What Do App Store Optimization Services Actually Deliver for Games? Agency vs Tool vs In-House, 2026 Pricing, RFP Questions, and a 90-Day Pilot
Store search is still the biggest front door for game discovery. Apple states that 70% of App Store visitors use search to discover apps and that almost 65% of downloads happen directly after a search (Apple's own data, worldwide, 2022). According to a summary of AppsFlyer's 2026 gaming marketing report, paid installs made up 57% of Android game installs and 44% of iOS game installs in 2025. Put the other way around, more than 40% of Android game installs and more than half of iOS game installs came through routes where the studio did not pay for the install directly, and a large share of those routes pass through a store page.
That is why so many studios look at ASO services, but what is sold under the same "ASO services" label varies widely in scope and price. A cost guide from ASO tool company AppFollow, updated in September 2026, places everything from self-serve tool subscriptions to enterprise retainers above $50,000 a month in the same market. A monthly retainer that changes a few keywords and a contract that produces screenshots for several countries and designs and reads store A/B tests share a name and little else.
We covered the principles and execution of ASO in ASO for Mobile Games: The Most Efficient Way to Drive Installs Without Paid Ads, and where ASO sits among promotion services in What Are You Actually Buying? A 2026 Comparison of App Promotion Services for Mobile Games. This post is the next step: a buyer's guide for game studios that are about to pay for ASO services. As of October 2026, it walks through what you are buying, who to hire, what it costs, how to verify the impact, what to avoid, and how to design the first 90 days.
What exactly do ASO services sell?
ASO services sell two things: being seen more often in store search (visibility) and getting more of the people who see your store page to install (conversion rate). Almost every line in a proposal belongs to one of the two, and the first thing to check is where the time and budget actually go.
Work area | What actually gets done | Target metric | What the studio should check |
|---|---|---|---|
Keywords and metadata | Keyword research; title, subtitle, and keyword field (iOS); title, short and full description (Google Play) | Keyword rankings, search impressions | Target keyword list and rationale, priority by country |
Creative testing | Producing icons, screenshots, and preview videos; designing and reading store-native A/B tests | Store page conversion rate | Test hypotheses, confidence threshold, whether production is in the quote |
Custom pages | Planning and producing App Store custom product pages and Google Play custom store listings | Conversion rate by traffic source | Plan for matching pages to ad creatives and keyword themes |
Localization | Country-level keyword research, localized metadata and creatives | Impressions and conversion by country | Translation only, or new keyword research per country |
Ratings and review management | Review responses, timing of rating prompts, review analysis | Average rating, recent rating trend | Official APIs only, no incentives or filtering |
Featuring and events | Apple featuring nominations, App Store In-App Events, Google Play promotional content | Editorial placement | Whether it is tied to your update and seasonal calendar |
The nature of keyword and metadata work is changing too. Apple says App Store search supports natural, everyday language, and that search results may include app tags describing an app's essential qualities, generated by large language models (LLMs) from the metadata you provide in App Store Connect. Describing your game's genre and core play accurately in metadata now matters more than packing in as many keywords as possible.
The areas that have grown the most over the past two years are creative testing and custom pages. Both stores now offer their own A/B testing tools, so the core job of a good ASO service has shifted from changing things on instinct to designing tests and interpreting the results.
Apple's product page optimization lets you test up to three treatments against your default page for up to 90 days, covering app icons, screenshots, and app previews. Apple recommends waiting until at least one treatment is shown to perform better or worse than the baseline with at least 90% confidence before applying it. In one case Apple highlights, a developer tested three icons for 44 days expecting a robot design to win; instead, a brain icon lifted conversion rate by 8% with more than 98% confidence, while the robot icon came in 3.5% lower. The fact that hypotheses can be wrong is exactly why testing is worth paying for.
