Rethinking my Indie App Advertising

From Apple Ads to Reddit Ads

Apple Search Ads seems like the default ‘paid acquisition’ route for the Indie developer, but for all of the people I know who use them, I can’t remember hearing of anyone who’s found them particularly satisfying. For a long time, I’ve been stuck putting money into Apple Search Ads, without a lot of context to understand whether my results were reasonable, and thinking of it as a necessary evil.

This month, I finally tried something new.

I’ve been running a series of Reddit ads for Bills to Budget, and the results were pretty surprising. This post is a breakdown of what I’ve tried, what’s worked, and what I’m doing next.

My History with Apple Search Ads

I’ve been running Apple Search Ads for years. I’ve taken their training courses, tweaked campaign types, followed best practices, and still walked away frustrated.

For the last year, my campaign has consisted of four Ad Groups - Discovery, Brand, Competitor, and Category - just like Apple (and most Search Ad guides) recommend. Here’s a good primer on that structure, for anyone unfamiliar. I’ve also experimented with small launch campaigns, putting budget behind a few targeted keywords.

But despite following the playbook, Apple Search Ads has always felt like a black hole, with expensive clicks, limited reach, no sense of momentum and very little control.

The Google Ads Detour

Before Reddit, I dabbled with Google Ads for about six months. It seemed like it would be simple - just text ads, right?

Nope. The Google Ads interface is utterly inscrutable to me, with important data scattered across tabs and panels. I ultimately was able to run campaigns on two separate occasions earlier this year, but my impressions were nearly zero. My clicks were actually zero. Not a great start.

Before diving too deeply into Google Ads, I had it in my head that I needed to configure my tracking. For Apps on the AppStore, that means integration with a company that can help manage Apple’s SKAN tracking framework. I didn’t want to include the Firebase SDK in my app, since if I ever expanded to other platforms like Meta, I’d need to include their SDK as well - it felt like a slippery slope that would add up fast. I ended up integrating with AppsFlyer as my MMP (Mobile Measurement Partner. I think?), with the theory that they could help track ads across any platforms.

But SKAN itself is complicated, especially at low volumes. It requires sending in-app events like it’s your analytics tool, and creating maps of your events to ‘customer value’, just to measure the success of your campaigns. And even if you do all that, Apple only posts a small sample of your data if your volume is too low. In the end, I got nothing useful, and wasted months.

The Breakthrough: Deep Dish Swift '25

At Deep Dish Swift, I had a few conversations with others that have had some success with paid acquisition, including Ryan Ashcraft, creator of the excellent FoodNoms. He mentioned that he had been running an ad on Reddit - on option that I had never considered. The ad was simple, but I could immediately see it as being effective - just a simple in-app animation with an appropriate title. It looked just like any other post on Reddit (with the ‘Promoted’ tag, of course), including the ability for people to comment on it

Something clicked for me.

I can already make content like this, of course - I do this all the time for support posts, and it’s what I (sporadically) post on social media. Creating ad videos doesn’t need to be complicated - in fact, simple was probably better in a lot of cases.

As a bonus, posting these ads could help build my social media presence. I’ve always struggled to post consistently, but if these ads doubled as semi-regular content, I’d be showing up in front of users, without having to hustle for daily posts.

It’s worth noting that I’ve always had a bit of a hate/hate relationship with Reddit. Years ago, when I was first starting to promote an app here, I was permanently banned from a Subreddit after two posts - I’m pretty sure most Indie Developer who have heard Reddit is a great place to find users know this feeling 😜. But Subreddits are full of focused, like-minded users - a perfect match for the right ad.

Later during Deep Dish, I caught Jordan Morgan’s talk on what he calls Vibe Marketing, which echoed the same ideas: simple creativity, AI-assisted iteration, and fast feedback, but he added a key ingredient for me - low-friction tracking. His recipe: a simple spreadsheet to ensure you’re not spending more than you bring in, taken directly from AppStore Connect, and Meta’s Dashboard (in his case, he was using Meta’s platform for advertising). Here’s his excellent summary of the talk, which you should all go read!

The First Reddit Ad Test

I took the $10/day I was already spending on Apple and redirected it to Reddit. I created a u/BillsToBudget account, wrote some simple ad copy:

"End the bill panic. Know what’s due, what’s safe to spend, and what’s next."

