I run a small puzzle app called Dayzle. Two weeks ago I turned on a Google Ads campaign for Android at CA$40 a day, goal set to installs. After removing the target cost per install, it spent double my daily budget, CA$80, and reported 21 installs.

My admin panel showed 1. Raw analytics revealed 21 new Android devices that day, but 20 were running an old version the Play Store had stopped serving days earlier. Each opened the app once, spent zero seconds on any screen, and never returned.

Over two weeks: 56 installs billed, 33 with that bot pattern, 7 from untargeted countries, and 13 real people who finished 92 games. Google optimizes for whatever goal you give it, and my goal was installs. The farm watched the shortest video, didn't click, then installed from a saved copy.

Google counts a view followed by an install as a conversion, so the more the farm installed, the better it looked to the algorithm, sending more ads to the farm. A loop that wasted my ad spend. Now I'm waiting on Google's answer to the invalid-traffic form, and the campaign goal is "won a puzzle" instead of "opened the app".

It's low effort to make a script open an app; higher effort to solve a Sudoku. Larger apps see more of this than they know. If a bot farm can find my tiny ad budget, it can find yours.