Google Play's store listing experiments, per the current help page, test up to two variants against your current listing, and you can run one default graphics experiment or up to five localized experiments at the same time. One detail worth noting for game studios is the choice of target metric: besides install clicks, you can pick unique user open clicks, the number of installers who actually opened the app. That lets you filter out screenshots that lift installs without lifting launches.
Custom pages show different store pages to different traffic sources. As of October 2026, Apple allows up to 70 custom product pages per app, and says that when you assign keywords to a custom product page, it can appear in search results for those keywords instead of your default page. Apple reports that developers see a 2.5 percentage point increase on average when referring people to a custom product page, a 156% increase compared with the 1.6% average conversion rate on default product pages. Google Play allows up to 50 custom store listings, targeted by country, pre-registration, churned or lapsed users, ads traffic, search keywords, unique URLs, and more. In practice, that means a different page per genre keyword theme, or a different page for returning players.
Agency, ASO tool, or in-house: which one fits?
The deciding question is not how big your game is but who can design the tests and produce the creatives. Tools give you data but not judgment or production; agencies sell judgment and production but take time to understand your game; an in-house team understands it best but carries the highest fixed cost.
Model | Good fit when | Strengths | Limits |
|---|---|---|---|
ASO tool subscription + an internal owner | One or two titles, one to three core markets, art resources in-house | Lowest cost; you see keyword and competitor data directly | Test design and interpretation depend on one person; part-time owners deprioritize it |
Freelancer or boutique consultant | Short projects: pre-launch audit, metadata cleanup, entering a specific market | Short contracts, fast start | Hard to hand over creative production and multi-market operations |
Specialist ASO agency | Multi-market operations, continuous creative testing, many custom pages | Production, testing, and localization in one place; test experience from other games | Monthly retainer and minimum term; ramp-up time to learn your game |
In-house ASO owner or team | Several titles, frequent LiveOps that change the store page often | Fastest link between updates, events, and the store page | Salaries and tools become fixed cost |
Many studios mix models. A consultant handles the audit and keyword strategy before launch, an agency builds the testing system in the first quarter after launch, and an in-house owner takes over operations with a tool once the system is in place. The decision closely mirrors how you structure UA, so the criteria in Hiring a Game Marketing Agency, Building In-House, or Going Direct: How Game Studios Should Structure UA in 2026 apply to ASO as well.
One more thing to settle is which stores are in scope. If you are considering third-party store distribution on Android, decide before signing whether the ASO contract covers only the App Store and Google Play or other storefronts as well. We covered the shifting Android distribution landscape in Rival Stores Now Live Inside Google Play: The New Map of Android Distribution.
How much do ASO services cost in 2026?
Across pricing published in 2026, monthly retainers mostly cluster between a few thousand dollars and $15,000, and the two variables that move the price most are the number of markets (languages) and whether creative production is included. All of the figures below come from ASO tool companies or agencies, so read them as reference ranges for reviewing quotes rather than market-wide averages.
Item | Published price range | Source |
|---|---|---|
ASO tool subscription (entry to mid plans) | Tens to hundreds of dollars a month; top public plans around $600-700/month | AppFollow cost guide (updated September 2026) |
Boutique consultant or freelancer retainer | $1,500-$4,000/month | AppFollow |
Mid-market ASO agency retainer | $5,000-$15,000/month | AppFollow |
Enterprise-focused agency | $15,000-$50,000+/month | AppFollow |
Boutique and mid-market agency retainer | $2,500-$7,000/month; full-service $7,000-$15,000+; 3-6 month minimum is typical | AppAgent pricing guide |
Published list price example | €2,900/month for one app on both stores in one market; +€1,500/month per additional market or language; +€1,500/month for keyword custom product pages; €2,500 audit | Admiral Media (as of September 2026) |
One-time ASO audit | $2,000-$7,500 | AppFollow, AppAgent |
Creative package (one language) | $3,000-$12,000; preview videos $1,500-$10,000 each | AppFollow |
Metadata refresh per country | $150-$500 per locale | AppFollow |
In-house ASO manager (US base salary) | $90K-$160K per year | AppFollow |
What matters in this table is structure more than unit price. If, as in the list price example, each added market raises the monthly fee by roughly half, it makes more sense to start with the two or three markets that drive most of your revenue, confirm the effect, and then expand, rather than handing over ten countries on day one. Whether creative production is inside the retainer or quoted separately also changes how many tests the same monthly fee can actually run. When comparing quotes, convert "dollars per month" into "how many tests per quarter, in how many markets, from production through interpretation."
