Apple’s new App Store ad slots made taps cheaper and the bill bigger. Since extra search-result placements reached the US in late March 2026, cost per tap fell four to six percent on brand, generic, and competitor campaigns, according to AppTweak’s Apple Ads benchmarks.
Taps rose faster than the price fell. Worked through, spend is up about three percent for brand, seven for competitor, and 39 percent for discovery.
Brand is the one to watch. Apple says nearly 65 percent of App Store downloads follow a search, a 2022 figure, and the new ads sit inside those results. The iPhone maker didn’t raise the price per tap. It added more ad placements, so defending your app’s name costs a little more.
What Apple Changed
Billing for app ads didn’t change. But more ads now compete for each search, and advertisers have no say over where theirs lands. Apple announced the extra ads in December 2025. They began March 3, 2026 in the UK, then Japan, with every other market due by the end of March, according to Apple’s email to developers, as reported by PPC Land. They need iOS and iPadOS 26.2 or later.
Advertisers can’t pick a position or bid for one. Billing stays on cost per tap or cost per install. Top-of-search ads convert at more than 60 percent on average, based on data from November 2024 through October 2025.
The platform weighs relevance and bids. An app has to fit the query to enter the auction, “regardless of how much you may be willing to pay,” the company says, and a poor match doesn’t enter at all.
Advertisers can prepare ad variations for audiences and keyword themes. Without them, default ads are built from the product page. Ad slots have grown in steps since Today tab ads in 2022.
Taps Grew Faster Than Cost per Tap Fell
AppTweak looked at US app advertisers in search results, comparing the 28 days before and after March 25, 2026.
- Brand campaigns’ cost per tap (CPT) dropped 4.4 percent, and taps climbed 8.1 percent, raising estimated spend by about 3.3 percent.
- Generic CPT fell 5.6 percent while taps rose 10.1 percent, so estimated spend rose 3.9 percent.
- Competitor CPT fell 5.5 percent while taps rose 12.8, so estimated spend rose 6.6.
- Discovery CPT fell 1.9 percent while taps rose 41.6, so estimated spend rose 38.9.
Estimated spend is calculated as taps times CPT, so it is a modeled figure rather than billed spend. Impressions also rose, from 6.2 percent for brand to 44.9 percent for discovery.
Cost per install moved differently. It fell 2.6 percent for brand, 3.8 for generic and 1.7 for competitor, and rose 4.3 percent for discovery. The bill grew because volume grew. Installs got cheaper in three of the four types.
Run the Same Arithmetic on Your Account
Pull two 28-day windows from your Apple Ads reports, one before and one after your market got the extra slots. AppTweak’s US comparison started on March 25, and every market was due to have the slots by the end of March.
Run the steps for each campaign type, using brand as the example. CPT fell 4.4 percent, which is -0.044. Add 1, and you get 0.956. Taps rose 8.1 percent, so that’s 1.081. Multiply the two and subtract 1. The result is 0.033, or about 3.3 percent more spend.
Conversion uses the same steps, with installs against taps. Brand installs rose 5.5 percent, so divide 1.055 by 1.081 and you get 0.976. Anything under 1 means taps converted worse, and here it’s about 2.4 percent worse. If your numbers are far off the US ones in this piece, check for a budget change, a new keyword, or an app update first.
Brand Taps Outgrew Brand Installs
Brand installs rose 5.5 percent, but taps climbed 8.1 percent, so each tap converted about two percent worse than before. That gap fits how brand searches work. Someone searching for an app by name is already looking for it, which means some of the extra taps may be visits that would have reached the product page anyway. The data can’t say how many.
Even so, brand is still the cheapest app campaign. Its median cost per install is $2.84, versus $5.31 for generic and $6.78 for competitor campaigns, and it leads both conversion (73.5 percent) and tap-through (25.3 percent).
That is why a rise of about three percent is easy to justify, since it buys the best traffic in the account. Skipping brand defense to save that money is probably the riskiest cut a small studio can make.
Competitor campaigns carry the highest median cost per install, $6.78. Discovery took most of the new reach, with impressions up 44.9 percent, yet it also got pricier per install (up 4.3 percent) and converts worst of the four, at 44.5 percent.
Small Studios Need to Check Weekly Now
One brand campaign checked once a month was enough when a single slot sat above the results. With ads mixed into the results, bids, custom product pages (alternate versions of the store page), and brand defense need weekly attention.
Custom product pages are worth checking, since apps using one converted 58.7 percent of taps versus 55.5 percent on the default page, yet 61 percent of apps ran none. Block 20 minutes on the same day each week. That leaves room for three tasks.
- Compare brand taps and installs with the previous week.
- Read the discovery search terms and move proven ones to exact match.
- Check which custom product page serves each keyword group.
Some developers hand Apple Ads to a digital advertising agency that already runs their Google and Meta campaigns, rather than learning a second auction from scratch.
Organic Traffic Isn’t in the Data
AppTweak’s comparison can’t show what the extra slots did to organic traffic, since organic traffic isn’t part of it. It has other limits worth keeping in mind too.
- It’s a before-and-after comparison with no control group.
- Seasonality plays a small part. Its 2025 data put brand CPT 3.3 percent below its annual average in February and 5.4 percent below in April, a drift of about two points.
- The sample is advertisers connected to AppTweak, which sells Apple Ads software, so it doesn’t cover the whole App Store.
- It doesn’t say how many extra taps came from the new slots.
Together, these make the spend figures a direction rather than a measurement, so your own account’s before-and-after numbers are the better test.
Where Your Cost per Install Should Sit Against the US Median
The 2025 benchmarks, collected before the extra slots arrived, put US search results medians at $1.91 per tap and $4.06 per install, with 55 percent conversion and a 6.6 percent tap-through rate.
Cost per install swings widely by category, from $1.33 for Shopping to $26.70 for Sports, while Games sits at $4.63.
The country and category figures come from different advertisers, so they can’t be compared directly, which makes the Games number the right one for a games studio. Either way, these medians are the baseline, and the figure worth watching is how far your own account drifts from them.
