Players explore, fight, and transform.
Wuthering Waves drives
high-quality conversions.

During the critical six weeks leading up to the game’s release, the Kuro Game team boosted visibility across the App Store with a multi-placement pre-order campaign. When a customer downloads a pre-order app, it’s automatically installed on their device once the app becomes available. With search results campaigns focusing on their brand terms and keywords expansion, the team captured strong early intent for their brand and drove awareness with relevant audiences. This approach complemented their integrated marketing efforts during the pre-order phase, helping them capture lower-funnel traffic, drive more registrations, and boost brand awareness for Wuthering Waves.

Today tab ads helped the Kuro Game team increase brand exposure with the broadest audience possible, placing their game prominently on the front page of the App Store. “Today tab ads are a vital customer acquisition placement that allowed our core users to see our app when they opened the App Store and convert immediately, expanding reach as well as cost-efficient growth,” says Kuro Game Global Marketing Director May Luo. “The cost per acquisition (CPA) of Today tab ads was 30 percent lower than all other media channels we used.”

To extend reach to more potential players, the team also invested in ads on the Search tab during the pre-order phase. “By running ads on the Search tab, we were able to increase brand visibility and strategically display our app to a vast pool of potential players before they narrowed in on specific searches,” says Luo. “This approach boosted search intent and consequently increased our conversion rates. We also saw that the CPA of Search tab ads was 20 percent lower compared to all other media platforms we used, making the return on investment more compelling.”

After running ads on the Today tab and Search tab, the daily search volume for the app’s brand keywords increased by more than 40 percent. “The multi-placement strategy across the App Store created a powerful synergy during the pre-order phase, helping drive 30 percent of the total iOS new-user downloads. The registration rate of users was 10 percent higher compared to other ad platforms we used,” says Luo.

After the pre-order phase, the team continued investing in all three ad placements across the App Store. For search result campaigns, they separated brand and nonbrand keywords, and further categorized keywords based on their relevance and potential for acquisition, reaching players actively searching for similar apps. With Search Match, they discovered new relevant search terms, driving keyword expansion and increased visibility with the right gamers. “With search results campaigns, we implemented specific bidding strategies based on conversion and postinstall performance, efficiently driving brand visibility,” says Luo.

To ensure the efficiency of the entire multi-placement strategy at each stage, the team closely monitored campaign performance and adjusted bidding based on ad impressions and cost-per-tap performance. For example, when launching a new version of the game, they actively optimized bids for their brand keywords, nonbrand keywords, Today tab, and Search tab campaigns to consistently maintain brand coverage and capture relevant traffic.

“By leveraging Apple Search Ads insights about evolving search trends, we were able to understand the market landscape and adjust our marketing strategies across platforms accordingly, enhancing our overall return on ad spend,” says Luo. “Our agency AppStare, who was instrumental in budget planning and cost optimization, helped us prepare these comprehensive advertising strategies and execute them diligently. With their timely data-driven optimization, we successfully increased impression share for brand keywords to 80 percent at optimal cost. Today and Search tab ads also drove over tens of millions of impression at costs below the industry average before and after official launch.”

To better engage different audiences and boost campaign performance, the team invested significant time and effort in ongoing optimization of custom product pages for their Apple Search Ads campaigns. “We constantly test creative including variables like concise promotional copy, showcasing stunning game scenes, and presenting unique artistic styles to attract core audience," says Luo. “With creative insights learned from those tests, we were able to tailor more compelling custom product pages for our campaigns, improving ad relevancy and conversions.”

During the pre-order phase, for example, the team aligned custom product pages with their marketing campaign theme for their Today tab ads, highlighting the game’s core selling points. This placed the main game character at the center of creative and the team adjusted the copy as well as color tone to match the character's design. After their creative optimization, the tap-through rate of of Today tab ads increased by 12 percent while the conversion rate increased by 10 percent.