I spent $220 on Google app ads. 60% of the installs were robots
A developer of a small puzzle app discovered that 60% of the installs from a Google Ads campaign were generated by bots rather than real users. The fraudulent activity involved a bot farm installing an outdated version of the app to trigger conversion metrics without genuine engagement. The developer has since adjusted the campaign goal to a more difficult action and is awaiting a refund from Google for the invalid traffic.
- ▪The developer spent CA$220 on a Google Ads campaign and found that only 13 of the 56 billed installs were from real users.
- ▪Bot farms installed an old version of the app from a saved file to bypass Play Store detection while still registering as Google Play installs.
- ▪The fraudulent installs exhibited identical behavior, such as opening the app once and spending zero seconds on any screen.
- ▪The developer changed the conversion goal from 'opened the app' to 'won a puzzle' to make the app more expensive for bots to farm.
- ▪Real users who installed the app completed an average of seven puzzles, providing a clear signal of genuine engagement compared to the bots.
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Record
| Original publisher | Dayzle |
| Canonical URL | https://dayzlegame.com/blog/google-ads-bot-farm/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 11 Sep 2026 18:24:55 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-11T20:58:35.467Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-11T20:58:35.467Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | oiqEKSaexZAC · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I run a small puzzle app called Dayzle. I’m a numbers guy, so a marketing optimization problem is right up my alley. Two weeks ago I turned on a Google Ads campaign for Android at CA$40 a day, with the goal set to installs. For the first few days it barely spent anything. I had a target cost per install of $1.50, and Google couldn’t find installs at that price. So, as a test, I removed the target. It immediately spent double my daily budget, CA$80, and reported 21 installs. I was excited. Then I checked my admin panel, which said 1. Turns out I didn’t need to be a numbers guy to see something didn’t add up. The panel had missed them because old versions of the app don’t report an install date.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Dayzle.
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