Apple Search Ads: The London Budgeting Guide

I see this question all the time. "How much should I budget for Apple Search Ads in London?". It's the wrong question. It’s like asking how much a car costs. A Dacia isn't a Bugatti, and an ad for a simple utility app isn't going to cost the same as one for a high-stakes trading platform competing for attention in the City of London.

Most founders and marketers get obsessed with Cost-Per-Tap (CPT). They see a number and panic. But CPT is a vanity metric. It tells you almost nothing about the health of your business. You could have a CPT of £0.20, but if none of those users ever install your app or spend a penny, you're just lighting money on fire. The only number that truly matters is your Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA), and more importantly, how that CPA stacks up against what each user is actually worth to you over their lifetime (LTV).

So, let's get this sorted. Forget the generic advice. This is a no-nonsense guide to what Apple Search Ads actually cost in the UK's most competitive market, and how to build a budget that doesn't just spend money, but makes it.

So, What Do Apple Search Ads *Actually* Cost in London?

Alright, let's get the numbers out of the way. But remember the caveat: these are ballpark figures. Your actual costs will be unique to your app, your industry, and how well you manage your campaigns. In the UK, and especially in a dense urban market like London, the auction is fierce.

Here’s what I typically see from the campaigns we run:

• Cost-Per-Tap (CPT): You can expect this to range from £0.80 to £2.50. For hyper-competitive niches like fintech, gambling, or B2B software, it can easily climb higher. If you're seeing CPTs below this, you're either in a very low-competition niche or your ads aren't being shown for valuable terms.
• Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA or Cost-Per-Install): This is the one to watch. A good CPA in the UK can be anywhere from £2.00 to £15.00+. One app campaign we worked on achieved a CPA of under £2, but that was a mature campaign for a well-known brand. For a new app, you should brace yourself for the higher end of that range initially.

The gap between CPT and CPA is your tap-to-install conversion rate. If your CPT is £1.50 and your conversion rate is 20%, your CPA is a painful £7.50. This is why just looking at CPT is a mistake. You need to understand the whole picture. Use the calculator below to see how these two metrics are linked.

Why is London so pricey? Simple. It's where the money is. You have a huge concentration of high-value users and companies with deep pockets, all bidding against each other. The fintechs clustered around the City and Canary Wharf, the gaming studios, the big subscription apps—they can afford to pay a high CPA because their users are so valuable. You're not just competing against other apps in your category; you're competing against anyone who wants the attention of a Londoner with disposable income. Getting your advertising strategy right here is vital, as you can easily burn through cash if you don't know what you're doing. Many founders find their initial campaigns struggle, and a common issue is getting traffic that simply doesn't convert into profitable users because the targeting or offer is wrong for this market.

Why Is My App's Lifetime Value the Only Number That Matters?

This is where we move from just spending money to investing it. If you dont know what a customer is worth, how can you possibly know what you can afford to spend to acquire one? You cant. You're flying blind. Calculating your Lifetime Value (LTV) is the single most important bit of maths you can do before spending a single pound on ads.

It's not as complex as it sounds. You just need three pieces of data about your users:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): How much money does the average user bring in each month? (e.g., subscription fee, in-app purchases).
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit on that revenue after accounting for costs like App Store fees, server costs etc?
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of your users cancel or stop paying each month?

The formula is simple: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate.

Let's take a hypothetical London-based fitness app. Their subscription is £14.99/month. Their gross margin is 70% after Apple's cut and other costs. And they lose 8% of their users each month (8% churn).

LTV = (£14.99 * 0.70) / 0.08
LTV = £10.49 / 0.08 = £131.13

Suddenly, that £10 CPA doesn't look so scary, does it? It looks like a fantastic deal. This is the mindset shift. You stop asking "how can I get my CPA lower?" and start asking "how high can my CPA be while I'm still printing money?". A healthy business can often afford a 3:1 LTV to CPA ratio. In this case, they could afford to spend up to £43 to acquire a customer and still be in great shape. This is the financial logic that underpins all successful user acquisition, and something any founder needs to master. To get a better handle on this, you might want to look into how to properly measure and forecast your advertising ROI.

Use the calculator below to find your own LTV. Be brutally honest with your numbers.

How Should I Structure My Campaigns for the London Market?

