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Towards Understanding iOS App Store Search Advertising: An Explorative Study

With millions of apps competing in the market, one major issue for app developers is to get their apps discovered by intended users. iOS App Store Search Advertisement (ASA) is a mechanism that provides app developers a chance to increasing the awareness of their apps within the iOS App Store by bidding related searching keywords. However, as one of the most efficient methods to promoting apps, ASA has not been touched by our research community, to the best of our knowledge. To fill the void, in this paper, we present the first large scale explorative study on understanding iOS app store search advertising. Specifically, we have created the first dataset on ASA promotion, covering over 47K popular apps across 22 categories and over 2.8 million ASA bidding keywords during the first week of 2021. Based on this dataset, we investigate the adoption of ASA in the wild and the characteristics of the bidding keywords. Furthermore, we created a large-scale app-keyword relation graph, based on which we infer the app competitive relations. We observed two types of app competitive relations, i.e., explicit competition that the advertised apps intended to attract users who search the corresponding target apps by embedding their names into the ASA keywords, and implicit competitions that apps share a large portion of bidding keywords with others. Our efforts reveal interesting implications to stakeholders in the mobile app ecosystem, including app markets and app developers, etc. our study is the first step towards understanding and improving the in-market mobile app promotion mechanisms.