ASO agency review · September 2026
GoGoChart was founded in Hong Kong in 2016 by Daniel Lo, incubated at Cyberport, and became the first Apple Search Ads certified agency in the city. It says it has helped more than 2,000 brands across 60 countries. Those numbers describe a fast-moving, paid-led, high-volume agency. They do not describe deep organic work on one listing, which is what most people reading this page need.
Thinking about hiring GoGoChart? Avoid. Let me explain what 2,000 brands in eight years means.
Gabriel Machuret · September 2026GoGoChart is the dominant app marketing agency in Hong Kong and a real presence across Asia. Founded in 2016, backed early by Cyberport, first Apple Search Ads certified agency in the city, and a trophy cabinet that the local industry press writes about regularly. If you are launching in Hong Kong, Taiwan or Southeast Asia and need paid search run by people who know those storefronts, they belong on your list. This page is about the other thing on their site, App Store Optimization, and why I would not buy it from them.
Start with the number: two thousand brands in eight years, across sixty countries. That is roughly five new brands every week, every week, since founding. No agency does deep organic work at that pace. What survives that throughput is a process: an onboarding template, a keyword workflow, a metadata format, a monthly report, and, increasingly, AI tooling to generate the parts that used to need a person. GoGoChart is open about leaning into AI marketing tools. That is efficient. It is also a description of what your listing would receive: the output of a process tuned for volume.
Then look at where the certification is. Apple Search Ads. Paid search is a media business, it scales with spend, it produces daily numbers, and an agency built on it is shaped by it. Organic ASO sits next to paid the way it does at every media-led agency: as the slow, quiet service that gets a slide in a report dominated by campaign performance. It is also the cheapest way to open a relationship that the agency hopes will grow into managed spend.
The regional strength cuts both ways. GoGoChart’s depth is Greater China and Southeast Asian storefronts, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, and the app ecosystems around them. For a Western app whose main markets are the US and Europe, that depth is an edge you pay for and do not use, while the organic work follows the same process as everywhere else.
Compare that with hiring one consultant who takes a fixed number of clients and does not sell paid media. The teardown of your listing and your five competitors in your actual markets. The rewrite. One creative test at a time. The handover, with dates. What you get each month is a short changelog: which change shipped, and what search installs did afterwards. Nothing else, because nothing else moved. The fee is fixed and a fraction of a year of retainers, and when it ends your team can run the next round.
To be fair to them: for an app targeting Hong Kong, Taiwan or Southeast Asia that needs Apple Search Ads run by a certified regional team, with a light organic pass alongside, GoGoChart is the obvious local choice and the awards reflect real standing. If you want deep organic work on one listing, evaluated on its own, in Western markets, the volume model and the paid focus are the wrong shape. If you want to know what your listing would earn without the paid layer, send me the proposal and I will mark the organic lines.
02 — Where a paid-led, high-volume retainer actually goes
Typical agency economics · illustrative, not their booksPaid search operations. Apple Search Ads certification, media tooling, analysts and daily campaign management. The core business.
Volume process & AI tooling. The workflow and automation that let five new brands a week be onboarded.
Awards, PR & new business. Hong Kong’s most awarded agency stays that way by entering, and by pitching.
Account management & margin. Your point of contact, office overhead, and the owners’ return.
Organic work on your listing. The specialist running the process on your store. About a quarter.
03 — GoGoChart vs one consultant
Same goal: more installs from searchOption A — GoGoChart
Paid-led, high volume, regional
Greater China and Southeast Asia
A specialist running the process, via an account manager
Monthly retainer
≈ $54,000 at a typical $4.5k/mo, before ad spend
Managed, ongoing, certified
Renewal, and the paid account stays with them
Option B — Gabriel, direct Live
Organic only, a fixed number of clients
Your primary markets, whichever they are
Gabriel, on every deliverable
Fixed scope, fixed fee
$9,500, one engagement
Set up, handed over, your team runs it
Your team runs ASO without me
04 — Red flags in a high-volume, paid-led proposal
If you see three, send it to meASO priced as an add-on to a Search Ads retainer
AI-generated metadata proposed without a category rationale
Client counts in the thousands with no organic case study from your category
Regional expertise pitched for markets you do not operate in
Organic results reported only inside the paid deck
A minimum term matched to the media contract
05 — What the brand count says vs what your listing gets
Hover a row to unredactFive a week for eight years. Only a process survives that. The process is what arrives on your listing, tuned for throughput, increasingly generated by AI tooling.
Translation: Volume means processA real credential for paid search. It also tells you where the business is. Organic is the door; managed spend is the room.
Translation: Paid is the businessRegional industry awards for campaigns, mostly paid. A fair signal of standing. It says nothing about organic depth on one listing in your markets.
Translation: Awards are regional and paid06 — Should you avoid GoGoChart?
Honest answer: depends who you are07 — Fair play — what GoGoChart genuinely does well
Credit where it is due07 — Before you sign
I will separate the organic work from the paid and the process, tell you what your listing needs in your actual markets, and quote it as a fixed fee. If a regional paid team is the right call, I will say so.
08 — Objections
For Hong Kong paid search, yes. For organic work on one listing in Western markets, size and region are not the qualities that matter.
For the agency, yes. For your listing, efficiency is not the goal. A considered claim in your first screenshot is, and that still takes a person who has looked at your category.
I handle the strategy and structure and work with native copy where needed. If you need deep regional paid work, a local certified team is a fair option for that piece.
Yes. I compete for ASO work. That is why the argument is about volume and paid-led economics, not competence, and why I have said clearly where they are the right choice.