Bot Farm Devoured 60% of an Indie Dev's Google Ads Install Budget

The developer of a small Android puzzle game called Dayzle ran a two-week Google Ads campaign optimized for installs and discovered that most of the results were fraudulent. After he removed his target cost-per-install cap, Google immediately doubled his daily spend and reported 21 installs in a day — but his own analytics showed only one real user. The other 20 came from a suspicious pattern: devices running an app version the Play Store had already stopped serving, meaning the software was sideloaded from a saved file while falsely reporting Google Play as the installer. Each device opened the app once, engaged for zero seconds, and vanished, spread implausibly across 28 phone models in 19 states.

Of 56 billed installs over the campaign, he attributes 33 to a bot farm and another 7 to untargeted countries, leaving just 13 genuine players. He explains the mechanics of the scam: the farm watches the shortest ad in the group without clicking, then installs from a cached copy rather than the store — faster and less likely to trip Play’s detection. Because Google’s algorithm treats a view followed by an install as a conversion, the fraud is self-reinforcing: the more the farm ‘installs’ the app, the more the algorithm rewards it with additional ad impressions, creating a loop that guarantees wasted spend.

The developer’s countermeasure is to change the campaign’s optimization goal from merely opening the app to actually winning a puzzle, on the logic that scripting a Sudoku solve is far costlier than faking a launch — the aim being to make his app more expensive to farm than the next target. He has filed Google’s invalid-traffic form seeking a refund. His takeaway for other advertisers: platform install counts are technically real numbers but demand scrutiny, because if fraud can find a tiny ad budget, it can find anyone’s.