Apple Ads earned its place
Spend grew 5X. What began as a test became a real contributor to Breeze’s paid mix, not a side bet.
How Breeze Scaled Offline Dating with Apple Ads
More reach. Lower CAC. Better matches.
5Xincrease in
Ad Spend
Ad Spend
2.8Xreduction
in CAC
in CAC
Hear it from the client
Admiral Media supported us in unlocking more of the potential within Apple Ads by helping us rethink our approach to audience targeting and overall campaign structure. Their structured testing methodology and early adoption of new features such as Maximize Conversions helped us scale spend more effectively while maintaining strong testing efficiency and improving overall user acquisition performance.
Geert Oosterbroek, Head of Growth @ Breeze
Introduction
Breeze is not your typical dating app. It takes online dating offline, fast. Instead of endless chat, you go straight to a real date at a partner venue. No more turning into a pen pal before you ever meet.
As Breeze’s performance marketing partner, our job was to scale that offline-first model across its key markets, hold CAC to target, and keep the gender mix balanced.
The Challenge
Scaling a dating marketplace takes more than install volume. For Breeze, the hard part was not finding users. It was finding the right users at enough scale for the matching to work. On Apple Ads, the early setup leaned on tight audience filters to hand-control the spend ratio and keep the gender mix balanced. That control came at a price:
Spend Stagnation
The setup followed every best practice, but the targeting was still so tight that spend flatlined and reach stalled.
Algorithmic Starvation
Over-tight targeting starved the platform of data. Without enough signal to learn from, it could not scale, even when the demand was clearly there.
High Intent vs. Low Volume
Intent was high, but the manual rules boxed us in. We never reached the new segments that keywords would have surfaced on their own.
The Strategy
So we changed tack. We dropped the rigid filters and let the algorithm chase intent instead. Apple Ads runs on intent, not the interest targeting most social channels use, so the gender split tracks real demand and stays healthier on its own.
Dropping the filters opened up a far bigger audience. That matters on Apple Ads, where Apple only learns who to target once a campaign has enough conversion signal to work with.
When Apple shipped Maximize Conversions in 2026, we were among the first to test it, moving Breeze off manual bidding and onto automated, conversion-led bidding.
It also came with a built-in cost guardrail. Because it bids toward a target CPA, download efficiency holds up even as spend climbs.
The Impact
Automation did the heavy lifting
Automated bidding pulled acquisition costs down across all three of Breeze’s main markets. The totals:
5X
increase in Ad Spend
2.8X
reduction in CAC
12X
increase in New Users
Admiral Media’s impact on CAC: Month-on-Month
Between November 2025 and April 2026, Admiral Media increased Breeze’s Apple Ads spend by 5X while reducing CAC by 2.8X, from 4.8x down to 1.65x.
Ad Spend CAC
Key Learnings
What scaling Breeze on Apple Ads taught us, in three takeaways.
Intent beat manual control
Backing intent and algorithmic signals over rigid manual filters is what finally got Apple Ads working for Breeze.
Automation wins. Sometimes.
Plenty of accounts still do better on a manual setup. But it is always worth testing, because when it lands, the upside is huge.
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150+
Apps Scaled
€500M+
in Spend Managed