What? You haven't tried Apple iAds yet?

That’s like missing out on Facebook ads when they launched in 2007.

Let’s cover this early-stage ad platform to understand the opportunities and the

Head on over to advertising.apple.com.

Sign in with your Apple id.

There are 4 steps: campaign set-up, targeting, ad, and summary.

Sign in to your iAd workbench to promote an app or a product.
There are 24 product types.

Upload your logo in 300×300.

For where to run your campaign, you can choose App Network or iTunes Radio.
Choose App Network, since iTunes Radio can run only in Australia right now.

Choose CPC or CPM.
We recommend CPC, in general.
Perhaps Apple will have goal-based bidding via oCPM or another default bidding strategy.

You’ll want to choose manual targeting, instead of auto-targeting.

Here are your choices:

You can specify targeting criteria in any or all of the following categories:

• Device: Which iOS device do you want your ad to appear on?
• Gender: Male, female, or both.
• Age: The age group or groups that your app is most likely to appeal to.
• iTunes Store Preferences: The interests that users of your app are likely to have (in several categories including apps, audiobooks, movies, and music). iAd will place your ad in apps downloaded by users who have similar interests (based on download data from the iTunes Store).
• Geo: Your users’ home (not current) location. You can select locations by state or DMA (designated marketing area).
• App Channels: The categories of apps in which you want your ad to appear, and whether you want your ad to appear in apps rated 17+ (within the selected categories).
• Scheduling: The day (or days) and times when you want your ad to appear.
• Frequency Cap: The maximum number of times an ad will be shown to the same person on any day.Note:  Frequency Cap is available for CPM bidding only.

You have to budget at least $50 per campaign and no more than $20 million.
And you must budget at least $10 a day.

The recommended bids are low at 15 cents.
And we find that we’re getting CPMs at about 25 cents, which only go up when more folks get on the platform.
Pricing will vary by ad unit and target of course.

400 taps (clicks) on 100,000 impressions is a 0.4% CTR.

So this can work out nicely for you.

You can add multiple lines per campaign.
For those not familiar with lines, it’s an old-fashioned media buying term, where you can have multiple lines run in a campaign, where each line is buying against a particular audience.

On the creative side, we have to deal with some non-standard ad aspect ratios.
There are 9 of them and it doesn’t look like you can reuse the 2:1 aspect in Facebook ads.
And you have to upload a bunch of creative variants (required).

You can’t target as fine as you’d like, clone ads, or bid to business goals.
But it’s a great start to a platform that previously required 7 figures to even get in.

If you’re a real pro, you’ll make fully immersive experiences with the iAd Publisher.

Now time to get rolling before you miss out on the cheap traffic!

Dennis Yu

Dennis Yu is co-author of the #1 best selling book on Amazon in social media, The Definitive Guide to TikTok Ads. He has spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises. Mr. Yu is the "million jobs" guy-- on a mission to create one million jobs via hands-on social media training, partnering with universities and professional organizations. You can find him quoted in major publications and on television such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and LA Times. Clients have included Nike, Red Bull, the Golden State Warriors, Ashley Furniture, Quiznos-- down to local service businesses like real estate agents and dentists. He's spoken at over 750 conferences in 20 countries, having flown over 6 million miles in the last 30 years to train up young adults and business owners. He speaks for free as long as the organization believes in the job-creation mission and covers business class travel. You can find him hiking tall mountains, eating chicken wings, and taking Kaqun oxygen baths-- likely in a city near you.

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