Right, you know your target CPA. Now, how do you actually build campaigns to hit it? Tossing all your keywords into one campaign is a classic rookie mistake that guarantees you'll overpay. You need to segment. It gives you control, clarity, and allows you to allocate budget intelligently. This is non-negotiable.

We structure every client account using four core campaign types:

1. Brand Campaign: This targets your own app name and variations. It's defensive. The goal is to stop competitors from bidding on your name and stealing users who are already looking for you. CPTs and CPAs here should be rock bottom. It's the cheapest traffic you'll ever get.
2. Competitor Campaign: This is where you go on the attack. You bid on the names of your direct competitors. It's more expensive and confrontational, but you can steal high-intent users right from under their noses. This is especially effective in a crowded market like London.
3. Generic Campaign: This targets broad, problem/solution-aware keywords (e.g., "budgeting app," "learn spanish"). This is for discovery – finding new users who don't know you exist yet. It will have the highest CPT and CPA, but it's where you find scale.
4. Discovery Campaign (with Search Match): This is your R&D department. You let Apple's "Search Match" algorithm find relevant search terms for you based on your app's metadata. You then take the winning keywords from here and move them into your other campaigns, and add the junk as negative keywords.

This structure prevents your high-cost discovery keywords from inflating the average cost of your low-cost brand keywords. It lets you see exactly what's working and what isn't. For a deeper look into this kind of strategy, our guide on user acquisition for UK app campaigns covers this in more detail.

How Much Should I Actually Budget to Start?

This is where the rubber meets the road. You can't test a wierd new idea with £5 a day and expect to get anywhere. You'll get a handful of taps, no installs, and conclude "Apple Ads don't work". You need to commit enough budget to get statistically significant data. The algorithm needs data to learn, and you need data to make smart decisions.

My rule of thumb is this: your initial test budget for any given campaign should be enough to generate at least 50-100 conversions. A conversion being an install in this case. So, if your target CPA, based on your LTV calculations, is £8, you need to be prepared to spend £400 - £800 on *each campaign* you want to test properly. Yes, each one.

Trying to do it on the cheap is a false economy. You'll spend less overall, but you'll learn nothing and have to start over. It's better to spend £1,000 on a properly structured test that gives you a clear "yes" or "no," than to dribble away £500 over two months and be none the wiser. I remember one B2B SaaS client in the medical recruitment space. Their initial CPA was over £100. We got it down to £7, but that only happened because we had the budget to test different approaches properly until we found what clicked. The same principle applies here.

If you have a smaller budget, don't try to run all four campaign types at once. Start with a Brand campaign (it's cheap and protects you) and one Generic campaign targeting your most important keywords. Prove the model there first, then expand. For more specific guidance on this, our breakdown of budgeting for Apple Search Ads in the UK provides a framework for this.

Budgeting isn't a one-time decision. It's a constant process of analysis and reallocation. You move money from the campaigns and keywords that don't work to the ones that do. This is why having a clear structure and sufficient starting budget is so important – it provides the clarity you need to make those decisions confidently. If you're finding this part difficult, it might be worth looking at a general guide on how to stop wasting money on ads to get the fundamentals right.

Your Action Plan To Acheive This

Talking about this stuff is one thing, doing it is another. It can feel overwhelming, especially in a tough market like London. But you can definately make it work if you're methodical. Don't try to do everything at once. Follow a phased approach.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

Getting Apple Search Ads to work in London is tough, but it's far from impossible. The founders who succeed aren't the ones who find a magic "low CPT" secret. They're the ones who do the hard work upfront: they understand their unit economics, they build a logical campaign structure, and they commit the resources needed to test properly.

It requires a level of focus and expertise that many founding teams simply don't have the time for. You're busy building a product, hiring a team, and running a business. Becoming a full-time paid acquisition expert on top of that is a huge ask. This is often where working with a specialist can make the difference between burning through your seed round and building a sustainable growth engine.

If you're serious about making Apple Search Ads a key growth channel for your app in the UK and want a pair of expert eyes on your strategy, we offer a free, no-obligation consultation. We'll go through your app, your goals, and give you honest, actionable advice based on our experience running campaigns for dozens of apps just like yours. There's no hard sell, just a genuine conversation to see if we can help.