of the Today tab—Apple Search Ads’ crown jewel placement that turns casual browsing into “aha!” app discovery moments. This premium front-page position offers brands unparalleled visibility to half a billion weekly visitors, creating instant excitement that other ad placements cannot match. While users may experience the Today tab as a lucky find, savvy marketers recognize it as a strategic powerhouse for promoting their app in the busy, ever-competitive App Store.
The Today Tab Advantage
When it comes to prime advertising locations, the Today tab is tops for App Store visibility. The coveted placement serves as your close-up in digital Times Square, instantly exposing your app to users actively seeking their next download—right as they enter the store. Unlike other placements that rely on specific searches or browsing behavior, Today tab ads capture the attention of users who are just starting out on their App Store quest.
The significance of this placement is immense: According to Apple, fully half of App Store visitors—approximately 500 million users weekly—begin their discovery journey on the Today tab. They arrive in a uniquely receptive mindset, often actively seeking new and interesting apps to explore, creating an ideal environment for brand introduction and engagement.
The impact extends beyond simple visibility: The placement confers an inherent prestige enhancing brand perception while providing an animated canvas perfect for showcasing new launches, major updates, or seasonal promotions. Because the Today tab displays a selection of app recommendations, editorial content, and featured apps, users often perceive apps appearing in this ad position as editorially chosen or specially curated, lending additional credibility to your offering—even though the placement itself is purchased advertising.
Read on to learn how to rock the Today tab!
Getting Your Ad Up and Running
Creating a Today tab ad requires more extensive preparation than other ASA placements. The process begins in App Store Connect, where you must create a custom product page—unlike other placements where your standard product page suffices.
This development stage calls for careful asset preparation that captures your app’s appeal and value proposition via your app name, icon, and subtitle. These elements animate in the background, drawing from the icon’s color palette. Unique to Today tab placement, this effect creates a distinctly premium visual experience.
The approval process involves multiple layers of review. After you create a campaign, your ad is automatically submitted for approval, with Apple Search Ads assessing all visual and textual elements. This ensures compliance with Apple’s advertising policies and specific guidelines for Today tab content.
Apple maintains strict regulations for the Today tab, prohibiting pricing promotions, ranking claims, or incentivized messaging. Any potentially violent, offensive, sexually explicit, or otherwise inappropriate content is immediately rejected. Your custom product page must be localized for every region where the campaign runs, ensuring that your message resonates across cultural boundaries.
Technical specifications matter: The latest Today tab ad format runs exclusively on iPhone devices using iOS 17.1 and later (with a different format for iOS 16.4–17.0). It isn’t available on iOS 16.3 or earlier—or on iPad at all. These compatibility limitations may inform your targeting strategy for campaign reach as well as performance expectations.
Managing Your Campaign
The Ads dashboard within the Today tab ad group provides the control center for monitoring current and historical performance data, editing ad names, changing ad status, and downloading details about any errors/rejections.
Various ad statuses may display:
- Active (running and serving impressions)
- Paused (temporarily stopped by you)
- Ad in review (awaiting Apple approval)
- Custom product page incompatible (issues with your custom page)
- Ad content rejected (failed to meet Apple’s guidelines)
When issues arise, such as destination pages not appearing correctly or ads being rejected, it’s time to troubleshoot. Common problems include missing assets for specific device sizes, incompatibility between your custom product page and the ad group’s target country/region, or policy violations. For asset-related rejections, you can simply revise the elements in question, then resubmit.
Strategic Foundations: Basic Bidding and Budget Principles
Success with Today tab placements hinges on recognizing how they differ from standard search results ads. This premium showcase demands unique thinking about investment and allocation.
It might be tempting to make an overly aggressive opening bid, reflecting the placement’s prestige and intense competition for front-page real estate. While Apple keeps specific pricing private, and some industry experts posit that Today tab costs should run considerably higher than other ASA options, data shows that this may be offset by other factors. Instead, start with an appropriately assertive bid to secure visibility and compile valuable baseline performance insights.
Should you choose a bid on the strong side, budget planning requires careful consideration of potentially higher max costs per tap. Seasonal fluctuations can dramatically impact costs, particularly during major shopping events or holiday periods. The period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s likely finds Today tab costs increasing as competition intensifies.
A sustainable Today tab strategy demands sufficient daily budget allocation to maintain consistent presence while allowing flexibility to capitalize on high-performing periods. Some advertising experts recommend setting your max CPT higher than for standard search result campaigns to account for the placement’s premium nature. This can provide a starting point for your Today tab strategy, which you’ll refine through testing and optimization as your campaigns mature. We’ll discuss advanced budget/bidding strategies in a bit.
Standing Out in Premium Space
Rocking the Today tab—once you are winning auctions and establishing your app’s presence—hinges on creative excellence to take full advantage of critical first moments of visibility. With users typically spending only a few seconds viewing content before deciding whether to tap, your custom product page must captivate instantly while asserting brand fidelity and consistency. Consider how our fictional AllegroTrek’s animated preview of upcoming performances might generate palpable excitement for travelers planning their cultural evenings—instantly communicating the app’s core benefit.