How do you measure ASO impact and separate it from paid UA?
The primary success metric for ASO is store page conversion rate; the secondary metrics are installs from search and rankings for target keywords. Be wary of services that report keyword rankings alone. A higher ranking has no business value if the people searching that term do not install.
Metric | Where to find it | What to watch when reading it |
|---|---|---|
Store page conversion rate | App Store Connect App Analytics; Google Play Console store listing acquisition reports | Read by country and traffic source; paid traffic mixed in moves the average |
Installs from search | Traffic source reports in both consoles | Log changes in search ads spend alongside it |
Target keyword rankings | ASO tool | Whether search installs rose after the ranking moved, not the ranking itself |
Average and recent rating | Both consoles | Read alongside your update and event calendar |
D7 retention of organic cohorts | MMP and internal data | Confirm that a winning creative did not bring in players who behave differently than expected |
The hardest part is separating ASO from paid UA. When paid campaigns increase downloads, the signals store algorithms read move as well, so organic installs rising in the same period does not prove ASO worked. There are three ways to separate them.
First, treat store-native A/B test results as your primary evidence. They compare randomly split visitors over the same period, so paid media and seasonality hit both sides equally and cancel out. Second, for work that cannot be A/B tested, such as metadata changes, pick countries where you make the change and comparison countries where you do not, and avoid large swings in paid spend in either during the same period. Third, lock your baselines before you start. If you do not write down each country's last four weeks of conversion rate, search installs, and target keyword rankings in the first week of the pilot, you will end up comparing only the favorable windows later. For country-level comparison design and sample size, the geo-lift approach in How to Design an Incrementality Test for Mobile Game UA: Holdouts, Geo-Lift, Sample Size, and Reading the Result applies directly.
There is one more thing to check when a service reports that "organic is up." According to AppsFlyer's fraud report published in June 2026, which analyzed 106.4 billion installs across 246,000 apps from Q1 2025 to Q1 2026, organic traffic accounted for 52% of fraudulent installs, the largest single channel. The report explains that organic is targeted because it serves as the baseline for judging paid campaigns. If a service reports organic growth as its result, ask it to show that the retention of the added organic players is in line with your existing organic players.
Which RFP questions should you send to an ASO agency?
A good RFP asks what will be tested, in what order, and with what data the results will be proven, before it asks about price. The questions below are written so you can use them as-is in an RFP or a first meeting.
Area | Question to ask | What you are checking |
|---|---|---|
Scope | How many markets (languages) and stores does the retainer cover, and what creative production is included? Are custom pages extra? | A common basis for comparing quotes |
Game experience | What tests have you run for games in our genre, and which ones failed? | Real experience with game store pages |
Test design | How many tests will you run in the first 90 days, on what hypotheses? What are the confidence threshold and stopping rules? | An experiment system, not instinct |
Target metric | In Google Play experiments, will you judge on install clicks or on players who opened the app? | Whether they look past the install |
Measurement | Which console reports will prove the results? How will you separate the effect of paid UA? | Where the evidence comes from |
Access | What permissions do you need in App Store Connect and Play Console? Who owns the accounts? | Account security and asset ownership after the contract ends |
Localization | Do you research new keywords per country or translate existing ones? Is native-speaker review included? | Whether local search intent is reflected |
Ratings and reviews | How do you design review responses and rating prompt timing? Do you use anything beyond the official rating APIs? | Policy risk |
Featuring | Do you plan featuring nominations, In-App Events, and promotional content around our update and seasonal calendar? | Use of editorial placements |
Contract | What are the minimum term, exit terms after a pilot, and ownership of deliverables (keyword research, creative source files)? | Room to decide after the test |
Ask about test design and measurement first. A service that cannot answer those two concretely will not give you grounds to judge its results, however low its price. We laid out the RFP structure and pilot principles for evaluating ad platforms in How to Choose a Mobile Advertising Platform for Your Game in 2026: Evaluation Criteria, RFP Questions, and Pilot Design; for ASO services, the standard is the same: can the results be verified with data the vendor does not control?
