Case Study

Optimizing ASA Campaigns for Maximum Efficiency With Transparent Automation

Vertical: Advertising Agency

Realtime Agency, a leading independent performance marketing agency with a unique, scientific approach to ads, helps major brands elevate their growth strategy on Apple Search Ads (ASA) and beyond. With deep industry knowledge in building and executing innovative digital strategies, Realtime’s digital scientists relentlessly drive performance for brands while balancing efficiencies via their test, learn, and scale methodology.

Challenge

Brands often look to agencies to help them scale their growth on ASA while keeping their cost per acquisition low. Realtime Agency, however, takes it a step further. They combine ASA data with mobile measurement partner (MMP) post-install event data to understand user quality beyond the acquisition and optimize toward a cost per goal (CPG). The goal may be a trial activation, an in-app purchase, or another post-install conversion action.

While CPG drives growth of a higher caliber, the process of analyzing and calculating CPG is often time-consuming. This makes it difficult to quickly adapt to sudden spend fluctuations brought on by keyword bidding wars and other variables, which can rapidly burn through spend and reduce efficiency. Realtime knew they needed a more efficient process to calculate deeper funnel goal performance and adjust bidding strategy accordingly.

Solution

In an effort to help more brands scale on ASA, Realtime sought a tool to aid in automating their campaign optimization process based on goal performance.

Realtime onboarded Search Ads Maven, an ASA campaign management platform. This eliminated the need for manual CPG reporting. Within Search Ads Maven, they can define custom goals based on tailored criteria and optimize towards the client’s target CPG.

Further, Realtime implemented advanced automation rules through Search Ads Maven’s Automation Studio to automate bid and spend adjustments at the keyword, ad group, and/or campaign level based on their return on ad spend (ROAS) goals. This automation allows their campaigns to adapt hourly to changing variables and competing max bids, as opposed to previous adjustments that could only be accomplished manually 2-3 times per week.

Impact

Realtime search specialists are now able to reprioritize their time into developing strategy, while Search Ads Maven supports their more manual tasks—resulting in highly efficient scaling on non-brand terms. Search Ads Maven has enabled them to better operationalize and automate campaign and keyword bidding optimization based on goal reporting. This saves an average of 8 hours of work per week with always-on automation, enabling Realtime to reduce average CPG by 30% or more for most clients.

Takeaways

With Search Ads Maven, Realtime Agency

Saves 8+ hours of manual work per week

Reduced the average CPG by 30% or more

Responds to market changes 20X faster due to automation

”The Search Ads Maven support team has been superb, fully understanding our goals and then crafting automation rules that put those goals into autopilot. This is now enabling our team to be more efficient, meaning we get to help more brands succeed on Apple Search Ads.
Ken MacdonaldProgrammatic Lead, Realtime Agency