Google Ads Fails to Stop Bot Farms, Dayzle Operator Seeks Investigation

Nick Abe, the operator of puzzle app 'Dayzle,' spent around $220 on Google Ads to boost app installs. The ads were set up with a budget of 40 Canadian dollars (approximately 4,400 yen) per day and a target cost per install of 1.50 Canadian dollars (around 170 yen). However, after several days with little ad spend, Abe removed the target cost per install, allowing Google Ads to optimize ad delivery.

Over the two-week campaign, Google Ads recorded 56 installs, but around 60% or 33 of these installs showed suspicious behavior. The devices that exhibited this behavior launched an older version of the app that hadn't been released in several days, and each app was only launched once with a dwell time of zero seconds on each screen.

Abe discovered that these devices didn't click on the ads after watching them but still generated conversions through Google Ads' 'view-through conversions' feature. This feature associates installations with ad success even if the ad wasn't clicked, and it appears to have been exploited by the suspicious devices, which installed the app from a saved file without interacting with the ad.

Abe believes that because the system optimized ad delivery based on installation numbers, it's possible that the more suspicious installs there were, the more likely ads were delivered to similar users. To counter this, Abe changed his performance condition for advertising campaigns from simply launching an app to 'solving a puzzle.'