App campaigns

  • App campaigns promote your app based on a specific area of focus.

  • Creating an App campaign involves specifying app info, campaign details, and targeting criteria, then creating an ad group and asset-based ads.

  • Google Ads automates targeting and bidding based on the specified goal and provided assets.

  • App Campaign Legacy (installs) is not supported in the Google Ads API, only in the UI.

App campaigns allow you to promote your app based on a specific area of focus. The campaign creation workflow differs slightly from other campaign types, and consists of the following high-level steps:

  1. Create a campaign, specifying your app information and the campaign's advertising channel sub-type, goal type, budget, and bidding strategy. You can also add targeting criteria such as languages or locations.
  2. Create an ad group. If the goal of the campaign is to drive in-app actions or in-app action value, you can also add ad group criteria for user lists.
  3. Create ads using the asset-based ad type that corresponds to your campaign's advertising channel sub-type.

Google Ads will automate targeting and bidding according to the specified goal and show ads based on the assets you provided.

Identify promoted apps

To retrieve a list of the mobile applications you are promoting through App campaigns, you can query the campaign resource. Use the fields campaign.app_campaign_setting.app_id and campaign.app_campaign_setting.app_store to get the application's ID and its store, such as Google Play Store or Apple App Store.

Here's an example GAQL query:

SELECT
  campaign.id,
  campaign.name,
  campaign.app_campaign_setting.app_id,
  campaign.app_campaign_setting.app_store
FROM campaign
WHERE campaign.advertising_channel_type = 'MULTI_CHANNEL'
  AND campaign.app_campaign_setting.app_id IS NOT NULL
  AND campaign.status != 'REMOVED'

This query will return the campaign ID, campaign name, app ID, and app store for all non-removed campaigns that have an associated app.

Next
Create campaign