Guide
Apple Search Ads automation: when to change budgets, pause, and add negatives
Most Apple Ads automation is a list of rules: if cost per install is over the target, lower the budget; if a keyword has no installs, pause it. Writing the rule is the easy part. The hard part is knowing when the numbers are strong enough to act on — a keyword with two taps and no installs has told you almost nothing, and pausing it is a guess.
This is how we automate our own Apple Ads campaigns, and what the automation is not allowed to do. Every number below is read from the engine that runs them.
What an automation can change in Apple Ads
Through the API, Loop makes these changes to Apple Ads campaigns:
- Raise or lower a campaign's daily budget.
- Pause or resume a campaign.
- Pause or re-enable keywords.
- Add negative keywords to a campaign.
- Move a campaign's end date, or start a copy of a campaign that has ended.
Apple Ads bids sit on ad groups and keywords, not on the campaign. A decision made about a campaign's cost cannot be turned into one bid without picking which ad group pays for it, so Loop does not change Apple Ads bids from campaign numbers. It moves budget, pauses, and adds negatives instead.
When the numbers can be acted on
Every verdict compares a campaign with one reference: the average cost per result of your other paid channels in the same window, or your cap if that is lower.
Results arrive by chance, so the verdict reads a 90% range for the true cost, not the single number. A campaign is called wasteful only when even the cheap end of that range is 1.5× the reference or more, and efficient only with at least 5 results and the expensive end at 1.2× the reference or less.
A pause is proposed only when the whole window and the last 28 days both say wasteful, and the cost is 3× the reference or more. Below that, the budget is cut first. A raise needs both windows to say efficient. Anything else waits, with a note of how much more spend would settle it.
Search terms that never install
Loop reads each campaign's search terms over 30 days. A term becomes a negative-keyword candidate when it has taps and no installs, and the campaign's own tap-to-install rate says it should have brought at least 3 installs by now — about a 5% chance of zero by luck.
A term whose spend has not reached your target cost per install is left alone, and so are terms that are already negatives, terms you bid on, and terms that contain your product's name.
At most 20 terms go into one proposal, so one person can check them on one screen. Nothing is added until it is approved.
Limits on every change
By default every change waits for your approval. If you turn on Autopilot and accept its limits, it may change budgets on its own — within these bounds:
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Size of one change | 15% by default (you can set 5%–20%) |
| Changes per campaign | 1 per day, 72 hours apart |
| Changes per workspace | 10 per day |
| Budget raises on one campaign | 30% in total over any 7 days |
| Account total | Never above the daily cap you set |
| Stops on its own | When spend runs 50% over plan, or 3 changes fail at the platform in a day |
Autopilot never creates a campaign, pauses one for performance, or changes bid strategy — those always go to a person. Before a budget is written, Loop asks Apple for the campaign's current budget; if someone changed it after the proposal was made, the change is refused instead of overwriting theirs.
Checking whether the change worked
Each change is measured afterwards with the platform's own numbers: 7 days before against 7 days after, minus what your other campaigns did over the same days, so a market-wide shift is not credited to the change.
Measurement skips the days the platform spends relearning (3 days after a budget change, 7 after a bid change), waits 3 more days for late attributions, and gives no verdict unless each window has at least 10 conversions.
When the same kind of change has hurt 2 times — and more often than it helped — in the last 10 measured, Autopilot stops making it on its own and sends it for approval.
If your automation is a script
Apple turns off the v5 campaign API on January 26, 2027. A bidding script or rule tool that still calls v5 stops on that day.
What changes in the Platform API →
Check your code in the browser →
Running it with Loop
Loop connects to Apple Ads, Google Ads, Meta and other ad accounts, applies the rules above every day, and puts each change in front of you with the numbers behind it. You approve it, or let Autopilot make the budget changes inside the limits.
Free trial. No credit card to begin.