How *tiered bids* price discovery and harvest

Apple's recommended ladder#

Apple own guidance prescribes a tiered bidding strategy across ad groups: the most aggressive bids on important exact match keywords, strong bids for similar keywords in broad match, and moderate bids for new queries discovered through Search Match. Discovery is deliberately the cheapest seat because its traffic is the least proven.

Read the prescription at source in Apple considerations for keyword bids, then build it inside the family from the Apple Ads hub. The ceilings underneath come from max CPT and the economics from CPT to CPA maths.

Tier one: the exact harvest#

Exact match carries your highest bids and tightest CPA caps, because these are terms with proven intent and history. Every query that converts reliably deserves to live here, defended and funded, never starved by discovery spend.

Build the tier with exact match, feed it winners through harvesting, and protect its cheap brand wins via brand and competitor terms.

Fund the tier without apology: these terms earned their bids with history, and starving proven winners to feed discovery experiments is the commonest budgeting error in small accounts. Harvest first, explore with the remainder.

Tier two: the broad middle#

Broad match earns strong but second-place bids: enough to test adjacency, never enough to outbid your own exact terms for the same query. This tier hunts the near neighbours of proven intent, plurals, reorderings and close variants your exact list missed.

Run it through broad match, grade its tap through honestly with TTR diagnostics, and confirm demand depth in search popularity before funding it like a harvest tier.

Tier three: Search Match discovery#

Search Match discovery gets the most modest bids in the account, because it buys questions, not answers. Its job is surfacing queries you would never have listed, and modest bids keep tuition fees low while the syllabus writes itself.

Scope the tier in Search Match, house it apart from harvest spend with discovery versus brand, and fund its learning through learning budgets rather than harvest budgets.

Negatives enforce the ladder#

Tiers collapse without negatives: the same query matching in two tiers means you bid against yourself and the read corrupts. Negate exact winners out of broad and discovery ad groups so each query resolves to exactly one tier.

Apple ad group mechanics support the split; their bid adjustment help confirms keyword bids override group defaults, which is the lever the ladder pulls. Master the enforcement tool in negatives and mind the 5,000 negatives ceiling via limits.

Promotion rules that keep it honest#

Promote a query upward when it clears volume plus efficiency thresholds you wrote down in advance: enough installs to trust, CPA inside the higher tier target, sustained across two or more weeks. Demote or negate when it fails the same test in reverse.

Guard each tier average with CPA caps, fund the moves with budget maths, and if the ladder keeps tangling, our team rebuilds tiered structures without losing the history that earned them.

Review the ladder monthly, because auctions drift: rivals enter, seasons turn and yesterday's harvest term becomes today's dear passenger. A ladder nobody revisits becomes a relic with budgets attached.

Frequently asked questions#