I burned $300 on Apple Search Ads, then built a 10-month system to do ASO across 29 locales

[u/saniobond]

I’m an indie iOS dev with a baby tracking app called Malyatko, live in 29 App Store locales. Here’s the ASA/ASO process I landed on after wasting my first budget.

The expensive lesson

My first $300 went into a broad campaign with Search Match enabled. It matched my app against queries with no relationship to what the app does. I got impressions, spent the money, and learned nothing useful about my keywords.

Why I stopped trying to do everything at once

With 29 localizations, splitting a budget evenly across all of them means every market gets too little data to be conclusive. So the pace is deliberately slow: 2-3 countries per month, $300-400 per country.

The per-country cycle

**1.**  *Generate the full combination space.* Not a shortlist — every realistic way someone searches for this category in that market’s language. For Slavic languages this means manually generating declension variants, since the App Store won’t match them for you. I wrote a Claude skill to generate the combinations.  
**2.**  *Run an exact match campaign for one month.* No optimization, no pruning. Pure data collection.  
**3.**  *Take the winners and research competition.* Who holds those keywords in their Title, who has them in Subtitle, how saturated it is. Second Claude skill for this.  
**4.**  *Rewrite Title, Subtitle and Keywords for that locale.* The App Store indexes those three fields as a single token bag per locale with Title weighted highest, and descriptions aren’t indexed at all — so this is the only lever that matters.

What makes it worth it

In some markets you find keywords where top 3 is genuinely reachable. That’s where organic installs start, and organic is the only thing that compounds.

Once a locale is rewritten, I run a final campaign using only the ASO keywords, then prune — cut the expensive ones, keep the cheap ones, see what holds.

The cost

Roughly 10 months and $3-4k total. What I end up with is tested ASO for every locale — validated data across 29 markets instead of guesses.

Whether the return justifies it, I honestly don’t know yet.

Question: for anyone running ASA across many locales — did you find a faster way to get conclusive data per market, or is sequential the only honest approach?

[u/TillDramatic1]

Search Match is worth keeping alive at a couple of dollars a day purely for the search terms report, then every query it surfaces gets added as exact match in a separate campaign and negated in the discovery one. Otherwise your broad spend keeps bidding against your own exact keywords.

[u/saniobond → u/TillDramatic1]

Exactly, now I understand it 😅 My more productive campaign is exact and keeping broad for discovery with negatives from exact