What's a Good Apple Search Ads Popularity Score? A Decision Framework

Popularity alone doesn't answer the question you're actually asking

'Is this a good popularity score' is really two questions collapsed into one: does this term have enough real demand to matter, and given that demand, is the difficulty of ranking for it accessible to my app right now. A popularity score in isolation, without a difficulty read and without knowing your app's current authority, doesn't tell you whether a keyword is worth a metadata slot.

The generic thresholds — below 25 is weak, 25-50 is solid, above 65 is high demand — are a reasonable starting orientation, but the actual decision depends on pairing that number with difficulty and with your app's stage.

A framework by app stage

Pre-launch or under 100 ratings: prioritize popularity above 25 paired with difficulty under 40. At this stage, difficulty accessibility matters more than chasing the highest popularity you can find, since you have no ranking authority to compete on a harder term regardless of its demand.

100-1,000 ratings: the accessible difficulty ceiling rises to roughly 55. This is typically the stage where a portfolio strategy — several popularity-30-to-50 terms at accessible difficulty — starts to outproduce chasing any single high-popularity term.

1,000-10,000 ratings: difficulty up to 65 becomes realistic for well-targeted metadata, and it's worth starting to test one or two higher-popularity, higher-difficulty terms in the subtitle or name, since your app now has enough engagement signal to compete meaningfully.

Above 10,000 ratings: difficulty in the 70+ range is worth pursuing for terms with genuinely high popularity, provided your conversion rate and retention are also strong — remember that ranking is a multiplication of relevance, conversion, retention, and velocity, not relevance alone.

When a lower-popularity term is the better choice

A term with popularity 30 and difficulty 35 frequently produces more actual installs, sooner, than a term with popularity 60 and difficulty 75 that you rank 30th for. Position matters enormously — a top-3 ranking on a moderate-demand term reliably outperforms a buried ranking on a high-demand one.

This is the core argument for scoring your full candidate list rather than cherry-picking the handful of highest-popularity terms and stopping there. The best decision is usually visible only once you can compare the full spread of popularity-difficulty combinations against each other.