RadASO review: pay-per-performance ASO. Avoid until you read the definition.

RadASO is an interesting agency, and I mean that as a compliment. Founded in 2018, majority-acquired by Netpeak in 2020 and now folded into a large Eastern European performance marketing group, it built its reputation on a single idea: pay for ASO results, not for ASO hours. If you have been burned by a retainer that delivered decks instead of installs, that pitch lands. I want to explain why it should land more softly than it does.

Pay-per-performance only works if the performance is the thing you actually want. In ASO, the thing you want is more installs from search, at a lower cost, sustained. The thing that is easy to measure, and easy to make a contract around, is keyword ranking. Top ten for this term, top three for that one. Those are real numbers, they move, and an agency can be paid against them. But a keyword position is an input, not an outcome. Ranking third for a term with no traffic, or a term whose searchers are not your buyers, is a performance fee earned and an install count unchanged.

This creates a quiet incentive. An agency paid on positions will steer you toward terms it can move. Long-tail phrases, lightly contested terms, brand-adjacent queries. Not because anyone is cheating, but because that is what the contract rewards. The report will show green arrows. Your dashboard will show the same install curve it showed before. And the retainer component, because there is nearly always a retainer component alongside the performance fee, keeps billing in the background.

Then there is the group. Netpeak is a big performance marketing business with SEO, PPC and analytics divisions. RadASO inside it is a specialist unit, but it is a specialist unit with cross-sell targets and a group margin to hit. The founder’s original insight, that clients should pay for results, sits inside a structure whose job is to grow accounts. You get the specialist and the structure together.

Compare that with hiring one consultant on a fixed scope. I do not tie my fee to keyword positions, because I do not want to be tempted to chase the ones that are easy. I tie it to a scope: teardown, rewrite, test, handover, with dates. You judge me on the install curve and on whether your team can run it afterwards. There is no group behind me and no upsell in month four. The fee is a fraction of a year with a performance-plus-retainer agency, and every line of it is work.

To be fair to RadASO: if you have the analytics to define performance as installs rather than positions, and the negotiating position to write that into the contract, their model can genuinely align incentives better than a plain retainer. Most clients do not have that leverage. Send me their proposal and I will show you exactly which metric the performance fee is tied to, and what the same scope costs with no metric games at all.