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iOS best practices guide: Do the iOS three to maximize your ROI

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To maximize your app’s momentum on iOS, you need to be present where iOS users are most actively discovering their next favourite app. Google and YouTube are essential destinations, with 74% of surveyed iOS users agreeing that Google or YouTube is where they spend the most time researching online.

To help you translate Google’s massive reach into reliable results, we are transforming our iOS solution to bridge post-ATT gaps and restore measurement visibility and performance stability. This guide outlines the three high-impact actions you should prioritize today to scale your iOS growth:

  1. Signal strength: Power better performance with richer, privacy-centric signals.
  2. Bidding strategy: Activate the right AI-powered bidding strategy for your business objective.
  3. Comprehensive measurement: Unlock more granular, real-time insights using integrated conversion measurement (ICM).

Power better performance with signal strength

To drive the best performance and measurement, it’s critical to fuel our models with sufficient signals.

  • Activate on-device conversion measurement using event data by integrating your app with the latest Google Analytics for Firebase SDK (minimum version 12.12.1+); this privacy-preserving solution increases the volume of conversion signals our models can observe.

    • If your app collects sign-in data like email and phone numbers, we also recommend you implement our other variant of this solution, which utilizes first-party data to further enhance signal strength.
  • Evaluate showing the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) prompt. Every opted-in user provides our AI with additional signals to improve your campaign optimization quality. To maximize your opt-in rates, we recommend showing the prompt within the first one to three user sessions. Additionally, use a “warm-up” screen before the prompt to build trust and explain how sharing data helps you provide a better, more personalized app experience. Learn more about creating and displaying an explainer screen using the Google Analytics for Firebase SDK.

Combining these increased signals and our ongoing model and ad relevance performance enhancements will help you achieve higher ROI and more stable performance on iOS.

Activate the right AI-powered bidding strategy

By fuelling our advanced models with richer, privacy-centric signals like on-device conversion data, we’ve unlocked advanced new bidding levers like maximize conversions, target ROAS and ad revenue optimization. Our fully flexible suite of AI-powered bidding strategies enables you to intelligently acquire your most valuable iOS users based on your desired business outcome.

Bidding strategy overview

Choose a bidding strategy that aligns with your specific goal, whether it’s volume, cost control, profitability or ad revenue.

Goal Recommended strategy
Volume Maximize conversions (for installs or in-app actions)
Cost Control Target CPA (tCPA)
Profit Target ROAS (tROAS) or Maximize conversion value
Ad revenue Target ROAS for ad revenue (available in beta)

Bidding best practices checklist

Follow these fundamental best practices to drive the best results with whichever bidding strategy you use:

  1. Fuel our models with more signals: Implement the ATT prompt and on-device conversion measurement using event data.
  2. Maintain sufficient conversion volume: For our AI to learn effectively and achieve scale and efficiency, observe at least 30 conversions per day.
  3. Don’t constrain your bids with unrealistic goals: Ensure your budgets are large enough and your target CPA or ROAS is set realistically to avoid limiting your reach.
  4. Consolidate your campaigns: Avoid internal competition and lower overall CPI by merging similar app campaigns with overlapping targets into a single campaign.
  5. Maximize inventory access: Maintain at least “Good” ad strength and resolve any asset policy disapprovals.
  6. Maintain campaign stability: Focus on only one major adjustment per conversion cycle to keep performance stable.
  7. Maximize conversion volume for post-install campaigns: Ensure your post-install conversion window is longer than your install window (ideally >7 days) to ensure all post-install actions are counted. We recommend setting this window to capture at least 90% of your total conversions. Additionally, for a single-country campaign, consider expanding to more target countries.

Specifically, for value-based bidding strategies, ensure you also follow these additional best practices:

  1. Implement dynamic conversion value tracking: Pass the exact revenue of every action; this allows Google AI to correctly prioritize high-value purchases.
  2. Increase signal density: Assign a low conversion value to first-open events to provide our models with more frequent, early signals.

Note

We suggest starting with a tCPA campaign before tROAS to establish a performance baseline. This “warm-up” period ensures that when you move to tROAS, our AI is already powered by proven data, minimizing the typical campaign learning phase.

Learn more about maximizing your iOS performance in our video below:

Watch the video

Link to YouTube Video

Restore visibility with integrated conversion measurement (ICM)

Integrated conversion measurement (ICM) provides a more holistic, accurate and real-time view of your campaign performance directly within your third-party app attribution partner (AAP) dashboards. Powered by on-device conversion measurement using event data to recover previously missed conversions, ICM enables you to gain the clarity needed to make faster, more confident campaign decisions.

Key unlocks of ICM

While SKAdNetwork is useful for aggregate, cross-network measurement, it has inherent constraints that can limit your growth, such as delayed reporting and limited reporting for in-app activity. Our ICM solution represents a strategic shift beyond these limits, providing the granular insights needed to help you drive reliable results with Google.

  • Granular insights: Provides event-level and near real-time data at the campaign level (and soon ad group level), allowing for faster creative and bidding optimization.
  • Longer conversion windows: Supports longer lookback windows for post-install events (up to 180 days), providing data to unlock high-performance bidding strategies like tROAS.
  • Integrated reporting: Eliminates fragmented reporting by delivering validated, probabilistic results you can trust directly in your third-party AAP dashboards.

Implementation steps

  1. Ensure you have an active iOS app campaign for installs running in Google Ads.
  2. Implement on-device conversion measurement using event data by integrating your app with the latest Google Analytics for Firebase SDK (minimum version 12.12.1+)
  3. Ensure your app is integrated with the latest version of your third-party app attribution partner SDK.
  4. Enable probabilistic attribution within your AAP reporting settings. For example, if you use AppsFlyer, make sure to toggle on the “Advanced data sharing” setting in your Google Ads integration settings.

Important note on reporting discrepancies

Seeing differences in reported performance between ICM, SKAdNetwork and Google Ads reporting is normal and expected. These variations are driven by different methodologies regarding conversion windows, conversion delays and reinstall definitions.

Note

If you don’t use a 3P AAP for measurement, use either SKAN or the default modelled conversion reporting available in your Google Ads interface. Our modelled reporting provides a self-attributed view of your performance, and later this year we’ll be enhancing it with additional on-device conversion signals for even greater accuracy.

Learn more about key iOS measurement frameworks in our video below:

Watch the video

Link to YouTube Video

Learn more about integrated conversion measurement in our video below:

Watch the video

Link to YouTube Video

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