It depends on one number — and the usual mistakes have nothing to do with keywords.
The honest answer is that it depends entirely on what a user is worth to you, and that most developers who try it never work that number out. They judge the campaigns on whether the cost per install "feels" high, which is a judgement with nothing behind it.
If an install earns you €6 over its life and costs €2 to buy, the ads are a machine that turns two euros into six and you should feed it. If an install earns you €0.40, no amount of keyword tuning will save it, and the problem is not the advertising.
Search intent. Somebody typing "sleep timer" into the App Store wants a sleep timer right now — they are not being interrupted, they are looking. That is a much shorter distance to an install than an ad shown to somebody scrolling a feed.
It is also one of the few channels where a small budget is not automatically wasted. You are not trying to outspend anyone for reach; you are buying a specific search from people already holding their phone in the App Store.
Four campaign types across five countries out of a small daily budget gives every one of them a fragment. None reaches the number of taps where its results start to mean something, so after a month you have spent real money and know nothing. One storefront funded properly beats five funded to a fraction each.
A keyword with twelve taps and no installs looks like a failure and is not evidence of one. At a true conversion rate of one in four, getting zero from twelve taps happens by chance often enough to be unremarkable. Pausing it is a coin toss dressed as a decision — and the same impatience keeps a genuinely bad term alive, because the account is being tuned on noise.
The opposite error is just as expensive: a term that has taken sixty taps and produced nothing is not "still learning". It has answered.
Without revenue connected, every decision is made on cost alone, and cost alone cannot tell you whether €3 an install is a bargain or a disaster. This is the single biggest difference between accounts that work and accounts that quietly drain.
An account set up well in January is not an account running well in March. Search terms drift, competitors arrive, and costs move. Most of the money wasted in Apple Search Ads is not wasted on a bad decision — it is wasted on a decision nobody revisited.
One storefront. Two campaigns — one bidding on terms you chose, one letting Apple find searches you did not think of. Enough budget that your keyword list can collect around fifty taps each inside a fortnight. Revenue connected, so the numbers mean something. Then leave it alone long enough to answer, which is the hardest part.
Enough that your keyword list can gather roughly fifty taps per keyword within a fortnight, because that is where conversion rates start to mean something. Ten keywords at fifty cents a tap is about eighteen euros a day. Less than that does not buy a slower answer, it buys no answer.
Expect a fortnight before the numbers are worth reading, and longer if your budget is small. New campaigns lose money at first while they find what converts; that is the cost of finding out, not a fault.
It is different rather than better. Apple Search Ads buys people who are already searching for what you do, so intent is high and the budget needed to learn is lower. Feed-based channels can create demand that search cannot, but usually need more money before the results mean anything.
No. The decisions are mostly arithmetic: what an install is worth, whether a keyword has had enough taps to judge, and where the budget is being wasted. What it does need is somebody looking every day, which is the part most developers cannot sustain.