… and recorded a basic screen capture of the app in action. No animated text. No music. Not even any device borders. Just the app.

To ensure that my ads were as targeted as possible, I used the ‘Advanced Create’ option, and set ‘App Installs’ as my campaign objective, which will only display on mobile devices, and even let me select the appropriate OS versions.

I ran it in Subreddits where I thought my audience lived, using Reddit’s automated targeting.

By the next day, I knew I was onto something.

• Impressions: Apple: ~75/day. Reddit: Over 17,000 on day one.

• Clicks (page views): Apple: 6/day. Reddit: 59.

• Installs: Apple and Reddit were tied at 4 each. This made some sense, as Apple Search Ad users are already looking to download an app, and are therefore high intent users, but at least I was breaking even here.

These numbers were easily big enough to see in AppStore Connect, so I dove in, and realized I could even track downloads and sales! In Analytics, instead of grouping ‘By Date’, you can group ‘By App Referrer’ - since all of my ads were only being shown on iOS devices, this ended up being a nice way to track the success of my campaign without needing to deal with SKAN at all. This is data I don’t even get from Apple Search Ads!

The Metrics

Here’s a summary of how the first three weeks of May went, as compared to the entire month of April using Apple Search Ads. My daily spend fluctuated a bit, as I ran a few experiments, so absolute numbers aren’t easy to compare, but I can provide numbers proportional to my spend here. As you can see, my day-1 numbers were just a start - it got better from there.

eCPM (effective Cost Per Mille… er… Thousand):

• Apple: $141.43

• Reddit: $0.47 (~300x lower 🤯)

CPC (Cost Per Click):

• Apple: $1.59

• Reddit: $0.70 (~2.3x lower)

CPA (Cost Per Acquisition/Download):

• Apple: $4.36

• Reddit: $0.82 (~5.3x lower)

Organic Side Effects

Interestingly, these volume numbers seem to be high enough to have had a small but meaningful impact on the keywords I’ve been tracking. As you can see by these graphs, taken from AppFigures, my important keyword ranking went slightly up, and have stayed more stable since running my Reddit Ads.

Keyword Tracking - April vs. May

What’s Next?

Iteration

This ad format feels like something I can experiment with - it’s easy to create new Ad Groups with different videos, or even just different headings. Compare that with Apple Search Ads, which just show your first 2 or 3 screenshots, and there’s much more control here.

Note for anyone interested in following - if you’ve been running an ad for a few days/weeks, and want to add a second as an experiment, you’ll want to create a new Ad Group, and split your budget, otherwise, your first ad (which Reddit knows has a particular success rate) will take the vast majority of the spend. Creating a second Ad Group will help prevent your new variants from being starved.

Driving Down CPA

$0.82 per user - as good as it is compared to Apple Search Ads - is still higher than my Average Revenue Per User (The strangely pronounced ‘ARPU’), and not something I can scale endlessly, but I’m happy to keep experimenting. Organic installs help balance it out, and as mentioned, Reddit ads have boosted some App Store keyword rankings as well, so the benefit is pretty clear, at least for now.

Keyword Influence

One interesting possible upside of Apple Search Ads is that they’re tied directly to App Store keywords - it stands to reason that spending on specific keywords may have an impact on the rankings of those keywords. I’m running a small experiment now that focuses on only three keywords to see if paid clicks translate into any improvement here - early results are unclear, but I’m sticking with it through at least the end of the month. I may need to simply put more money into the keywords, or bring my focus down to one keyword to see a difference.

Looking Beyond Reddit

Now that Reddit is de-mystified, I feel more confident trying other platforms - Meta, TikTok, etc. I’ll need to grow the ad budget first, but I no longer feel locked into just Apple.

Scaling?

If I’m successful in finding a mix that pushes the CPA down to levels that are below my ARPU, then scaling this up is a possibility! At that point, it will require a lot more rigor around tracking, and probably a deeper dive back into SKAN - that will be a problem I’ll be happy to have, though!

Should you give it a try?

If you’re an Indie Developer who’s already spending some money on Apple Search Ads - or has done in the past - but not sure if it’s paying off, I don’t see a downside here. I would highly recommend checking out Jordan Morgan’s thoughts on Vibe Marketing, linked above, and keep it simple to start - don’t over think it, just try something and move forward!