Red flags to avoid: guaranteed rankings, review packages, and install bursts
Offers that guarantee rankings, chart positions, or review counts often run straight into store policy, and even when they work they can put your store account at risk. Both stores explicitly prohibit ranking manipulation.
Google Play's User Ratings, Reviews, and Installs policy states that developers must not attempt to manipulate the placement of any apps on Google Play, including through fraudulent or incentivized ratings and reviews or by inflating install counts through illegitimate means. It also says not to offer rewards or incentives for ratings or reviews, and not to use automated services to inflate installs or ratings. Apple's App Review Guideline 5.6.3 (Discovery Fraud) states that manipulating any element of the App Store customer experience, such as charts, search, reviews, or referrals, is not permitted, and the guidelines say developers who inflate chart rankings with paid, incentivized, filtered, or fake feedback, or use third-party services to do so, may be expelled from the Apple Developer Program.
Red flag | Why it is a problem |
|---|---|
"Guaranteed top 10 in your category," "guaranteed #1 for your keyword" | Rankings are set by store algorithms and no one can guarantee them; guaranteeing them requires manipulation |
Review or rating packages ("N five-star reviews") | Prohibited by both stores; incentivized and fake reviews violate policy |
"Keyword installs" that funnel installs after a specific search | Inflating install counts and search signals by illegitimate means can count as ranking manipulation |
Screening players with "Do you like the game?" before the rating prompt | Google Play's in-app review guidance prohibits asking opinion questions before or while showing the rating card; Apple disallows custom review prompts outside its API, and the system prompt is limited to three times in 365 days |
Reporting keyword rankings only, never conversion or install data | No evidence of business impact |
Requests for owner-level console access or account transfer | Control of assets and accounts after the contract ends |
Long contracts of 6-12 months with no pilot option | No room to verify results before committing |
Legitimate rating management points the other way. Ask for a rating through the official API after the player has experienced enough of the game, for example right after clearing a first boss or collecting a season reward, and respond first to low-star reviews and reviews about technical issues. Apple, too, recommends prioritizing reviews with the lowest star ratings or those mentioning technical issues with the current version if you cannot respond to every review. We covered how reviews connect to community strategy in How Mobile Game Reviews Affect User Behavior and Community Strategy.
How should you design a 60-90 day ASO pilot?
Start your first ASO engagement with a narrowly scoped 60-90 day pilot rather than a long retainer. The essentials are two or three markets, two or three tests per store, and baselines and decision rules fixed before day one.
Weeks | What to do | Deliverables |
|---|---|---|
1-2 | Audit; lock baselines (last four weeks of conversion rate by country, search installs, rankings for 30-50 target keywords, ratings); check Android vitals | Baseline document, test backlog |
3-4 | First metadata change in target markets; launch the first creative tests (App Store product page optimization, Google Play default graphics experiment) | Test hypotheses and stopping rules |
5-8 | Call and apply the first tests; run the second round; build custom pages for two or three key keyword themes or ad creatives | Test result report, custom pages |
9-12 | Wrap up results, compare against control countries, check organic cohort retention, plan next quarter | Scale, hold, or stop decision |
There is a reason to check Android vitals before you start. Google says that if an app exceeds the overall bad behavior thresholds of a 1.09% user-perceived crash rate or a 0.47% user-perceived ANR rate (based on a 28-day average), Play may reduce the app's visibility and may show users a warning on the store listing. In that state, even the best screenshot changes will be masked, so fix technical quality issues before the pilot.
