I've done both:

- ASA was awesome in the beginning for me, but a competitor came out and way outbid me. So I don't use them currently. - Meta will take time to figure out, but once it did - it has been critical for me. For example, at the start I had my targeting age around 20-60 year old, something like that. But I found out that 20-25 year olds aren't really serious basketball coaches yet, and the algo serves ads to them like crazy because they are super cheap. Basically, low intent users. Changing my age range to 25+ was like a magic switch that made me ads better overnight. Stuff like that is why you need a few months to figure it out, and you can do that without spending a toooon of money, but you do need to spend some money. Hope that helps.

For crowded markets, search ads are very expensive so display ads on Meta/TikTok are cheaper. You should do some research on what's the competition for keywords you're targeting. If there's a lot of competition, then go with Meta, otherwise go with ASA or Google Search Ads

You should also look into app store optimization, that's something I did too for apps I've made. It's like SEO except for, well, the app store.

I have not been able to figure out tangible, real ASO steps I should take. Or how to measure them. All of the tools for this are unintuitive to me. Any resources?