Platform Overview
Catchbase sits between three external systems and joins them into one picture. The bidding model and Keyword Mining sections each link out to a longer explanation of how those features work.
What comes in
Apple Ads delivers everything that happens on the ad itself: impressions, taps, tap-attributed installs, spend, and the hierarchy (app, country, campaign, ad group, keyword) that every report groups by. You authorise it once through OAuth when setting up.
Your MMP, Adjust or AppsFlyer, delivers everything that happens after the install: validated install counts, in-app events, and revenue bucketed into cohorted windows (D0, D1, D7, D14, D30, and lifetime). Connection is a single API token in either case.
App Store Connect delivers app metadata and total impressions and installs across different sources, including search. This data feeds the Incrementality feature and lets Creative Studio publish generated Custom Product Pages back to your App Store listing.
What happens in the middle
Catchbase joins the three streams by campaign, ad group, keyword, and date so every feature reads from the same numbers. Three systems then work in parallel on top of that joined view:
- The bidding model observes per-keyword performance and writes new bids back to Apple Ads.
- The budget allocator proposes budget splits across a group of campaigns.
- Keyword Mining scores candidate search terms against your app's description and purpose, filters out false positives, and surfaces the rest for review.
Hold-out tests created in the Incrementality section are analysed separately using CausalImpact.
What goes back out
Two things flow from Catchbase back to Apple Ads: per-keyword bid updates from the bidding model, and keyword additions, pauses, and status changes from Keyword Mining and your own edits. Both use the same authorised Apple Ads connection set up during onboarding. Creative Studio additionally publishes Custom Product Pages to App Store Connect.
What users see
The dashboard is the entry point, showing your campaign groups and the top-line numbers. The sections of this documentation map directly onto what you click from there: campaigns and ad groups, Keyword Mining, budget allocations, incrementality tests, analytics, and the settings pages for users, billing, and integrations.