Write the decision rules down before you begin. For example: "If store-native tests confirm a conversion lift in at least two target markets and organic cohort D7 retention does not fall below baseline, add markets and scale"; "If tests ran but produced no clear winner, change creative direction and run one more quarter"; "If the only evidence is performance reporting that cannot be reconciled with the baseline document and console data, stop." Featuring belongs in the plan rather than in the pilot's success criteria. Apple asks for a minimum of two weeks' notice for featuring nominations and recommends submitting up to three months in advance for wider consideration. Google Play promotional content can be submitted up to 60 days before the event starts, approval can take up to four days, and featuring requests are limited per quarter and not guaranteed.
Where does Playio fit when you run ASO and user acquisition together?
Playio is not an ASO service; it is an advertising platform built on a gaming community. But for a studio investing in ASO, the choice of user acquisition channels running alongside it is not irrelevant to store performance.
Google Play says its search factors in the overall experience of an app based on user behavior and feedback, and that apps are ranked on a combination of ratings, reviews, downloads, and other factors (the exact weights are not public). Apple likewise says search results reflect text relevance as well as user behavior such as downloads, ratings, and reviews. A channel that brings in many players who uninstall right away adds downloads but does nothing for the other signals the store reads, and can feed low ratings and reviews. A channel that brings in players who actually enjoy the game pulls in the same direction as your ASO.
Playio is a community of 5 million gamers, and it uses AI to analyze genre preferences, play history, and in-game behavior data to connect each game with players whose tastes match. Rewards are tied to playtime or to in-game actions the advertiser defines, and while CPI is the default pricing model, campaigns can also run on CPE or CPA. Ratings and reviews are never a reward condition, and we do not recommend using any rewarded campaign as a way to push keyword or chart rankings. Playio's user base is Android-centric globally.
If you plan to run an ASO pilot and a user acquisition test in the same quarter, start by separating their timing and countries so neither contaminates the other's results. Send your game's genre, target countries, current Google Play store listing conversion rate and D7 retention, and your planned ASO test window to [email protected], and we will send back an Android acquisition pilot design that does not overlap your ASO test countries or dates, covering countries, duration, billing events, and decision rules based on D7 retention.
You can find more details here. (https://playioadsen.oopy.io/bizdeck)
Key Takeaways
As of October 2026, store search is still the biggest door to game discovery, and a large share of game installs come through routes where the studio does not pay for the install directly. What ASO services sell is search visibility and store page conversion rate, and the work splits into keywords and metadata, store-native A/B testing, custom pages, localization, ratings and review management, and featuring. Choose an operating model based on who can design the tests and produce the creatives. In pricing published in 2026, agency retainers cluster between a few thousand dollars and $15,000 a month, and the number of markets and whether creative production is included move the price most. Judge results on conversion rate and search installs rather than keyword rankings, and separate them from paid UA with store A/B tests, comparison countries, and baselines fixed in advance. Guaranteed rankings, review packages, keyword installs, and filtered rating prompts are red flags under both stores' policies. A first engagement built as a 60-90 day pilot with two or three markets, two or three tests, and decision rules set in advance is the one you are least likely to regret.
