Apple Ad Repository Scraper

This is an Apify actor that scrapes advertising data from the Apple Ad Repository. It utilizes Crawlee and Playwright.

What is the Apple Search Ads Repository?

The Apple Search Ads Repository is a library of ads that apps in European countries are running. It's a comprehensive resource designed to help you understand and optimize your app's performance on the Apple Search Ads platform, but only European countries are featured.

What can you find in the Apple Search Ads Repository?

In this centralized hub of ads, you can explore and analyze the creative assets, keywords, and performance data from your or other app ads.

• Creative Sets: View the range of creative assets—screenshots, videos, app previews—used in ads. This allows you to see what’s currently driving engagement and where there might be room for improvement.
• Performance Data: Access key performance metrics such as impressions, taps, downloads, and cost-per-tap (CPT). These insights are invaluable for understanding how your ads are performing and where to allocate your budget for the best results.
• Keyword Insights: Discover which keywords are generating the most traffic and conversions. This data is crucial for refining your keyword strategy and ensuring that you’re targeting the most effective search terms.
• Competitor Analysis: See what your competitors are doing. By examining their creative assets and keywords, you can gain insights into the strategies that are working for them—and then tailor your own campaigns accordingly.
• Ad Variants and A/B Testing: Learn from different ad variants and their performance data. This helps you understand which creatives resonate best with your target audience, guiding your future in-app A/B testing ideas.

Why the Apple Search Ads Repository Matters

Here’s why it’s a critical tool for app marketers:

• Optimization: By analyzing the data available in the repository, you can make informed decisions that optimize your ad spend, improve conversion rates, and reduce customer acquisition costs.
• Benchmarking: The repository provides benchmarks for how other apps in your category are performing. This allows you to measure your campaigns against industry standards and identify areas for improvement.
• Creative Inspiration: Viewing the creative assets used by others can spark new ideas for your own campaigns, helping you craft ads that capture attention and drive downloads.

Search Options Available in the Apple Search Ads Repository

The repository offers several search options that make it easier to find the data you need. You can search by:

• App Name or Developer Name: Quickly find the ads and data associated with a specific app or developer.
• Specific Country in the EU: Focus your search on ads running in a particular country within the European Union, allowing for more targeted analysis.
• Time Period: Choose to view data from the last 90 days, 180 days, or the last year, giving you flexibility in your analysis and trend tracking.

Number of App Store Users by Country

Here’s the 2023's breakdown of App Store users by country:

• Germany — 28 million
• France — 24 million
• Italy — 14 million
• Spain — 11 million
• Netherlands — 8 million
• Sweden — 6 million
• Poland — 5 million
• Belgium — 4 million
• Denmark — 4 million
• Austria — 3 million
• Czechia — 2 million
• Finland — 2 million
• Greece — 2 million
• Hungary — 2 million
• Ireland — 2 million
• Portugal — 2 million
• Romania — 2 million
• Bulgaria — Under 1 million
• Croatia — Under 1 million
• Cyprus — Under 1 million
• Estonia — Under 1 million
• Latvia — Under 1 million
• Lithuania — Under 1 million
• Luxembourg — Under 1 million
• Malta — Under 1 million
• Slovakia — Under 1 million
• Slovenia — Under 1 million

This data is a valuable resource when planning your Apple Search Ads campaigns. By understanding where the largest user bases are, you can better allocate your resources to target the most promising markets.

How to Use the Apple Search Ads Repository to Boost Your Campaigns

With these features and data points in mind, let’s explore how you can leverage the Apple Search Ads Repository to supercharge your app marketing efforts:

• Refine Your Creative Strategy: Start by using the search options to explore creative sets for your app or competitors. Identify which visuals and messaging are driving the highest engagement and consider incorporating similar elements into your own ads. For instance, if Babbel’s custom product page screenshots are performing well, analyze why and apply those insights to your creatives.
• Optimize Your Keywords: Dive into the keyword insights provided by the repository. Focus on the keywords that are delivering the best results and consider adjusting your bids to maximize visibility. If a particular keyword is underperforming, reallocate your budget to more effective search terms.
• Target the Right Markets: Use the App Store user data by country to prioritize your ad spend and localization efforts. For example, with 28 million users in Germany, you might decide to focus heavily on German localization and marketing to capture a significant share of that market.
• Learn from Competitors: Regularly check the repository for competitor ads and strategies. By staying informed about what’s working for others in your industry, you can adapt and refine your own campaigns to stay competitive.
• Test and Optimize Continuously: The repository is a goldmine for A/B testing insights. Use it to track how different ad variants are performing over time, and apply those learnings to continuously optimize your campaigns.

