---
title: What an ASO team owns and how to organise it
slug: aso-team-scope-and-ownership
summary: The modern scope of ASO ("organic user acquisition") — discoverability, off-store landing pages, conversion for organic and paid, measurement and insights — who should own CPPs and in-app events, squad vs central-team structures, and how Tilting Point staffed it (7 people, 30+ games).
domain: mobile-apps
tags: [aso, team-structure, organic-acquisition, custom-product-pages, strategy]
related: [aso-roi-measurement, aso-audit-and-prioritization, custom-product-pages-for-ads, in-app-events-and-promotional-content, mobile-ua-evolution-and-team-structure]
sources: [yt:M2e6pJuA8hA, yt:3nas91cJjDE]
updated: 2026-10-24
---

# What an ASO team owns and how to organise it

## TL;DR
- ASO sits **in the middle of product, support and UA**; its job is to gather insights and redistribute them.[^1]
- Four components (2022): **discoverability** (search, featuring, charts, in-app events, app clips), **off-store landing pages** (CPPs for ads, influencers, TV, QR codes), **conversion optimisation** for organic *and* paid, and **measurement & insights** from the consoles.[^2][^3][^4][^5]
- **Who owns CPPs?** UA controls campaigns, but ASO holds years of knowledge on how audiences react to store pages — at Tilting Point the organic team owns them, in close contact with UA.[^6][^7]
- Structure options: embed ASO specialists in squads (organic, paid support, live ops, research, analytics), or a **central strategic ASO team** that feeds others first signals.[^8]
- Be **proactive**: feed leadership regular insights instead of waiting for a "code red" organic drop.[^9]
- Staffing benchmark: Tilting Point (2022) — **~7 people for 30+ games**, 5–6 games each, weekly syncs with UA, creative and featuring teams.[^10][^11]

## Details
**Naming.** Storemaven's Jonathan Fishman proposed calling ASO "organic user acquisition"; Simon Thillay (AppTweak, 2022) cares less about the name but rejects "SEO for apps": SEO is one landing page per query, while the App Store gave one page to everyone until CPPs.[^12][^1]

**Off-store example.** Coinbase's 2022 Super Bowl ad was a bare QR code (~20 million scans in the first minute, per Jonathan). Simon would have used an App Clip; Jonathan a CPP repeating the $15 Bitcoin sign-up offer.[^13][^14]

**Measurement as the growth area.** With fingerprinting expected to fade (Google's proposed SDK Runtime, 2022), both expected aggregated console data to carry more of the measurement load, and ASO people — used to proving their impact via uplift analysis — to be well placed for it.[^15][^16] See [[aso-roi-measurement]].

**Mindset.** Simon's tip for newcomers: every number stands for user behaviour; translate keywords and conversion rates back into what users are thinking.[^17]

**Brand vs data.** Simon saw companies long avoid conversion optimisation because a brand team chose the screenshots; native testing tools put pressure on ASO teams to show conversion gains.[^18]

## Disagreements / caveats
- Ownership varies by company; Simon explicitly says not everyone will do it the same way.[^6]
- Predictions about measurement and SDK Runtime were made in 2022; see [[mobile-ua-evolution-and-team-structure]] and [[mmp-role-and-skadnetwork]] for the 2026 picture.

## See also
- [[aso-audit-and-prioritization]] — what to work on first
- [[custom-product-pages-for-ads]]

[^1]: yt:M2e6pJuA8hA @ 05:56 — Simon Thillay
[^2]: yt:M2e6pJuA8hA @ 09:22 — Jonathan Fishman
[^3]: yt:M2e6pJuA8hA @ 10:15 — Simon Thillay
[^4]: yt:M2e6pJuA8hA @ 13:50 — Jonathan Fishman
[^5]: yt:M2e6pJuA8hA @ 14:39 — Jonathan Fishman
[^6]: yt:M2e6pJuA8hA @ 06:55 — Simon Thillay
[^7]: yt:3nas91cJjDE @ 15:51 — Jevgen Tarasenko
[^8]: yt:M2e6pJuA8hA @ 25:50 — Simon Thillay
[^9]: yt:M2e6pJuA8hA @ 27:48 — Jonathan Fishman
[^10]: yt:3nas91cJjDE @ 03:21 — Jevgen Tarasenko
[^11]: yt:3nas91cJjDE @ 04:07 — Jevgen Tarasenko
[^12]: yt:M2e6pJuA8hA @ 04:59 — Simon Thillay
[^13]: yt:M2e6pJuA8hA @ 11:57 — Simon Thillay
[^14]: yt:M2e6pJuA8hA @ 12:49 — Jonathan Fishman
[^15]: yt:M2e6pJuA8hA @ 39:23 — Jonathan Fishman
[^16]: yt:M2e6pJuA8hA @ 40:28 — Simon Thillay
[^17]: yt:M2e6pJuA8hA @ 42:10 — Simon Thillay
[^18]: yt:M2e6pJuA8hA @ 34:41 — Simon Thillay