For inquiries about Playio's advertising solutions, reach out at: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]?subject=Playio%20inquiry%20from%20blog%20-%20ASO%20services%20guide)
Sources
Apple Ads, Ads on the App Store (70% of App Store visitors use search to discover apps; almost 65% of downloads happen directly after a search — App Store, worldwide, 2022): https://ads.apple.com/app-store
Game Dev Reports, summary of AppsFlyer's State of Mobile Gaming for Marketers 2026 (paid install share of game installs in 2025: 57% on Android, 44% on iOS): https://gamedevreports.substack.com/p/appsflyer-the-state-of-the-mobile
AppFollow, App Store Optimization Cost, updated September 2026 (tool pricing; boutique $1,500-$4,000/month; mid-market agencies $5,000-$15,000/month; enterprise $15,000-$50,000+/month; audits $2,000-$7,500; one-locale creative package $3,000-$12,000; preview videos $1,500-$10,000; metadata refresh $150-$500 per locale; US ASO manager base salary $90K-$160K. Published by an ASO tool company): https://appfollow.io/blog/app-store-optimization-cost
AppAgent, App Store Optimization Pricing (boutique and mid-market agencies $2,500-$7,000/month; full-service $7,000-$15,000+; audits $2,000-$7,000; 3-6 month minimum. Published by an agency; no publication date shown): https://appagent.com/blog/app-store-optimization-pricing/
Admiral Media, ASO agency pricing (published list prices as of September 2026: €2,900/month, +€1,500/month per market, +€1,500/month keyword custom product pages, €2,500 audit. Published by an agency): https://admiral.media/aso-agency-pricing/
Apple Developer, Product page optimization (up to three treatments, up to 90 days, icons, screenshots, and app previews; 90% confidence recommended; Peak Brain Training case: 44 days, three icons, brain icon +8% conversion rate with >98% confidence, robot icon -3.5%): https://developer.apple.com/app-store/product-page-optimization/
Apple Developer, Custom product pages (up to 70; keyword assignment for search results; average +2.5 percentage points, a 156% increase over the 1.6% average conversion rate of default product pages): https://developer.apple.com/app-store/custom-product-pages/
Google Play Console Help, Run A/B tests on your store listing (up to two variants; one default graphics experiment or up to five localized experiments at a time; target metrics of install, open, or pre-registration clicks; experiments stop automatically after six months): https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/6227309?hl=en
Google Play Console Help, Create custom store listings (up to 50; targeting by country, pre-registration, churned and lapsed users, buyer segments, ads traffic, search keywords, unique URL): https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9867158?hl=en
Google Play Console Help, Get discovered on Google Play search (search factors in overall app experience based on user behavior and feedback; ranked on a combination of ratings, reviews, downloads, and other factors; weights are proprietary): https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/4448378?hl=en
Apple Developer, App Store search (results based on text relevance and user behavior such as downloads, ratings, and reviews; natural-language search; LLM-generated app tags based on metadata): https://developer.apple.com/app-store/search/
Android Developers, Android vitals (overall bad behavior thresholds of 1.09% user-perceived crash rate and 0.47% user-perceived ANR rate; exceeding them may reduce visibility and trigger store listing warnings; 28-day average): https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/vitals
AppsFlyer, State of Fraud for Marketers 2026 press release, June 10, 2026 (Q1 2025 to Q1 2026, 106.4B installs across 246,000 apps; organic traffic accounts for 52% of fraudulent installs): https://www.appsflyer.com/company/newsroom/pr/organic-traffic-ad-fraud/
Google Play Console Help, User Ratings, Reviews, and Installs policy (no manipulation of app placement; no incentivized ratings or reviews; no automated services to inflate installs or ratings): https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9898684?hl=en
Apple, App Review Guidelines, last updated June 8, 2026 (5.6.3 Discovery Fraud; 5.6.1 custom review prompts disallowed; chart-ranking manipulation may lead to expulsion from the Apple Developer Program): https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
Apple Developer, Ratings and reviews (rating prompts up to three times in a 365-day period; prioritize low-star and technical-issue reviews when responding): https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/
Android Developers, Google Play In-App Review API (no opinion questions before or while showing the rating card; time-bound quota): https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/in-app-review
Apple Developer, Getting featured on the App Store (minimum two weeks' notice; up to three months in advance recommended): https://developer.apple.com/app-store/getting-featured/
Google Play Console Help, Create promotional content (submission up to 60 days before the event; approval can take up to four days; featuring requests limited per quarter and not guaranteed): https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/12932541?hl=en