APPLE SEARCH ADS

Apple knows installs. You need revenue.

Connect Apple Search Ads spend to RevenueCat revenue. See real CAC and real ROAS per keyword — not Apple's install estimates.

No credit card. Works alongside RevenueCat and your existing SDK.

Apple Search Ads tells you 24 people installed your app from the keyword [competitor-name] at $24.33 CPA. RevenueCat tells you 12 people converted to paid this week. Neither tells you whether those 12 paying customers came from that keyword or a completely different one.

You're bidding on keywords with no feedback loop. You're scaling spend based on Apple's install CPA — a number that treats a user who opens the app once and uninstalls the same as a user who subscribes for a year.

The real question isn't "how much do installs cost?" It's "how much do paying customers cost, and which keywords bring them?"

READY TO SEE YOUR REAL NUMBERS?

Connect your payment provider and see which channels actually drive revenue.

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How It Works

StepTitleDescription
1Connect Apple Search AdsOne-click OAuth. We import spend, keywords, and campaign structure. Read-only — we never touch your bids. See the full setup →
2We already have the revenueIf you're using the Grometrics SDK and RevenueCat, purchases are already attributed to install sources. Apple Search Ads spend is the missing piece.
3See keyword-level ROASEvery keyword with real revenue, real CAC, and real ROAS. Not install estimates — actual paying customers traced back to the keyword that brought them.

What Grometrics gives you

Keyword-level revenue attribution

See which keywords drive paying customers, not just installs. [competitor-app] might drive 3x ROAS while [category term] barely breaks even. Apple can't tell you this; we can, because we know who actually paid.

Territory tier comparison

Split campaigns by country and compare real ROAS across tiers. Tier 3 might deliver better margins than Tier 1 — you won't know unless spend and revenue are in the same view.

Platform comparison

Apple reported 24 installs. Grometrics tracked 18 paying customers. The gap isn't Apple lying — it's the difference between downloading an app and paying for it.

Full funnel visibility

A keyword drives an install. The user goes through onboarding. Grometrics shows the entire journey so you can tell whether a bad keyword is attracting the wrong users or onboarding is losing the right ones.

Data lag transparency

Apple Search Ads data lags 24–48 hours. We surface this explicitly so you don't panic when today's ROAS looks off. Revenue is real-time from RevenueCat; spend catches up from Apple.

Automatic campaign import

Campaigns and keywords import automatically. No manual campaign creation, no spend entry. Spend stays in sync as Apple updates its reporting data.

The Comparison That Matters

Apple's number and your real number are different, and the difference matters for budget decisions.

MetricApple ReportsGrometrics Tracks
MetricInstallsPaying customers
Count2418
Cost basis$24.33 per install$32.44 per paying customer
Missing infoWhich installs paid?

Use the keyword attribution guide to read this gap without treating installs as revenue.

Questions founders ask before deciding

Can't I just track this in Apple's dashboard?

Apple tracks installs, not revenue. It knows 24 people downloaded your app from the keyword [competitor-app]. It doesn't know that 8 of them paid and 16 didn't. Without connecting payment data, your CPA is an install cost pretending to be a customer cost.

RevenueCat has attribution built in, right?

RevenueCat can show you that a subscriber came from Apple Search Ads. It can even show the campaign. But RevenueCat's attribution doesn't show you the onboarding journey — which screen they dropped off on, how long they spent on the paywall, whether they saw your competitor's app page first. Grometrics combines the revenue data from RevenueCat with screen-level journey tracking from the SDK, then matches it against keyword-level spend from Apple.

Find out which keywords pay for themselves.

Connect Apple Search Ads and RevenueCat. Keyword-level ROAS in your first sync.

No credit card. Live data in your first session.