A puzzle app spent $220 on Google app ads — 60% of the installs were robots
A one-dev indie studio just published the cleanest writeup we've seen of why "installs" is the most dangerous number in mobile advertising: a bot farm found his $220 budget, Google billed him for it, and the ad algorithm rewarded the fraud at every step.
Nick Abe, the developer behind the puzzle app Dayzle, ran a Google Ads campaign for Android at CA$40 a day with the goal set to installs — and when he removed his cost-per-install target after a slow start, the campaign immediately spent double his daily budget and reported 21 installs in a day while his own admin panel counted one. Digging into the raw analytics, he found 20 of those 21 devices were running an old version of the app the Play Store had stopped serving days earlier. Every one of them claimed Google Play as the installer, yet none could have gotten the app from Play — they installed from a saved copy of the app file instead, opened it once, spent zero seconds on any screen, and never came back. Twenty-eight phone models across nineteen US states, all doing exactly the same thing.
Over the full two weeks the split was stark: 56 installs billed, 33 matching the bot pattern, 7 more from countries the campaign wasn't even targeting — and 13 actual humans, who finished 92 games between them. The mechanics of the fraud loop are the part every advertiser should internalize. The farm would watch the shortest video in the ad group without clicking, then install the app from the cached file because it's faster and Play might notice. Google counts a view followed by an install as a conversion, so every fake install made the campaign look better, which sent more of the budget to the farm, which installed more. The optimization target and the fraud were the same signal.
The fix is instructive precisely because it's a goal change, not a fraud filter: the campaign now optimizes for "won a puzzle" instead of "opened the app," on the theory that it's cheap to script opening an app and clicking around, and expensive to script solving a Sudoku. Abe is waiting on Google's answer to an invalid-traffic claim, and his advice generalizes — if a bot farm can find a CA$40-a-day budget from a tiny puzzle app, it can find yours, and larger apps almost certainly see more of this than they know. For anyone buying AI-adjacent app installs right now — and the market is full of "AI companion" and "AI assistant" apps doing exactly this — an install count that isn't validated against your own analytics is a number a machine is writing to you.
Why it matters: install-goal campaigns are the default for every small app developer, and this is a first-person, receipts-included demonstration that the default quietly funds fraud. Ad-fraud bots keep getting more autonomous — watching ads, installing, mimicking a device farm's worth of diversity — and the platform's own optimization loop is what feeds them.
What to watch: whether Google refunds the invalid-traffic claim, and whether Abe's "won a puzzle" goal actually starves the farm.
Has an ad platform ever billed you for traffic you could prove was fake — and did you ever get the money back? Tell us in the comments.