An effective approach balances attention-grabbing innovation with strategic cycling. Successful advertisers typically maintain something like a quarterly update schedule—incorporating seasonal themes, event tie-ins, or feature highlights—with additional refreshes for major announcements. A regular cadence keeps content fresh while homing in on the sweet spot between standing out and staying true to your brand. Remember that while bland creative might not beguile user attention, aggressive promotional language risks rejection under Apple’s strict guidelines. The winning formula combines visually striking imagery, clear value proposition, and authentic brand voice.
Precision Targeting in a Broad-Reach Environment
Even with the Today tab’s broad reach, calculated targeting amplifies its effectiveness. Demographic filters let you tailor messaging to specific audience segments—for example, ensuring that your creative resonates with Gen Z without alienating older users.
Geographic and device parameters further refine your approach. Localization addresses regional preferences and regulatory requirements, while device targeting accounts for technical limitations by prioritizing newer iPhone models with iOS 17.1+.
Your audience strategy—whether acquiring new users, reengaging existing ones, or both—should reflect broader marketing goals. First-time user targeting excels for launches and rebrands, while returning user focus helps promote premium features or reactivate dormant relationships.
Narrowing campaign targeting on age, gender, or location within a country limits your reach to only those devices that have opted in to tracking via Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework. On average, this reduces your total reachable audience by 70%. Demographic filtering then applies to the remaining 30%.
Measuring Impact
Measuring Today tab success requires looking beyond traditional conversion metrics to capture both immediate performance indicators and long-term impact patterns.
Daily budget utilization serves as a powerful diagnostic: Consistently maxed-out budgets suggest opportunities to lower bids and expand reach, while underutilized budgets indicate adjustments in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, the halo effect of Today tab placement can result in a marked increase in organic brand searches following campaign launches.
A cultural discovery app like our AllegroTrek example might notice significantly higher conversion rates during evening hours when users might jump at finding local performances to enjoy—informing more strategic bid timing. Temporal analysis reveals which hours and days deliver the highest-quality conversions, while longer attribution windows (7–14 days) capture users who don’t convert immediately but return later through search or direct navigation. A comprehensive measurement approach can reveal synergistic value—coordinated campaigns leveraging both Today tab and standard search placements potentially delivering better results than either alone.
Advanced Strategies: Next-Level Bidding Techniques
Once you’ve established your measurement foundations and collected meaningful performance data, you’re ready to implement sophisticated bidding strategies that capitalize on the Today tab’s unique dynamics—and inherent volatility. Data from Search Ads Maven by Kochava reveals that cost per acquisition (CPA) can fluctuate by ±75% over a matter of months, making ongoing strategic optimization essential.
An effective approach leverages daily budget patterns: When campaigns consistently spend their entire daily budget, strategic bid reductions can dramatically expand reach without sacrificing quality. One case study documented impressions growing from 4,000 to over 95,000 through automated gradual bid adjustments—significantly improving campaign efficiency.
Time-based optimization presents another opportunity, as performance may vary dramatically throughout the day. Search Ads Maven’s Late-Day Winning strategy capitalizes on this by setting bids lower during less productive hours and winning auctions during optimal periods—ideally after competitors have depleted their daily budget.
The Automation Advantage: Search Ads Maven
Performance on the Today tab is volatile over time and highly sensitive to bid changes, demanding a level of vigilance that surpasses manual capabilities. Search Ads Maven by Kochava addresses this challenge by providing sophisticated automation that transforms complexity into a strategic advantage. The platform enables continuous, 24/7 campaign optimization by intelligently monitoring spend patterns and automatically implementing bid adjustments. This includes lowering bids when budgets are nearing their limit to capture additional impressions as well as making calculated adjustments to address underpacing.
By automating these intricate processes, Search Ads Maven demystifies Today tab optimization, enabling you to set a target cost per goal while the system autonomously updates bids at just the right time to maximize your return on investment. The platform’s intelligent optimization further refines campaign performance by implementing strategies including Late-Day Winning and Strategic Losing, while providing granular control through rule-based automation. You simply define thresholds for key metrics such as CPA or ROAS, and the system executes the necessary adjustments. Real-time alerts keep you informed of significant changes, and comprehensive reporting quantifies the Today tab’s true impact across your entire App Store presence. In essence, Search Ads Maven eliminates the impracticality of manual Today tab management, freeing you from the burdens of constant monitoring, incremental bid adjustments, hourly pattern analysis, and rapid responses to performance fluctuations.
Maximizing Your Today Tab Investment
Just as our AllegroTrek transforms App Store browsing into delightful musical discoveries for travelers, the Today tab creates serendipitous moments that connect users with exactly the app they didn’t know they needed. Whether launching a new offering or elevating an existing one, this premium placement offers bona fide opportunities to capture user attention and drive meaningful growth, facilitating meaningful discoveries and connections that benefit advertisers and users alike.
Ready to transform your Today tab performance? Contact us for an expert consultation on how Search Ads Maven can help you navigate all the aforementioned complexities and maximize your ASA investment.
For more insights, explore our companion pieces: Apple Search Ads 101: Understanding the Four Ad Placements and Apple Search Ads Optimization: 5 Smart Tips for Better Performance.