Use Cases

This actor can be used to:

• Monitor Competitor Ads: Track the advertisements that your competitors are running on the Apple platform. This includes identifying which apps are actively advertising, the creatives they use, and their chosen ad formats.
• Analyze Ad Trends: Collect historical data on ads to identify trends in ad content, placement, and targeting. Observe how these trends change over time and across different regions.
• Market Research: Gain valuable insights into how apps are being marketed across various countries and regions. Understand regional preferences in ad creatives, app positioning, and overall messaging.
• Optimize Ad Campaigns:
  • Category Bid Analysis: Analyze the competitive landscape within specific app categories and geographies. Estimate current and potential future bid rates by examining the first and latest impression data of competitor ads. This allows you to strategically adjust your bidding strategies.
  • Bid Rate Understanding: Evaluate how campaign durations (indicated by first and last impressions) correlate with bid rate fluctuations.
  • Targeting and Format Analysis: Evaluate which targeted screens and ad formats are most commonly used by competitors, giving insights on which ones are working most effectively.
  • Creative Inspiration: Generate creative ideas for visuals and ad copy by examining successful competitor ads.
  • Competitive Positioning: Analyze competitor positioning to refine your own app's messaging and bidding strategies, identify niches, and exploit opportunities in different categories.
  • A/B testing idea generation: Scrape competitor ads to generate A/B testing ideas.
• Compliance Monitoring: Ensure that your own ads and those of your partners adhere to the relevant legal and ethical standards by comparing your ads with others within your industry.
• Data-Driven Ad Optimization: Leverage scraped data to optimize your overall advertising strategy by refining targeting, messaging, and budgeting. This will enable more efficient and effective campaigns.

How the Actor Works

The actor performs the following steps:

1. Initial Setup:

   • The actor starts by navigating to the Apple Ad Repository URL specified in the startUrls.
   • It uses the inputSchema file to validate the input parameters.
   • It then reads the environment variables that you provide in the Apify actor user interface.

2. Filtering Ads:

   • It populates the filter form with the user input provided in the environment variables, which are:
     • DEVELOPER_OR_APP: (Optional) Filters ads by a specific developer or app name.
     • COUNTRY_OR_REGION: (Required) Filters ads by a specific country or region. This must be one of the following values:

       1Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia,
       2Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg,
       3Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden
       

     • DATE_RANGE: (Required) Filters ads by a specific date range. This must be one of the following values:

       Last 90 days, Last 180 Days, Last Year
       

   • It applies the filters.

3. Extracting Ad Cards:

   • The actor scrapes all the ad cards from the page, which contain information such as:
     • Picture
     • App Name
     • Developer
     • Legal Name
     • Placement
     • Format
     • Country or Region
     • Parameters
     • First Impression
     • Latest Impression
   • The ad card information is saved into the Apify dataset.

4. Extracting Ad Details:

   • For each ad card, the actor clicks the "View Ad Details" button.
   • It navigates to the ad details page and scrapes:
     • The full image of the ad
     • All the text content on that page.
   • This ad detail information is also saved to the Apify dataset.

5. Data Output:

   • All extracted data (ad cards and ad details) is stored in the Apify dataset for further analysis and export.

Example Output

Here is an example of the JSON output that the scraper produces:

1[
2    {
3        "app": "#livetoski",
4        "developer": "Fischer Sports GMBH",
5        "legalName": "Fischer Sports GmbH",
6        "placement": "Search Results",
7        "format": "Icon + Asset Ad",
8        "country": "Italy",
9        "parameters": "None",
10        "firstImpression": "10 December 2024",
11        "latestImpression": "02 January 2025"
12    },
13    {
14        "app": "1 GB - İnternet Kazan",
15        "developer": "1GB APP COMPANY DMCC",
16        "legalName": "1GB APP COMPANY DMCC",
17        "placement": "Search Results",
18        "format": "Icon + Asset Ad",
19        "country": "Italy",
20        "parameters": "None",
21        "firstImpression": "27 December 2024",
22        "latestImpression": "02 January 2025"
23    }
24]

###Integrations

Can I integrate Apple Ad Repository Scraper with other apps?

Yes. The Apple Ad Repository Scraper can be connected with almost any cloud service or web app thanks to integrations on the Apify platform. You can integrate your Apple Ads data with visualization tools like Looker, Databox, and Funnel via API. Furthermore, integrations with Zapier, Slack, Make, Airbyte, GitHub, Google Sheets, Asana, LangChain, and more are also available.

You can also use webhooks to carry out an action whenever an event occurs, for example, get a notification whenever Apple Ad Repository Scraper successfully finishes a run.

Can I use Apple Ad Repository Scraper as its own API?

Yes, you can use the Apify API to access Apple Ad Repository Scraper programmatically. The API allows you to manage, schedule, and run Apify actors, access datasets, monitor performance, get results, create and update actor versions, and more.

To access the API using Node.js, you can use the apify-client NPM package. To access the API using Python, you can use the apify-client PyPI package.

For detailed information and code examples, see the API tab or refer to the Apify API documentation.

Can I use this Apple Ad Repository Scraper API in Python?

Yes, you can use the Apify API with Python. To access the Apple Ad Repository Scraper API with Python, use the apify-client PyPI package. You can find more details about the client in our Python Client documentation.

###Additional Notes

Error Handling: The actor includes basic error handling but can be improved with additional try...catch blocks.

Scalability: Apify can be used to scale this actor if you need to scrape large amounts of data or run it frequently.

Data Storage: The scraped data is stored in the Apify dataset by default. You can configure your actor to save this data to other storage options.

Rate Limiting: The actor doesn't implement custom rate limiting. Please be mindful of the Apple Ad Repository's terms of service and limits when running.

###Ethical Considerations

Public Data: This actor scrapes publicly available data from the Apple Ad Repository. However, it is important to be mindful of Apple's Terms of Service and avoid excessive scraping that could strain their servers.

Data Usage: Use the scraped data responsibly and ethically. Avoid using the data for malicious purposes, and ensure compliance with all applicable privacy regulations. Be transparent about your data collection practices.