I spent $220 on Google app ads. 60% of the installs were robots
I run a small puzzle app called Dayzle. I turned on a Google Ads campaign for Android at CA$40 a day, targeting installs. After two weeks, I had 56 billed installs: 33 showed a clear bot pattern, 7 came from untargeted countries, and only 13 were real people. The 13 real users finished 92 games between them. The bots watched the shortest video in my ad group, then installed the app from a saved copy instead of the Play Store, because that's faster and Play might notice. Google counted each view plus install as a conversion, so the more the farm installed, the more Google sent my ads to the farm. I'm now waiting on Google's answer to the invalid-traffic form, and I've changed the campaign goal to 'won a puzzle' instead of 'opened the app' to make us more expensive to farm. If a bot farm can find my tiny ad budget, it can definitely find yours.
Google optimizes for whatever goal you give it, and my goal was installs.
- yunusabd
My favorite story:
1. Dev publishes app with Google Admob integration to the Play Store.
2. Buys Google Ads to drive traffic to the app.
3. Google Admob bans his account for invalid traffic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/admob/comments/1vzg3fu/i_paid_googl...
- phenomen
If you have their IP addresses in your dashboard, go to Google Ads > Admin > Account Settings > IP Exclusions. Then, add the entire network/data center range there (i.e. 123.4.5.*). In 99% of cases, these bot networks are not run from residential providers. You can confirm IPs at https://ipgeolocation.io/
After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US.
- dave_sid
Google ads are a con. Meta ads are a con. If someone tells you you’re just not doing it right yet, they’re probably trying to sell you something.
- rybosworld
I've suspected that google has been turning a blind eye to ad fraud for a few years now. In the early-mid 2010's, ad fraud wasn't nearly as common.
And it's absolutely not the case that google can't detect ad fraud - in fact they are VERY good at detecting it when they want to.
- pseudonymidy
Your post led me to install your app and play through 10 puzzles. The post doesn’t even show the app!
What’s the name for this sort of marketing?
I really like the interface you’ve built for completing the puzzles. Very clean - it’s very nice to not be bombarded at every screen.
- legonigel
What is the incentive for the bot owners? Why do the bots download and install the apps? It has some (very small) cost to them, and I don't understand the value for them.
- yalok
this is unfortunately very common - I kept running very small ads regularly over many years (~10 years by now) and the % of bots has been steadily increasing, and Google doesn't really have any system to report those reliably to them. In fact, it's contrary to their incentives to investigate & fix these problems - unless they feel some pressure from competition...
From time to time, Google ads sales reps call me and are trying to convince me to increase the ads spend. I complain about bots, and none of them had any suggestion on what I can do to appeal it etc. I mean I can appeal on some specific instance, once - but there's no process to communicate back to Google the cases where I'm 99% certain about bots on regular basis.
And these bots get increasingly more sophisticated. They used to just click on ads. Then they started installing the app. Then running the app once and do nothing in it. Then they started tapping on the app screen & actually try to go through some initial app steps. When they do it in a spiky way, it's easy to detect them. But when they do it through some distributed device farms, below noise, it's very hard.
- XCSme
This will always remind me of the post I made 10 years ago, with Facebook ads being 100% robots...
With a small budget, in 15 years I never managed to get any positive ROI on any online platform I tried advertising on.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_...